Table of Contents:
  • Social work research : context and politics
  • Ethics
  • Evidence and professional social work practice
  • Problem formulation : what to study
  • Using the literature
  • Working from questions or hypotheses
  • Variables
  • Assumptions
  • Design options
  • Exploratory design
  • Descriptive design
  • Experimental design
  • Correlational design
  • Plausible alternative explanations
  • Practice evaluation
  • Program evaluation
  • Working toward reliability and validity
  • Sampling
  • Data collection
  • Data analysis : an overview
  • Qualitative data analysis : making sense of words
  • Quantitative data analysis : making sense of descriptive statistics
  • Quantitative data analysis : making sense of inferential statistics
  • Tests of statistical significance
  • Wrapping it up.