Health Education Research, Vol. 15, No. 1, 117-118,
February 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
Book Review |
The Hard-pressed Researcher: A Research Handbook for the Caring Professions
Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton
The intended audience for this book is practitioners who wish to conduct research in the field in which they work and who may also be undertaking their research as part of a higher education course. In just 200 pages, the authors guide these `hard-pressed' researchers through the entire research process, from identifying a research question, through reviewing the literature, designing a study, collecting and analysing data, to writing up a research report. The authors have experience of research in health and education, and throughout the book they provide examples of the application of different methods drawn from their own research. There must be very few researchers today who do not consider themselves to be hard-pressed and this book is a good introductory text for anyone who is conducting research for the first time. Thus, most of the material would be appropriate for a non-practitioner undergraduate or postgraduate student who is carrying out a research project independently, perhaps for a dissertation.
One of the strengths of this book is that it addresses aspects of the research process which appear mundane and which are often omitted from research methods text books and neglected in research methods courses. So, for instance, there is a chapter on `making notes and using a library', which gives clear and helpful advice on the range of material available and how to use it to review the literature, the use of indexes and abstracts, and approaches to note-taking. Similarly the chapter on `writing up' provides a concise account of the format of a research report and gives cogent advice about, for example, how to write an abstract and what to include in—and exclude from—appendices.
A particularly appealing feature of the book is that the authors are not afraid to offer guidance on questions to which there are no definitive answers, but which frequently worry those who have little research experience, e.g. `how much should I read?' (between 20 and 40 items for a 4000 word research report) and `how big does a pilot study need to be?' (approximately 10% of the sample size). It is made clear that such advice is only indicative, but such rules of thumb can be very reassuring to the novice researcher.
A concise book of this type can only provide short introductions to many of the research methods it covers. Thus questionnaire design is addressed in nine bullet points which occupy just over 1 page and focus groups are discussed in three short paragraphs. The authors deal with this necessary brevity by providing a guide to further reading at the end of each chapter, with notes on each of the suggested texts. The reader of this book who wishes to learn how to conduct research would certainly need to consult some of these references.
The section of the book that I found least satisfactory was the account of statistical analysis. Here, much of the space is taken up with formulae for statistical tests and examples of how to do the calculations manually. The authors acknowledge that for readers with access to a computer package such as SPSS this part of the book is `redundant' (p. 141). In a book of this length is not possible to cover the details of the calculations and also give adequate explanations of fundamental concepts such as statistical significance, the distinction between parametric and non-parametric tests, the normal distribution, the relationship between types of data and choice of test, etc. The reader is introduced to a range of statistical procedures without sufficient information about which test would be appropriate to use in any particular situation. For the hard-pressed, novice researcher, a more detailed explanation of key statistical concepts, accompanied by a much briefer guide to the most widely used statistical tests and an introduction to some of the most widely used statistical analysis packages, would be more helpful than the details of manual calculation of statistical tests.
I was a little uneasy with occasional suggestions that the `hard-pressed researcher' may not only need to compromise the quality of their research but may also disregard some of the likely limitations of small-scale research projects. For example, the section on validity addresses face validity only, with the comment that `there are other indications of research validity but the hard-pressed researcher needs to deal primarily with the common-sense concerns around face validity' (p. 83). While research which is conducted under pressure of time and resource constraints may not be able to incorporate other types of validity into the research design, it is important that researchers are aware of any shortcomings of their work. Similarly, it is suggested that the reader does not need to engage with the `extensive literature' on sampling (p. 37) and, while the importance of achieving as representative a sample as possible is emphasized, there is no attempt to explain the crucial distinction between random and non-random samples.
The authors go to some length to avoid labelling methods as `quantitative' or `qualitative' and they usefully suggest that a mixed design is often the most appropriate approach. Despite this commendable stance, an inappropriate preference for quantitative results sometimes emerges. For example, it is suggested that having analysed qualitative data and identified themes and categories, the researcher may wish to `firm up the picture you are presenting by the application of some statistical procedures' (p. 129). While it is certainly true that use of pre-determined categories derived from interview questions would be a more `manageable' way of analysing interview transcripts than deriving categories from the data (p. 125), such an approach would seem to defeat the purpose of in-depth interviews.
Despite my reservations about some features of this book, I am convinced of its value as an introductory text. It would not be possible to conduct a focus group or carry out an experimental study solely on the basis of reading this book, but as an introduction to the research process and to the range of approaches available to the social researcher, and as a source of references to more detailed accounts of particular research methods, this is a highly accessible guide.
Notes
A. Edwards and R. Talbot Longmans. London, 1999 (2nd edn) 222 pp. ISBN 0-582-36972-X
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