E-Research: Methods, Strategies, and Issues

Rating:
Summary: Particularly useful
Review: I found this book to be particularly useful for college and university faculty who supervise undergraduate and graduate students who complete online research. The chapters address a wide array of relevant issues that a novice researcher will encounter.

As Chair of a University Institutional Review Board, I was impressed with the content of the chapter on ethics and e-Research. The use of technology in human participants research exponentially complicates the process, and this chapter addresses many important issues.

Rating:
Summary: Not particularly useful
Review: This book provides a high-level overview of some of the methods, strategies and issues involved in research in general and web-based research in particular.

Structurally and stylistically, the book resembles a freshman-level introductory text. Unfortunately, the information is presented in such a broad and generalized manner that it is of little use.

Want to know if web-based research is right for your project? Here's what page 89 has to say:

"One step that you can take to determine if the Net is a suitable communication medium in which to conduct an interview is to spend some time doing background work on the selected or potential participants. Much can be learned, for example, from reading personal web pages or published works and/or asking people who know the participants."

Which is a long way of saying, "be resourceful and figure it out for yourself."

This is about as concrete as the authors get. More often, you see pages and pages of sentences like this:

"Complex analysis information may be very time consuming and require special programming and data extraction skills." (p. 140)

Is this something a researcher wouldn't know?

There is a little bit of useful information here for researchers who know nothing or close to nothing about the Internet and its practical capabilities.

But what's most frustrating about this book is that every time I get to the end of a chapter, I ask myself, "What did I learn from that chapter? What was the point of it?" And I can come up with no answer.