Doing your research project - Zina O´Leary

This is one of my favourite books on how to do research:

You can have a look into the book on the Amazon web page at:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Essential-Guide-Doing-Research-Project/dp/1848600119/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274079262&sr=8-1

Zina also has a great web page with additional videos and charts, at:
www.uk.sagepub.com/resources/oleary

You can download her excellent powerpoint charts, which are a great summary of her book at:
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/resources/oleary/pptslides.htm

This is one of the great examples of professors that are sharing their materials openly. I would wish that this development would also come to Germany, which is still very closed in this respect. In the meantime, I am continuing my work on my PhD in the UK :-)

Here are the videos, which are a very nice overview of the book contents and the research process in general:









So keep on braining yourself and the rest of the world!

Guide to SPSS

And another great youtube series on stats - this time on how to use SPSS:















What did the poor PhD students in the pre-youtube times do?

Great ANOVA lecture on youtube

When you are looking for an easy explanation of how to run an ANOVA in SPSS, have a look at this great lecture on youtube:

Great quant statistic course on youtube

I found a great channel on youtube, called the headlessprofessor.
This professor explains quantitative statistics, so that I can understand it easily.
My problem with the most statistical lectures I received, was that the professors were just too advanced on stats for me. This guy really makes quant stats for dummies.

I compiled the relevant videos from his channel here:























































Please let me know, when you find other great sources like this. I am looking especially for easy to understand lectures on the more advanced bivariate and multivariate analysis concepts and tools.

I keep you updated on the headless professor. I have subscribed to his channel.

Web Center for Social Research Methods

I just found an excellent link on research methods at:
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/

Have a look at the knowledge base, which is a full online-textbook on research methods and on the statistical test selector, which helps you to identify the appropriate statistical test for your inferential statistics.

Sample size calculator

This is a great tool to calculate the sample size you need to get significant results in surveys:

http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

The webpage also gives a good explanation of the underlying variables for the calculation.

Some good videos on doing your literature review

Have a look at these good videos on how to approach your literature review:

Great video and wikispace on action research

Here is a good short introduction on what action research is:



You can really find some good youtube-stuff on research methodology, especially as an entry point into some methodologies.

I also found a great wikispace on action research at:
http://elementary-education.wikispaces.com/Action+Research

Proquest-Great full text research tool for articles and thesises

My main tool for the literature research for my PhD is Proquest.
You can find it at:
http://www.proquest.co.uk/en-UK/

You can even find DBA and PhD thesises in full text from 2009. Another nice functionality is, that you can see the articles that cited the found article. This allows crawling through the literature not only backwards, but also forward. You can also subscribe to a RSS feed of your search. Then you always get an update in your RSS reader when a new article or thesis is online which has the criteria of your search. I use the google reader for this (as I can access it online from all of my or other PCs).

A really great way to find the most recent articles on your topic. This is so much easier than spending hours in the library like it used to be in the past. I love the internet for this.

For all of you who are enrolled at a university for their DBA or PhD studies, most of the universities have a university login to give full access to their students. I have one from my university (School of Management at the University of Bradford).

Tool to autosummarize information

I already worked with the Mindmanager-add-on themreader in he past. This tool produced mindmaps out of pdf-files. I used it to scan articles for their relevance.

Mindsystems has now significantly improved this tool. It is now called context organizer and you can use it to summarize documents and webpages in different formats. It even produces word lists and you can make annotations. A eally great tool to boil down the information overload to the essential information required.

See the video at : http://www.mindsystems.com.au/products/contextorganizer/tutorials/coint/

to understand the concept and how it works. I don´t want to miss it anylonger.

New google search options

When you are using the English version of google (wich you can change in the options tab) you have a new options button with the search results. It does not work with the German version, yet.

The two best options are the wonderwheel and the timeline. With the wonderwheel you have a structural map of related search topics. This allows you to search a whole research area and gives you a lot of interesting links. The timeline shows you the search results by year, which helps in judgeing how relevant and recent the search result is.

Have a go - I love these new functions.

Great material on effective learning techniques

Nici just remined me of the great material that our PhD university (School of Management at the University of Bradford) has on its webpage at:

http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/management/external/els/informationsheets.php

Full text PhD-Thesises online

For all of you who are doing their PhD or DBA, this is a great link:

http://www.ethos.ac.uk/

You can download up to date PhD thesises in FULL TEXT als pdf. Most of them are even free of charge. This is far better than spending hours in the library.

Thank you so much again Marc for this great info!