Practicing Research: Discovering Evidence That Matters

Practicing Research: Discovering Evidence That Matters provides students, practitioners, and researchers with guidance on best practices. The book's eight chapters correspond to the skills that research consumers need to discover evidence that matters. Author Arlene Fink pays special attention to facilitating student learning by offeringing over a hundred examples, exercises, tables, figures, and checklists, as well as an extensive glossary. All the examples are taken from existing research and programs and grounded in the practitioner's reality.

Key Features

• Provides methods for determining the validity of evidence and how to justify an acceptable level of "proof" based on science, experience, and values
• Offers practical frameworks to guide the research process and take the student from needs assessment to program implementation and evaluation through to implementation of results
• Shows how to engage diverse stakeholders (communities, teachers) in the research process
• Accompanied by a companion Web site at www.sagepub.com/finkstudy that consists of Web exercises for students for each chapter

Intended Audience

This text is intended to be the core text or one of the primary texts for applied research courses at the graduate level in Education, Social Work, Public Administration and Policy, Evaluation, Health, Nursing, and Criminal Justice. Readers should have a passing familiarity with the idea of research, but no special research expertise is necessary.

Arlene Fink (Ph.D.) is Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles and President of the Langley Research Institute. Her main interests include evaluation and survey research and the conduct of research literature reviews as well as the evaluation of their quality. Dr. Fink has conducted many research studies in medicine, public health and education. She is on the faculty of UCLA's Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and its Health Services Research Center and is on the Advisory Board of the University of Southern California's Minority Research Center. She is also a consultant to the American Society for Bioethics, the International Society for Clinical Bioethics, and L'institut de Promotion del la Prévention Secondaire en Addictologie (IPPSA) Paris, France. Professor Fink has lectured extensively in the United States and internationally and is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed articles and 15 textbooks.