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Dedication
Preface: Social workers' roles in science and research
1. Science and social work
2. Starting your research project
3. Searching the literature
4. Reading scientific literature reviews
5. Reading empirical studies
6. Writing your research question & literature review
7. Research ethics
8. Conceptualization in quantitative research
9. Measurement in quantitative research
10. Connecting conceptualization and measurement
11. Sampling for generalizability
12. Survey design
13. Experimental design
14. Conceptualization in qualitative research
15. Qualitative measurement and rigor
16. Qualitative data and sampling
17. Qualitative data collection
18. A survey of qualitative designs
19. Single-subjects design
20. Univariate analysis
Matthew DeCarlo
21. Evaluation research
Appendix
Glossary
CSWE EPAS Index
Attribution index
Appendix A: Student-to-student resources
Appendix B: Faculty-to-faculty resources
To my wife, Emily. For everything good in my life.
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Scientific Inquiry in Social Work (2nd Edition) Copyright © 2026 by Matthew DeCarlo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.