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Book review: Designing and Proposing Your Research Project

by Geoff Hart

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2020. Book review: Designing and Proposing Your Research Project. Technical Communication 67(4):91-92.

Jennifer Brown Urban and Bradley Matheus van Eeden-Moorefield. 2018. American Psychological Association. [ISBN 978-1-4338-2708-2. 140 pages, including index. US$29.95 (softcover).]

There’s much to like about Designing and Proposing Your Research Project: it’s a friendly, unintimidating, reasonably comprehensive overview of a complex subject. The authors explicitly note that more reading is necessary; for example, their description of sampling (Ch. 7) won’t support quantitative research if you haven’t already taken a statistics course. The many examples, helpful forms, and summary tables concisely present large amounts of information. Unfortunately, two flaws make the book hard to recommend.

First, it needed better substantive editing to eliminate egregious errors. For example, the authors suggest (p. 90) that readers with red–green colorblindness can’t see red text (in fact, they can’t easily distinguish red from green). Then there are contradictions. For example, the authors note that samples must be representative of the study population in quantitative research (pp. 63–64), then suggest that in qualitative research, it’s more important to support the research question (p. 65). Are unrepresentative results really more acceptable in qualitative research?

Muddy advice includes the suggestion that surveys of adults should use 7th to 8th grade language based on a readability formula. Readability formulas are meaningless; a better recommendation would be to use audience-appropriate language. The authors don’t define many key terms on first appearance, nor link to definitions in the index. For example, triangulation is indexed twice (p. 56, 58), but with no definition on either page; the actual definition (p. 123) doesn’t appear in the index. A glossary would have solved this problem.

Second, the authors incorrectly assume that quantitative and qualitative research are fundamentally different things, rather than different methods applied to the same research questions. Thus, Chapter 4 shows more similarities than differences between these research types. This division leads to subsequent questionable choices such as concluding that acknowledging and accounting for bias is essential in qualitative research (p. 53), but not mentioning its importance in quantitative research. Similarly, the authors emphasize the importance of strong and trusting relationships with subjects in qualitative research (p. 55), but not in quantitative research. Related errors include the belief that only quantitative research requires hypothesis testing. In fact, hypotheses are testable predictions in any type of research.

These flaws make it hard to recommend Designing and Proposing Your Research Project for self-study; they will discourage or mislead many readers. The same flaws frustrate its use as a classroom resource, exacerbated by an unpredictable combination of really good information, such as the advice to pretest and correct study methods before using them collect real-world data, with frustrating omissions, such as no discussion of the reproducibility crisis or the many forms of bias. Though the book’s title suggests it will teach readers how to prepare a research proposal, that information is scattered throughout the book rather than gathered into its own chapter.

Better editing and a reality check would make a second edition more useful.

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