Research Methods & Encyclopedias in Social Sciences

The Encyclopedia of Evaluation is an authoritative, first-of-its-kind who, what, where, why, and how of the field of evaluation. Covering professional practice as well as academia, this volume chronicles the development of the field--its history, key figures, theories, approaches, and goals.

Evaluating Qualitative Research provides expert insight and advice on how to evaluate the merit of qualitative research in the academic community. As one of the first works of literature to address this gap in the exploration of theory, practice, and reflection that comes with the evaluation of qualitative research, author Jeasik Cho constructs a typology of evaluation by examining actual information collected from a variety of websites and relevant journals.

Evaluation Methodology Basics: The Nuts and Bolts of Sound Evaluation provides a step-by-step guide for doing a real evaluation. It focuses on the main kinds of "big picture" questions that evaluators usually need to answer, and how the nature of such questions is linked to evaluation methodology choices.

The Handbook succeeds in capturing and presenting evaluation's extensive knowledge base within a global context. In so doing it provides a useful, coherent, and definitive benchmark on the field's diverse and dynamic purposes, practices, theories, approaches, issues, and challenges for the 21st century.

Understanding and Evaluating Research: A Critical Guide shows students how to be critical consumers of research and to appreciate the power of methodology as it shapes the research question, the use of theory in the study, the methods used, and how the outcomes are reported.

Qualitative Literacy presents criteria to assess qualitative research methods such as in-depth interviewing and participant observation. Qualitative research is indispensable to the study of inequality, poverty, education, public health, immigration, the family, and criminal justice. Each of the hundreds of ethnographic and interview studies published yearly on these issues is scientifically either sound or unsound. This guide provides social scientists, researchers, students, evaluators, policy makers, and journalists with the tools needed to identify and evaluate quality in field research.