Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices

I like open access. The USF Tampa Library hosts a collection of open access textbooks. One of them, which might be useful for many SCM researchers, has been published by Anol Bhattacherjee, a professor of information systems. It is titled Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices. The book, which is succinct and compact, is about the entire research process and it is designed “to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of scientific research”. The initial chapters 1 to 4 give an introduction to research. This includes topics such as “thinking like a researcher” and “theories in scientific research”. The chapters 5 to 8 are about the basics of empirical research (i.e, research design, construct measurement, scale reliability/validity, and sampling). The chapters 9 to 12 are concerned with data collection (i.e., survey research, experimental research, case research, and interpretive research). Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis is explained in the chapters 13 to 15. The last chapter is about research ethics.