For a wide variety of graduate or undergraduate research courses.

Written in uncommonly engaging and elegant prose, this text is a "do-it-yourself, understand-it-yourself” manual designed to help research students in any discipline understand the fundamental structure of quality research and the methodical process that leads to genuinely significant results. It guides the reader, step-by-step, from the selection of a problem, through the process of conducting authentic research, to the preparation of a completed report, with practical suggestions based on a solid theoretical framework and sound pedagogy.

Suited for the core text in any introductory research course or even for self-instruction, this text will show students two things: 1) that quality research demands planning and design; and, 2) how their own research projects can be executed effectively and professionally.

New! Significantly expanded and updated material, specifically:

- The importance of research expertise for practitioners as well as researchers (Chapter 1),

- Theory-building processes (Chapter 2),

- Operational definitions (Chapter 3),

- Need for open-mindedness in hypothesis testing and data collection (Chapters 3 and 6),

- Online databases (Chapter 4),

- Additional issues in writing, such as need for consistency in terminology use, misuse of homonyms, correct use of apostrophes in possessives, and need for parallelism in grammatical structure (Chapter 6),

- Possible influences of cultural background and gender on responses to interviews and questionnaires (Chapters 7 and 9),

- Cohort-sequential designs (Chapter 9),

- Value of pilot studies for determining the internal reliability and validity of researcher-developed assessment instruments (Chapter 9),

- Use of the Internet to collect questionnaire data (Chapter 9),

- U-shaped relationships (Chapter 11),

- Mediators and moderators in structural equation modeling (Table 11.5 in Chapter 11)