Author : Roger Sapsford
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 37,99 MB
Release : 2006-03-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780761943631
In simple and non-technical terms, this text illustrates a wide range of techniques and approaches used in social research projects.
Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 36,84 MB
Release : 2008-08-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 030912056X
The National Children's Study (NCS) is planned to be the largest long-term study of environmental and genetic effects on children's health ever conducted in the United States. It proposes to examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of approximately 100,000 children across the United States, following them from before birth until age 21. By archiving all of the data collected, the NCS is intended to provide a valuable resource for analyses conducted many years into the future. This book evaluates the research plan for the NCS, by assessing the scientific rigor of the study and the extent to which it is being carried out with methods, measures, and collection of data and specimens to maximize the scientific yield of the study. The book concludes that if the NCS is conducted as proposed, the database derived from the study should be valuable for investigating hypotheses described in the research plan as well as additional hypotheses that will evolve. Nevertheless, there are important weaknesses and shortcomings in the research plan that diminish the study's expected value below what it might be.
Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 13,8 MB
Release : 1988-02-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 0309037492
This volume explores the scientific frontiers and leading edges of research across the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, sociology, history, business, education, geography, law, and psychiatry, as well as the newer, more specialized areas of artificial intelligence, child development, cognitive science, communications, demography, linguistics, and management and decision science. It includes recommendations concerning new resources, facilities, and programs that may be needed over the next several years to ensure rapid progress and provide a high level of returns to basic research.
Author : Nancy Tague
Publisher : Quality Press
Page : 625 pages
File Size : 43,84 MB
Release : 2004-07-14
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1953079008
The Quality Toolbox is a comprehensive reference to a variety of methods and techniques: those most commonly used for quality improvement, many less commonly used, and some created by the author and not available elsewhere. The reader will find the widely used seven basic quality control tools (for example, fishbone diagram, and Pareto chart) as well as the newer management and planning tools. Tools are included for generating and organizing ideas, evaluating ideas, analyzing processes, determining root causes, planning, and basic data-handling and statistics. The book is written and organized to be as simple as possible to use so that anyone can find and learn new tools without a teacher. Above all, this is an instruction book. The reader can learn new tools or, for familiar tools, discover new variations or applications. It also is a reference book, organized so that a half-remembered tool can be found and reviewed easily, and the right tool to solve a particular problem or achieve a specific goal can be quickly identified. With this book close at hand, a quality improvement team becomes capable of more efficient and effective work with less assistance from a trained quality consultant. Quality and training professionals also will find it a handy reference and quick way to expand their repertoire of tools, techniques, applications, and tricks. For this second edition, Tague added 34 tools and 18 variations. The "Quality Improvement Stories" chapter has been expanded to include detailed case studies from three Baldrige Award winners. An entirely new chapter, "Mega-Tools: Quality Management Systems," puts the tools into two contexts: the historical evolution of quality improvement and the quality management systems within which the tools are used. This edition liberally uses icons with each tool description to reinforce for the reader what kind of tool it is and where it is used within the improvement process.
Author : Magda Stouthamer-Loeber
Publisher : SAGE Publications, Incorporated
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 46,80 MB
Release : 1995-08-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN :
Tired of a trial-and-error approach to collecting and managing data? Data Collection and Management offers helpful information on managing research projects. By stressing how to use good standards for data collecting and processing, the authors cover such important how-tos as planning research activities; making budgetary decisions and keeping the budget under control; hiring, training, and supervising field interviewing staff; establishing whether interviewers are ready to start interviewing; and ensuring high participant acquisition and retention rates. The book also covers using computerized information systems for tracking data collected and the data management process. Proposal writers, principal investigators, graduate research students, and project coordinators of research requiring large-scale field data collection will find the book to be an indispensable tool.
Author : Gabe Ignatow
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 22,34 MB
Release : 2017-09-22
Category : Computers
ISBN : 150633699X
Students in social science courses communicate, socialize, shop, learn, and work online. When they are asked to collect data for course projects they are often drawn to social media platforms and other online sources of textual data. There are many software packages and programming languages available to help students collect data online, and there are many texts designed to help with different forms of online research, from surveys to ethnographic interviews. But there is no textbook available that teaches students how to construct a viable research project based on online sources of textual data such as newspaper archives, site user comment archives, digitized historical documents, or social media user comment archives. Gabe Ignatow and Rada F. Mihalcea's new text An Introduction to Text Mining will be a starting point for undergraduates and first-year graduate students interested in collecting and analyzing textual data from online sources, and will cover the most critical issues that students must take into consideration at all stages of their research projects, including: ethical and philosophical issues; issues related to research design; web scraping and crawling; strategic data selection; data sampling; use of specific text analysis methods; and report writing.
Author : Wallace R. Blischke
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 594 pages
File Size : 36,6 MB
Release : 2011-07-28
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0857296477
Warranty Data Collection and Analysis deals with warranty data collection and analysis and the problems associated with these activities. The book is a both a research monograph and a handbook for practitioners. As a research monograph, it unifies the literature on warranty data collection and analysis, and presents the important results in an integrated manner. In the process, it highlights topics that require further research. As a handbook, it provides the essential methodology needed by practitioners involved with warranty data collection and analysis, along with extensive references to further results. Models and techniques needed for proper and effective analysis of data are included, together with guidelines for their use in warranty management, product improvement, and new product development. Warranty Data Collection and Analysis will be of interest to researchers (engineers and statisticians) and practitioners (engineers, applied statisticians, and managers) involved with product warranty and reliability. It is also suitable for use as a reference text for graduate-level reliability programs in engineering, applied statistics, operations research, and management.
Author : James V. Spickard
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 610 pages
File Size : 37,9 MB
Release : 2016-09-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1483387232
Research Basics: Design to Data Analysis in Six Steps offers a fresh and creative approach to the research process based on author James V. Spickard’s decades of teaching experience. Using an intuitive six-step model, readers learn how to craft a research question and then identify a logical process for answering it. Conversational writing and multi-disciplinary examples illuminate the model’s simplicity and power, effectively connecting the “hows” and “whys” behind social science research. Students using this book will learn how to turn their research questions into results.
Author : Susan C. Weller
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 108 pages
File Size : 30,41 MB
Release : 1988-02-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1452213917
Data collection in the field, whether by interviewing or other methods, can be carried out in a structured, systematic and scientific way. This volume compels field researchers to take very seriously not only what they hear, but what they ask. Ethnographers have often discovered too late that the value of their interview information is discounted as a consequence of poor sampling (of both questions and informants) and poor elicitation techniques. The authors focus on the importance of establishing the right questions to ask through the use of free listing techniques; then they describe in practical terms the administration of an impressive array of alternative kinds of informant task. They conclude with a discussion of reliability and validity of various methods which can be used to generate more systematic, culturally meaningful data.
Author : J. Flamm
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 37,62 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9401124388
The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous plants require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by regulatory bodies and industrial organisations to collect reliability data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also needed to assess availability of plants and services and to improve quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning, production availability, etc. The need for an educational effort in the field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the framework of EuReDatA, an association of organisations operating reliability data banks. This association aims to promote data exchange and pooling of data between organisations and to encourage the adoption of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be essential in order to improve data quality. To cover issues directly linked to the above areas ample space is devoted to the definition of failure events, common cause and human error data, feedback of operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, lifetime distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions, Bayesian inference methods, multivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and possibility theory, etc.
