In addition to hundreds of new references features new to this edition include: a comprehensive introduction to qualitative methods including a review of existing computer applications for collecting and analyzing data; the latest information about the use of computers and online research techniques, including the use of the Internet to locate actual research instruments and journal articles; updated coverage on new scales, internal and external validity, and new analytic techniques with extensive references on each; abstracts, citations and subject groupings by measurement tool of the last five years of the American Sociological Review, Social Psychology Quarterly, and the American Journal of Sociology; extensive coverage of how to prepare manuscripts for publication, including a list of all journals covered by Sociological Abstracts along with the editorial office address and URL for each entry; new coverage of ethical issues; expansion of social indicators to include international coverage; discussion of the importance of policy research with presentation and discussion of specific models as an adjunct to both applied and basic research techniques; and the addition of an index to facilitate the reader's ability to quickly locate a topic.

How Researchers Create Their Own Scales: An Activity of Last Resort

How Researchers Create Their Own Scales: An Activity of Last Resort

A researcher constructs a new scale if (a) after a literature search, he or she does not find a scale that fits the problem, or (b) the available scales are poorly constructed. Any constructed scale should be good enough to invite future researchers to use it in the ongoing process of accumulating research findings. Putting some items together and assigning arbitrary weights to them does not produce this kind of scale. An acceptable scale will cover an important theoretical construct and meet evaluative criteria discussed below.

Some researchers, caught up in ...

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