The Field Research Survival Guide (Paperback)

One of the most important tasks facing social scientists is managing a field research project. Yet field research training focuses almost entirely on theories and formal methods, leaving researchers with no practical guidance in actual implementation. The Field Research Survival Guide fills a need for all researchers in social science, psychology, and related areas, by serving as an advanced guide for making decisions in the field. This collection of narratives from leading field researchers acknowledges the unpredictability of managing a project and candidly illustrates real-world problems and solutions. The authors openly reveal their successes, their failures, and what skills are needed for successful field research management.
Unlike the standard research methods text, each chapter of The Field Research Survival Guide has practical import for the researcher, ties together extant literature, and illustrates the issues with concrete examples from the authors' own experience. Chapters cover such topics as creating an interdisciplinary research team, hiring and training research staff and interviewers, developing the instrument, preparing the data for analysis, navigating the IRB and ethical dilemmas, maintaining cultural sensitivity, measuring the impact of the methodology, evaluating the intervention, transferring the results to practice and policy, and disseminating results and sharing data and publications. Though many research texts cover these areas, no other book gives readers such straightforward advice about balancing the textbook ideal with the field reality.
Newly minted and experienced researchers alike will learn and benefit from the shared experiential knowledge ofseasoned, widely respected field researchers. Doctoral students, junior faculty, and research assistants will benefit from an insider's guide to managing the reality of conducting a research project. Designed to supplement traditional textbooks on research methods, this will be an ideal addition to doctoral courses in departments of social work, psychology, psychiatry, and public health, and an indispensible reference for those conducting field research.