Book Review Research Methodology by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg (2016)

Book Review  

Research Methodology by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg (2016)

“Research Methodology- Methods and Techniques”, authored by C. R. Kothari and Gaurav Garg is published by the New Age International Publishers. The book has 19 main chapters. Each chapter is discussed in detail, which gives complete information to readers.

            The first chapter gives the introduction to research methodology. It covers the topics meaning, objectives, significance and types of research, research approaches, research process, criteria of good research, problems faced by researchers in India. Research process is been represented with a flow chart which helps the reader to understand the complex process in a simpler way. Research methods versus methodology and research and scientific method are clearly and neatly explained in this chapter. The second chapter concentrates on the research problem. It gives the complete insight into the meaning of research problem, selection of research problem, what is the necessity of defining a problem. Here author have tried to explain that with an illustration. This is the small chapter among 19 chapters but gives complete knowledge about the research problem.

            The third chapter deals with the research design. It consists of the meaning and features of the research design, need for the research design, important concepts relating to research design which includes information related to variables, research hypothesis and different research designs, basic principles of experimental designs and important experimental designs.  In the fourth chapter, the authors explain about the designs of sample survey. Which includes introduction to sample survey, sample design, sampling errors and non-sampling errors and the difference between sample survey and census survey is briefed with types of sampling designs. Chapter 4 is the smallest among all other chapters.

            The chapter 5 deals with the important part of research that is measurement and scaling. The qualitative and quantitative data are explained with good examples. Further classification of measurement scales, goodness of measurement scales, sources of errors, techniques of developing tools, scaling, scale classification and multidimensional scaling are explained. The chapter 6 deals with the data collection which is again important part of social science research. The types of data collection are explained. This book also explains about the important points to be considered while procuring secondary data and selection of appropriate method for data collection. The case study method is explained in detail in this chapter.

            The seventh chapter is on data preparation, which explains about the data preparation process in detail and also talks about the importance of statistics in research. There by this connects the next chapters which are concentrated on statistics part of the research. The eighth chapter to eighteenth chapters are concentrated on statistics. The eighth chapter deals with the descriptive statistics, which explains about skewness, measures of relationship, kurtosis.

            Ninth chapter deals with the sampling and statistical inference, which gives explanation regarding sampling and non sampling errors, sampling distribution, degree of freedom, which is important in finding the standard freedom and explains about statistical inference. Highlight of this chapter is tests of significance i.e hypothesis testing. Statistical inference is important while drawing results from the collected data. In the tenth chapter testing of hypothesis is explained in detail with lot more concepts. It talks about the definition of hypothesis and basic concepts in testing of hypothesis. Hypothesis testing for different statistical tests.

            Eleventh chapter talks about the chi-square tests and chapter twelve, explains the analysis of variance. These two chapters explain the problems on the topics and give chance to reader to learn proper steps in the calculation process. There is also scope for the reader to do exercise related to the calculation. In twelth chapter both the types of ANOVA are clearly explained. The reader can understand with explanation given by the authors.

            Chapter thirteen deals with other nonparametric methods. In this chapter, spearman’s rank correlation is used in social science research. In chapter fourteen, linear regression analysis is discussed. In that simple linear regression model, multiple linear regression model, problem of multicolinearity are explained. In addition to this in the this third edition, the authors have also included linear regression Analysis using SPSS software, which is very much useful to carry out the analysis of the data.

            Fifteenth chapter talks about the mathematical basis of factor analysis, important methods of factor analysis, rotation in factor analysis and merits and demerits of factor analysis. In this chapter, methods of factor analysis are given more importance and factor analysis using SPSS is also given in detail. In the sixteenth chapter discriminant analysis is explained.

            In the chapter seventeen, distance measures, clustering algorithms and agglomerative clustering are explained with examples and SPSS screen shots for the better understanding. Eighteenth chapter consists of other multivariate techniques like path analysis, canonical correlation, multidimensional scaling, multivariate anova and latent structure analysis.

            The last nineteenth chapter gives information on interpretation and report writing topics. This chapter is emphasized on techniques of interpreting the data, precautions to be taken while interpreting data, and significance of report writing. It also gives information regarding punctuations and abbreviations to be used in the report writing which arouses interest in reader.

            At the end authors give selected references and recommended readings that can be used for further readings.

Conclusion: overall the book was informative in many ways. The chapters are arranged in a proper order as the research process or in accordance with the research process. In the statistics part more examples and problems are given for good understanding. The present edition also has information regarding use of SPSS which is very important for a researcher to understand the statistical analysis part. The language used in the book is simple and easily understandable. A researcher who thinks research methodology is difficult to understand can read this book for better and easy understanding of the topic. Any reader can enjoy reading this book at the same time may avail very good information regarding research methodology.