Understanding Research Methods

This eleventh edition, written by Michelle Newhart with Patten, lays out the groundwork a student needs before beginning a research project. Its approach draws on how people learn and on deliberate content design. The essentials of both quantitative and qualitative inquiry appear as brief, self-contained topics, and these topics are gathered into logical sections.

The book has remained in demand through more than ten editions. It keeps its focus tight, centering on core ideas and breaking material into compact units that suit current learners. At the close of each topic, readers are asked to answer prompts in a research planning journal to start shaping their own project. Topic Review exercises invite hands-on practice, and Topics for Discussion offer open-ended questions that can launch conversation in a classroom or an online forum. The final part addresses writing a research report and includes guidance and activities for doing so. It can underpin project-based coursework, or it can serve on its own for senior theses, master's theses, dissertations, and articles intended for publication.

Instructors can reshape the book to fit their needs, since the topics can be selected and sequenced in whatever order they prefer. This makes it adaptable to methods training across many courses and fields of study. Online digital materials are available to support course development.

This edition adds a table of contents and a list of keywords to each part's introduction, expands the treatment of qualitative research, introduces new material on designing quantitative studies, broadens the discussion of sampling, and includes more simple graphs, charts, and illustrations that visualize key points.