Reading like a book

If you are a beginning researcher or a student in an introductory social research methods class, you may want to begin at the beginning of this site. In this case, click on Parts, shown as the third term in the set of buttons at the top of this page. When you do this, a drop-down menu will appear showing a short title for each of the five Parts. By clicking on a title for any Part, you will taken to the beginning of that Part. Once in a selected Part, you will see a list of chapters included in that Part. Chapter titles are shown in a column on the left side of the first page of each Part. For Part 1, for example, the chapters are: Chapter 1: Understanding Scientific Inquiry; Chapter 2: Sudan Fertility Study; and Chapter 3: The Language of Research.

By clicking on the name of the chapter, you can go directly to that chapter. Once in a chapter, you will see a list of topics in a column down the left side of the first page of the chapter. These topics are listed from   top to bottom in the order in which they are discussed. You can read from one topic to the next and from one chapter to the next. In this way, you can read from the beginning of the site to the end. Or, by clicking on the buttons for various topics, you can jump from one topic to the next within any chapter.

Selecting a part

This site is divided into five main parts. Part 1, "Thinking Like a Researcher," introduces you to social research and the way researchers look at the world around them. If you want to learn more about how scientists and researchers think and look at things, begin with Part 1 and proceed through its three chapters.

Part 2, "Planning Research," describes how to plan a research project, beginning with the selection of a problem to investigate. If your interest is in how to select a problem to investigate and how to develop a plan for addressing that problem, this is the place to start. From Part 2, you can go to any of the chapters making up this part and learn about the various steps involved in planning a research project.

Research is based on the collection and analysis of information, called data by researchers. By the way you plan your research, you will be creating the kinds of data you will collect and later analyze. Therefore, Part 3 is called "Creating Data." The seven chapters of this part describe ways of collecting data. Each of these chapters can be accessed from the first page of Part 3.

After you collect your data, you have to analyze it to see what you have found. Ways of organizing and analyzing data are described in Part 4, "Analyzing Data." The four chapters in this part show how to prepare data for analysis and how to conduct various statistical analyses of your data. Clicking on a title name will take you to that chapter.

The final chapter, in Part 5, "Reporting Your Results," describes how to plan and write a research report and how to share your research results with others in additional ways. You can go to any of the specific section of this chapter by clicking on the topics listed in the column on the left side of the first page of this chapter.

Using the table of contents

The table of contents (TOC) of a book allows you to find a specific section you want to read. The TOC on this site works the same way. Any time you want to go to a specific section, you can click on TOC to see the table of contents for material on this site. The TOC provides a list of the Parts of the site, each with their respective chapters, and then within each chapter, the main topics discussed within each chapter. You can scroll up or down in the list to find the specific section you want to go to.