Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Real world research is a common responsibility of professionals and practitioners in a wide range of both public and private settings.  These include teachers, social workers and health service professionals, managers and specialists in business, architects, designers, criminologists and accountants among many others.

Real World Research provides a clear route-map of the various steps needed to carry out a piece of applied research to a high professional standard.  It is accessible to those without a social science background while providing rigorous and fully up-to-date coverage of contemporary issues and debates.  It brings together materials and approaches from different social science disciplines, seeing value in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, as well as their combination in mixed-method designs.

Updated throughout, the third edition includes:

Colin Robson's bestselling textbook is essential reading for many higher education courses, at both undergraduate, taught postgraduate and doctoral level, as well as practitioners and others carrying out a research project as part of their job.  A very extensive website, which is closely keyed in to the text, provides additional resources including copious examples of research and further discussion of research issues, links to other useful resources and selected journal articles, annotated lists of further reading and an extensive set of PowerPoint slides.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part I Before You Start
• 1 Real World Enquiry
• 2 Approaches to Social Research
• 3 Developing Your Ideas
• Part II Designing the Enquiry
• 4 General Design Issues
• 5 Fixed Designs
• 6 Flexible Designs
• 7 Designs for Particular Purposes: Evaluation, Action and Change
• Part III Tactics: The Methods of Data Collection
• 8 Surveys and Questionnaires
• 9 Interviews
• 10 Tests and Scales
• 11 Observational Methods
• 12 Additional Methods of Data Collection
• Part IV Dealing with the Data
• 13 The Analysis of Quantitative Data
• 14 The Analysis of Qualitative Data
• 15 Reporting on the Enquiry
• Appendix A Writing a Project Proposal
• Appendix B The roles of Practitioner-Researchers, Researchers and Consultants in Real World Research