Research for Development — A Practical Guide

Laws, a sociologist who is associated with a UK charity that aims to develop and promote best practice in the care of vulnerable children and their families, Harper and Jones (social development, Overseas Development Institute), and Marcus, a freelance social development consultant, show development workers how to conduct research. They explain planning and managing research, including which development work can benefit from its use, how to tell when research is the best approach to a problem, the main research approaches and purposes (to inform program planning and influence policy), quality, clarifying the research focus and questions and writing a brief, supervising research work, estimating costs and timescales, negotiating access, managing participatory research, relating to funders, conducting a review of existing evidence, and helping people learn more about research. The next two sections cover methods and techniques, collecting good quality data, ethical challenges, types of quantitative and qualitative sampling, how to include hard-to-reach people, and using interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, documentary sources, and observation, as well as visual methods, drama and role play, and participatory approaches, and analyzing data, writing reports, presenting findings, and assessing the research work. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)