SAGE Research Methods

04 Nov 2013 11:17 AM | Alaska Evaluation Network (Administrator)
Hello AKEN members:

I’m Diane Hirshberg, and for those of you I don’t know, I’m director of the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) Center for Alaska Education Policy Research, a part of the Institute of Social and Economic Research. I conduct both research and evaluations around education policy and practice, and have taught program evaluation as well.

I want to share with you one of my favorite research and evaluation resources that we have at UAA, the SAGE Research Methods (SRM) online database. http://Srmo.sagepub.com

SRM is a both an online repository of thousands of SAGE publications and a tool for exploring research methods. It includes full text chapters and articles from numerous SAGE handbooks, textbooks, encyclopedias, journals and other reference materials, and all of the “Little Green Books”  - quantitative research methods and “Little Blue Books!” – qualitative research methods.  But in addition to these reference materials, the website includes videos from researchers discussing how they make decisions around methods, a “methods map” visualization tool that allows you to explore relationships between methods (and to discover new methods), and access to lists of resources that other researchers have developed. 

I use SRM both when I am developing my own research and evaluation projects and in teaching others how to do research and evaluation. My students, especially my graduate students, are thrilled to learn about this resource!

Unfortunately, SRM is only available via an institutional subscription; individuals cannot subscribe. If you are in Anchorage, however, you can come to the UAA Consortium Library and access the database free of charge. At the library you can download .pdf files and then email them to yourself. You also can get access to SRM as a distance UAA student – if you were thinking of taking an online course from UAA, access to SRM will add to making it worth your while!

Otherwise, if you work at an organization that invests in research reference materials, you may want to encourage them to sign up. Information on how to contact SAGE about SRM is at:http://srmo.sagepub.com/page/how-to-purchase.  There is also link at the bottom of the “how to purchase” page if you want to send a recommendation direct to your campus or organization’s librarian.


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