Methodological Approaches to Community-Based Research

A prevailing paradigm in social research and community-based interventions involves examining individual problems within various contexts - from the interpersonal to the community at large. Yet the research methodologies used to support these interventions typically lack the ability to consider data from this multilevel, systemic perspective. Methodological Approaches to Community-Based Research presents a range of innovative research methodologies that address this basic problem in community-based research frameworks, thereby facilitating more encompassing and more nuanced analyses and interventions. Contributors to this groundbreaking volume offer appropriate methodologies for addressing specific, community-based problems that are relevant to both researchers and practitioners involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating social, health, and education programs from a variety of perspectives, including community psychology, developmental psychology and ageing, health and rehabilitation psychology, neuropsychology, industrial/organisational psychology, and consumer psychology, among them. Part I presents chapters on the implications of mixed-methods research for the producers and consumers of such research. Parts II-IV present chapters on methodologies that involve the grouping of data (such as cluster analysis and meta-analysis), change over time (such as time series analysis and survival analysis), and the context of behaviour and community-wide interventions (such as multilevel modelling, epidemiological approaches, and geographic information systems). A special feature of Methodological Approaches to Community-Based Research are Web Appendixes that include a variety of research applications (e.g., SPSS, SAS, Mplus, GIS) and detailed guidelines on how to run the applications for analysing the accompanying data sets.