Public Administration Research Methods

Students intending to manage public organizations - ranging from local city offices to nonprofit organizations to many other types of organizations - have a specific set of needs from a methods course. These individuals will need exposure to a wide range of research tools and sufficient comprehension of these tools to read the results of research critically. Increasingly, managers are also finding it necessary to conduct their own research to address their organization's needs - that is, practicing evidence-based management. Research Methods for Evidence-Based Public Management address the needs of these practice-oriented students for a toolbox of public management research.

Eller, Gerber, and Robinson guide the reader through critical issues such as the research process itself, by presenting intuitive explanations of difficult concepts, and by explaining not only techniques of qualitative research, but how qualitative data can be analyzed properly and how those data relate to quantitative data gathering and analytic techniques. Students can expect to come away from reading this text with a clear understanding of how qualitative and quantitative analysis can be explicitly tied to evidence-based public management decision-making. The text will develop a small number of detailed, reoccurring cases across chapters to provide students with a continuing stream of familiar examples to illustrate the practical enactment of the skills developed within the textbook.