Quantitative research methods : from theory to publication / Nicholas Harkiolakis

Attempting to describe quantitative research methods through one volume of material is quite a challenging endeavor and it should be noted here that this book is by no means attempting to exhaustively present everything under the Sun on the subject. Interested readers will need to expand on what is presented here by searching the extant literature on what exists and what best suits their research needs. Having said that, the book does cover the great majority of quantitative methods found in social sciences research. The motivation for developing this book came from years of delivering quantitative methods courses for graduate programs in Europe and the USA. Through exposure to such programs it became apparent that while most students had some exposure, to statistics mainly, at the time they entered graduate studies most of their understanding and familiarity with quantitative techniques was forgotten or vaguely remembered. In many cases, what remained was the impression of how much they “hated” the subject. Overcoming this negative predisposition required a re-introduction of basic concepts and a fast-track approach to higher and more advanced methods of analysis. These realities guided the development of this book and so the assumption is made that the reader doesn’t know anything about quantitative research and about research in general. All concepts presented in the book are defined and introduced. Also, alternative and overlapping expressions and keywords used in quantitative research are presented so the reader can identify them in their readings of academic research. Whether this “zero-to-hero” approach succeeded is left for the reader to judge. Additional effort was made to include examples that are easily replicated in spreadsheets like Excel so the users can manually repeat them at their convenience. Regarding the use of software, commands for executing the various methods for SPSS are given in footnotes to avoid diverting from the core narrative of the text. The interested reader can easily retrieve a plethora of material from the Internet with step-by-step instructions for most of the analysis techniques discussed here and for the most popular statistical software packages. The book’s website at www.harkiolakis.com/books/quan provides additional material for executing the methods discussed here with SPSS, as well as all book images in higher resolution and links to other sources online. For instructors who are interested in using the book as a textbook, data sets and exercises on the methods included in the book are available upon request.