| Summary, etc. |
"This textbook on methodological best practices takes a 360-degree view, covering topics pertinent to the authors, reviewers, and consumers of research alike. Its content is intended to serve undergraduate students, graduate students at the master's and doctoral level, junior as well as seasoned researchers (including journal reviewers and editors), and consumers of research (other researchers, organizational leaders, and policymakers). The book is the product of my 30+ years of experience regarding research methodology as a researcher and research consumer. It is also the product of my experience as an evaluator of research quality in my capacity as former Editor-in-Chief of Organizational Research Methods, which is devoted entirely to research methodology, as well as having served as an editorial board member for more than 25 journals and evaluator for grant proposals in the United States and many other countries around the world (e.g., Belgium, Israel, Romania). Finally, it is also the result of my multiple professional roles addressing research methodology, such as having served as Chair of the Research Methods Division of the Academy of Management and member of the American Psychological Association Task Force on Increasing the Number of Quantitative Psychologists. What did I learn as a result of these experiences? First, there are ways to do research right and ways to do research wrong, and we know this based on decades of accumulated knowledge. So, the first goal of this book is to synthesize this vast body of work on methodological best practices in a user-friendly manner. Second, I also learned that most social and behavioral scientists are not methodological specialists-nor do they want to take on such a role. Instead, most researchers are methods users as we conduct our own research and methods consumers as we read the research produced by others. So, the second goal of this book is to present material and best practices, mainly in the form of checklists. In other words, I wrote this book like a tutorial to include "how-to" and "dos and don'ts" guidelines so you can understand the extent to which methodological best practices are being followed-and so that you can follow best practices in your research. Each chapter includes figures and tables to make the material easier to digest. In addition, each chapter (a) describes why the particular methodological topic is important for doing rigorous, credible, and impactful research; (b) explains and expands upon the summaries, checklists, and steps in the figures and tables; and (c) provides examples and applications to demonstrate that the best-practice recommendations are actionable and implementable and not just wishful thinking. And, in case you are thinking about this, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT cannot tell you the best ways to do research. Indeed, they can provide some general and vague recommendations, but they are often overly general and flatly wrong due to "generative AI hallucination." In other words, ChatGPT often makes things up based on the information it picks up from the web"-- |