HSR 210: Intro to Research in Human Services

Creative Inquiry introduces both undergraduate students and general readers to the exploratory mindset and hands-on skills essential to the cultivation and implementation of new ideas. Using active learning, this book combines concise explanations and real-world examples with engaging exercises for readers to complete. The writing style is conversational, yet substantial, and the examples given reflect a wide range of disciplines, from early aeronautics and linguistics to zoology. Creative Inquiry emphasizes the importance of direct experience, personal initiative, and the generation of new knowledge. Step by step, the exercises build the skills students need when they tackle the final self-designed Capstone project. Positioned at the end of major sections, five brief self-reflection papers are designed to help students assess their progress and revise their assignments. To encourage collaboration and strengthen metacognition, teams of three to six participants work together on these papers. This encourages an iterative mindset and provides extensive practice with writing. The appendix provides a lively and practical "Top Ten List" of writing strategies for students who need extra advice.

The availability of research methodologies and frameworks to facilitate different ways of gathering knowledge and performing research is often a matter of concern for early career researchers as well as advanced research scholars. Positioning Research, while identifying this gap, provides avenues that encompass differing cultural backgrounds and disciplines to enable exploration of research frameworks and shifting paradigms, considering the impact of social media and new forms of knowledge that assist real-time, global distribution of research.  The book highlights the possibilities of transition into 'the third space', where negotiation and dialogue are central to positioning research. It upholds the principle that different research methodologies are equally valid and valued in contributing to new knowledge. The book focuses on the contexts in which research questions are conceptualised and designed, and highlights the implications of research for the various partners and communities that participate in the research. It thus provides a cutting-edge framework for conducting multidisciplinary research.

Qualitative interviewing has today become one of the most common research methods across the human and social sciences, but it is an approach that comes in different guises. Qualitative Interviewing will help its readers write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research in its many forms as currently practiced. The book begins with a theoretically informed introduction to qualitative interviewing by presenting a variegated landscape of how conversations have been used for knowledge-producing purposes. Particular attention is paid to the complementary positions of experience-focused interviewing (phenomenological positions) and language-focused interviewing (discourse-oriented positions), which focus on interview talk as reports (of the experiences of interviewees) and accounts (occasioned by the situation of interviewing), respectively. The following chapters address various ways of designing qualitative interview studies and a guide to writing up the methodological procedures and results of an interview study. The book concludes with a presentation of the most common errors in interview reports, offering a range of solutions and strategies for evaluating research findings based on qualitative interviews.