The Good Research Guide

A book review.

The Good Research Guide

For Small-scale Social Research Projects

by Martyn Denscombe

published: 2010.08.01

ISBN: 9780335226863

genre: Social Science

reviewed:2014.06.04

This is a research guide that appears to be aimed at novices. I was directed to purchase a copy by the university where I was doing my master dissertation, and I resisted as it didn't seem necessary and the book wasn't cheap. But when I got through all of the material and had spoken with my supervisor a few times I realized that they expected us to write a fair bit about how we'd conducted our research into the dissertation. So I bought a copy and dutifully wrote up some stuff about ontology and who knows what else. It was all pretty mechanical but I squeezed everything I could out of that book. In the end, I got a score well above the normal range, so I guessed that artifice helped. Anyway I published the dissertation on some websites, and moved on.

If you're looking at this book, buy a used one, don't pay the exorbitant cost of this thing, you can find all the same material on the Internet. Hell, you can find my dissertation on the Internet, and in my methodologies chapter I practically reproduced this dull affair.