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.
There's some useful information here, but I didn't enjoy the authors' manner. I find it a bit questionable that a 2015 edition makes spreadsheets and word processors out to be more estoric than Grounding Theory, classifies online surveys as completely different to paper surveys, and treats the latter's very format-specific problems as universal and format-independent.
Don't get your hopes up for learning about quantitative research and analysis, either. The chapters about that are best summed up in the authors' own words: "Instead, we recommend you take a statistics class."
My introduction to research methods course for my MILS degree required this book as reading and resource material. I learned a good bit from it, but as someone who does not intend to do much (if any) actual research studies, some of the content really dragged. Most chapters were very readable, though, and I do recommend this as a good resource to understand creating & conducting a researching study for beginners. The explanations of concepts found within have been helpful for me doing my assignments.
Used this book in one of my post-grad classes. It was useful in general and I liked the way it presented the information. It was organized good but there were some parts that we did not really need it at all. I don't really have much to say about this. It was okay.
For a textbook it was a good read. Had excellent details that supported my learning. Where the deficits lay is that they lack understanding of the use of technology in the field of research. The way the information is presented is as if using online sources, databases or word processing software is brand new to the field of research. Our students are better prepared to use technology in their research than what is presented in this text.
This book was required in a class of mine during my graduate studies in psychology. It was well-written and easy to understand, which was important because it was an online class lacking instructional lectures.
I would like to think that there is better literature that can help teach me basic research but, alas, this was a requirement for my grad program and I survived.
Read for my doctoral program. Contains clearly understandable information regarding different research methodologies. A bit outdated, but I bought a used copy for my class so I didn’t mind so much.
If you have to read a textbook about conducting research, this is probably the best one you will find. This is the second textbook I have read which is authored (at least in part) by Jeanne Ellis Ormrod. I really like her style. It is personable enough to keep the text interesting while still maintaining a highly professional tone. By the end of a very long chapter on statistical analyses in quantitative research I actually understood purposes and functions of various equations, even though I've never had a course in statistics in my life. This is another textbook I will probably hold on to as a resource as I begin my action research courses next fall.