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Schwab, D. P. (2005). Research Methods for Organizational Studies (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
According to the author, Research Methods for Organizational Studies (2nd ed.) is an outgrowth of more than 30 years of teaching research to master's and doctoral students. Although this material was taught formally in courses offered in management and industrial-relations departments, students enrolled in the author's classes have come from a variety of disciplines, including industrial/organizational psychology, social psychology, educational administration, marketing, communication arts, operations management, nursing, health care administration, and industrial engineering. This diversity of students provides an indication of the breadth of audience this book is designed to reach.
The second edition of Research Methods for Organizational Studies consists of 21 chapters arranged into eight parts: (a) "Overview" presents the organization of the book, its objectives, and a synopsis of "all" research activities; (b) "Measurement" discusses construct validity, error, and reliability; (c) "Design" addresses internal validity, causal inference, field and experimental studies, sampling, and threats to validity; (d) "Analysis" deals with investigating empirical relationships, cleaning data, central tendency, variability, correlation, and regression; (e) "Statistical Validation" discusses t tests and F tests, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and R squared; (f) "Generalization" focuses on external validity and compares narrative reviews to meta-analysis; (g) "Research Reports" deals with content and formatting issues when writing results for dissemination; and (h) "Extensions" draws on material in previous chapters and addresses issues of incomplete data, imputation, effects of unreliability in correlation and regression, multicollinearity, and "causal" modeling. Note that the new edition addresses many of the concerns raised regarding the previous version. Specifically, it includes an expanded discussion of correlation, regression, and moderators as well as an entirely new chapter on causal modeling and a true capstone (ch. 21) that provides guidelines for conducting research and evaluating the results of others. Still absent, however, is a chapter on qualitative research, which the author explains but acknowledges as a certain limitation in the eyes of some readers.
Among the book's nice features are its short, well-organized chapters that touch on a panoply of research-related topics. Each chapter closes with a brief summary, a glossary of keywords (also shown in bold print in the body of the chapters), a list of questions for review,...