Out of the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram, Mary R. Bast, Ph.D. 
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Social Research: Guides to a Decision-Making Process
by Susan Gustavus Philliber, Mary (Schwab) Bast, and G. Sam Sloss, copyright © 1980, Peacock Publishers, Inc.

Preface

To us, social research is exciting. This book arose from our conviction that teaching and learning social science research methods should not be dull or difficult. It can be extremely challenging and even fun to learn why people believe and behave the way they do. You'll be your own worst enemy if you expect methodology and statistics to be too difficult. We hope this text is understandable even for those who've carefully avoided mathematics and research.

While we're technically accurate about how to do social research, we're also professionally honest about how social research is actually done. We don't believe the interests of students or the social sciences are served by pretending research methods arise from a series of inviolable rules. Research is basically a decision-making process. At every stage, you'll have to make compromises with what's ideal. At best we can only offer you hints about how to make intelligent choices and some consequences of those choices.

We've designed this text for a relatively simple, first course in social research methodology, so it's not comprehensive and not intended as a substitute for a statistics course. We've also included a few topics not generally found in methodology texts, learning from our own teaching that new researchers benefit from guidelines for even such basic but important research tasks as writing hypotheses or reviewing the literature.

Chapter 1:  On Knowing

Chapter 2:  The Research Problem

Chapter 3:  Measurement

Chapter 4:  Study Design

Chapter 5:  Data Collection

Chapter 6:  Analysis

Chapter 7:  Communicating and Interpreting Results