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Rating: 
Summary: Poor Instructions for Doing Poor Research
Review: A writing and research guide for absolute beginners - better yet, students who don't know they're absolute beginners. If you're looking for poorly written instructions on how to do thin research and then write up a paper that will have no relevance to anyone but your teacher, then this guide is for you. Concerning the research methods covered here, this book is a great example of academics trying to add unnecessary legitimacy to simple methods, by using big words to describe common-sense concepts, and operationalizing the methods and grandly trying to turn them into science. In this case, the fields are cultural studies and ethnography, which were already fine when they were looked upon as illuminating field work, character sketches, and documentaries. This book makes the standard attempts (for academia) to turn these simple yet effective styles into sciences with multi-syllabic names and hierarchies of methodology, to gain respect from other more structured fields. Then there is this book's atrocious writing. A variety of authors crank out a non-varied smorgasbord of self-aggrandizement about how "insightful" their research has been, with hugely unnecessary biographies about themselves and how exemplary they think their methods are. In an attempt to beef up the thin material, the editors have added wave upon wave of specific examples and questions from semi-anonymous "students," which are so mind-numbingly repetitive and homogenous that they cease to be believable testimonials. Qualitative research is certainly an important field with its own strengths and methods that need to be mastered by anyone attempting to do the associated research. But you can do infinitely better than this book which fails to rise above the amateur level. [~doomsdayer520~]
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