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Book ReviewOriginally published in The British Journal of Healthcare Computing & Information Management. |
Roger Gomm, Gill Needham, and Anne Bullman (2000). Evaluating research in health and social care. Sage: London.
The expanding swarm of research methods books is beginning to remind me of those moths at the Sydney Olympics: whatever your activity, they are there, in your face. But before you skip the review, this book is different. In lieu of serving up the usual fare of methods and applications to be chosen from at whim, it concentrates on clinicians with limited time who wish to evaluate research rather than necessarily do it themselves. Methods are segregated into three broad sections, one each for experimental, survey, and qualitative approaches. Each section has two parts, the first providing example papers applying different methods, and the second reviewing the principles and philosophy underlying those methods. Every paper has a short introduction followed by suggestions for follow-up activities. The review chapters then relate their discussion to the papers so that practice and theory are firmly linked. This requires effective cross-referencing and the book does not disappoint, even if one does sometimes require a fist-full of fingers to keep the different pages marked.
One downside of the book, for those of us incapable of admiring the views during a round of golf, is that the example papers may not be on clinical issues directly relevant to our own interests. However, it remains instructive to see how other researchers have applied methods and the final part of the book provides a series of pertinent questions for evaluating the papers while studying them. If you already have a research methods book, and there are no excuses because this column has previously recommended one or two, the current one will still fine-tune your antennae to the good, the bad, and the cant.