The Illustrated Guide to Social Science Research

Divya Sharma is Professor of Justice and Law Administration at Western Connecticut State University, CT, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Master’s degrees in Sociology and Criminal Justice. Her research interests include informal banking systems, visual criminology, cultural communication, and white-collar crimes. She has collected data in India, Kenya, and the United States. She specializes in program and policy evaluation, survey and field research, and research ethics concerning nonwestern and cross-cultural settings and digital data. She has developed and taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in criminal justice, homeland security, and sociology, and has extensive experience in supervising student research projects involving primary and secondary data. She is the author of the textbook Fundamentals of Criminology (2019), and editor of Ethics, Ethnocentrism and Social Science Research (2021).

Introduction 1. Research Methods: An Overview 2. Research Steps 3. Research Ethics 4. Defining and Measuring Concepts 5. Sampling 6. Collecting Primary Data: Survey Research Methods 7. Collecting Primary Data: Experiment Research Methods 8. Collecting Primary Data – Qualitative Methods: Focus Groups, Observation, Intensive Interviews 9. Data Organization, Report Writing, and Presentation