Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 29

There are three major goals of this book. The first goal is to equip students with competence in the application of research tasks that are congruent with the nature of scientific inquiry. For example, you are not supposed to conduct research to prove a point; instead, you conduct it to discover the truth. Most important, you learn to appreciate the contribution of science to your understanding of social reality, with special attention to evidence with regard to social work practice. Furthermore, the social worker must undertake research with attention to ethics in the use of human subjects in research.

The second goal is to give students the ability to conduct the tasks of various types of research. For example, a social worker as researcher may conduct a study to describe a study sample (descriptive research) or to explain phenomena by examining the relationships between variables (explanatory research). They may evaluate a service (evaluative research) or explore the unknown (exploratory research). With regard to each type of research, the student goes through each of the four phases of the research process at a basic level.

The third goal is to equip students with the skills necessary for conducting the major phases of the research process at the intermediate level. This is accomplished by giving more details and tools for the research tasks. First, students learn how to engage in the development of a knowledge on which their research is founded. Developing the methods for finding the answer to their research questions is a second phase of research. They learn how to analyze data as they undertake the third phase of research. Then they review how to draw conclusions, the final phase of this process.

These three goals serve as the guides for the three parts of this book. In the first part, the student reviews the fundamentals of science that help them achieve the first goal. The second part acquaints students with the necessary tasks in the development of the methods for conducting the research study. In the third part, the student learns how to analyze data while the final section focuses on the conclusions that should be drawn based on the data analyzed. These three sections are described below.