Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 28

This book is designed to be user-friendly, which means it has special features that will help students understand the meaning of concepts and retain their learnings. For example, each chapter places emphasis on essential concepts and techniques rather than on esoteric knowledge. While technical terms are presented, more common phrases are used to help students to remember the meaning of them.

One of the features of this text is that each chapter ends with a review section that contains discussion questions, a list of key learnings, a chapter quiz, and a chapter glossary. These items help the students review the content of the chapter and focus on key themes.

The discussion questions help the students reflect on critical concepts in the chapter. Their answers can be a good vehicle for class discussion. The listing of key learnings should help the students review critical concepts and make note of which concepts are more important than others. When students take the chapter quiz, they can see whether they need further review of the content. The chapter glossary is a convenient tool for review of definitions of concepts and the determination of concepts that are most critical for understanding.

In addition, there is an emphasis on how the parts of the research process fits together. For example, the sampling procedures helps the researcher draw conclusions about the generalization of study results; the definition of the target behavior helps the researcher select the proper tool for measurement; the selection of a research design helps in the drawing of conclusions about the extent that the treatment should be credited with causing the clients’ improvement. These mechanisms help the student understand both the what and the why of research procedures.

Learning is also facilitated through the use of terms that are easier to remember. For example, the reader is repeatedly reminded that the concept of threats to internal validity refers to alternative explanations of client outcome. Students are not as likely to remember what is meant by “threats to internal validity” without this help. Wherever possible, this text employs user-friendly language such as “credibility” as an overall category for the concepts of reliability and validity.

One chapter in this book presents the connections between common sayings in everyday life and research ideas. One example is “Don’t put the cart before the horse!” In other words, be sure to execute the research process in proper order. Another is “Two heads are better than one.” This saying is relevant to the establishment of the credibility of measurement tools when they are subject to comparisons to other tools. If both tools are correlated, you have evidence of two heads being better than one.

A final feature of this book that facilitates learning is the repetition of concepts in different contexts with later versions being more complex than earlier discussions. This should help the students always be able to see the forest for the trees. Students are introduced to concepts in simple fashion in the early chapters and are given more depth of knowledge in later chapters. For example, the student will have learned basic lessons about sampling in the early chapters before they encounter this theme at a higher level in a later chapter. They will already understand how the research design addresses the issue of causation in evaluative research before they reach the chapter that discusses myriad different research designs. They will understand the concept of chance in the very first chapter of this text, but will return to it later when they examine data statistically.