Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
by Thomas H. Davenport
from Harvard Business School Press
You have more information at hand about your business environment than ever before. But are you using it to “out-think” your rivals? If not, you may be missing out on a potent competitive tool.
In Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning , Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris argue that the frontier for using data to make decisions has shifted dramatically. Certain high-performing enterprises are now building their competitive strategies around data-driven insights that in turn generate impressive business results. Their secret weapon? Analytics: sophisticated quantitative and statistical analysis and predictive modeling.
Exemplars of analytics are using new tools to identify their most profitable customers and offer them the right price, to accelerate product innovation, to optimize supply chains, and to identify the true drivers of financial performance. A wealth of examples—from organizations as diverse as Amazon, Barclay’s, Capital One, Harrah’s, Procter & Gamble, Wachovia, and the Boston Red Sox—illuminate how to leverage the power of analytics.
Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches (2nd Edition)
by John W. Creswell
from Sage Publications, Inc
"Creswell's Research Design is an accessible and useful book that stimulates students through walk through experiences, use of exercises, and production of actual writing samples. It is a book that models the types of issues that best suit different approaches and allows students to understand when to use mixed methods. Furthermore, its focus on theory and paradigms is done in a way that helps students decode their meaning."
--MARTHA MONTERO-SIEBURTH, University of Massachusetts, Boston
"One of the most formidable challenges of research design is stating your purpose. Creswell's approach takes the guesswork out of the process."
--STEVE GUERRIERO, Organization & Management, Antioch New England Graduate School
The Second Edition of the bestselling Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches offers a unique comparison of three key approaches to inquiry. This comparison begins with preliminary consideration of knowledge claims for all three approaches, a review of the literature, and reflections about the importance of writing and ethics in scholarly inquiry. The book also addresses the key elements of the process of research: writing an introduction; stating a purpose for the study; identifying research questions and hypotheses; using theory; defining, delimiting and stating the significance of the study; and advancing methods and procedures for data collection and analysis.
Key Features:
- Provides a clear presentation of how to implement a mixed methods design in your proposal or plan as well as show how to implement qualitative and quantitative approaches
- Presents the ethical issues that may arise in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods studies
- Offers extensive writing tips to help get your research plan started in the right direction
- Contains the latest developments in qualitative inquiryâincluding advocacy, participatory, and emancipatory approaches
This book is ideal for readers who seek assistance in designing a full research study or planning a proposal for a scholarly journal article, dissertation or thesis. The book is an invaluable reference on the basics of research design as well as an effective text for graduate courses in Research Methods, Research Design, and related topics. The book serves a broad audience of social and human scientists in fields of marketing, management, criminal justice, psychology, sociology, K-12 education, higher and post-secondary education, nursing, health sciences, urban studies, and family research.
Cartoon Guide to Statistics
by Larry Gonick
from Collins
If you have ever looked for P-values by shopping at P mart, tried to watch the Bernoulli Trails on "People's Court," or think that the standard deviation is a criminal offense in six states, then you need The Cartoon Guide to Statistics to put you on the road to statistical literacy.
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics covers all the central ideas of modern statistics: the summary and display of data, probability in gambling and medicine, random variables, Bernoulli Trails, the Central Limit Theorem, hypothesis testing, confidence interval estimation, and much more--all explained in simple, clear, and yes, funny illustrations. Never again will you order the Poisson Distribution in a French restaurant!
Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master
by Paul W. Farris
from Wharton School Publishing
Applied Behavior Analysis (2nd Edition)
by John O. Cooper
from Prentice Hall
Forty Studies that Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History of Psychological Research
by Roger R. Hock
from Prentice Hall
This unique book closes the gap between psychology books and the research that made them possible. Its journey through the “headline history” of psychology presents 40 of the most famous studies in the history of the science, and subsequent follow-up studies that expanded their findings and relevance. Readers are granted a valuable insider's look at the studies that continue to be cited most frequently, stirred up the most controversy when they were published, sparked the most subsequent related research, opened new fields of psychological exploration, and changed most dramatically our knowledge of human behavior. For individuals with an interest in an introduction to psychology.
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
by Edward R. Tufte
from Graphics Press
With Visual Explanations, Edward R. Tufte adds a third volume to his indispensable series on information display. The first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which focuses on charts and graphs that display numerical information, virtually defined the field. The second, Envisioning Information, explores similar territory but with an emphasis on maps and cartography. Visual Explanations centers on dynamic data--information that changes over time. (Tufte has described the three books as being about, respectively, "pictures of numbers, pictures of nouns, and pictures of verbs.")
Like its predecessors, Visual Explanations is both intellectually stimulating and beautiful to behold. Tufte, a self-publisher, takes extraordinary pains with design and production. The book ranges through a variety of topics, including the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (which could have been prevented, Tufte argues, by better information display on the part of the rocket's engineers), magic tricks, a cholera epidemic in 19th-century London, and the principle of using "the smallest effective difference" to display distinctions in data. Throughout, Tufte presents ideas with crystalline clarity and illustrates them in exquisitely rendered samples.
Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Third Edition, Applied Social Research Methods Series, Vol 5
by Robert K. Yin
from Sage Publications, Inc
This new edition of the best-selling Case Study Research has been carefully revised, updated, and expanded while retaining virtually all of the features and coverage of the Second Edition. Robert Yin's comprehensive presentation covers all aspects of the case study method--from problem definition, design, and data collection, to data analysis and composition and reporting. Yin also traces the uses and importance of case studies to a wide range of disciplines, from sociology, psychology and history to management, planning, social work, and education.
New to the Third Edition:
- Additional examples of case study research
- Discussions of developments in related methods, including randomized field trials and computer-assisted coding techniques
- Added coverage of the strengths of multiple-case studies, case study screening, and the case study as a part of larger multi-method studies
- Five major analytic techniques, including the use of logic models to guide analysis
This edition also includes references to examples of actual case studies in the companion volume Applications of Case Study Research, Second Edition (Sage, 2003).
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers
by Gerald Zaltman
from Harvard Business School Press
Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a groundbreaking book that reveals how to overcome this "depth deficit" and find the universal drivers of human behavior so vital to a firm's success.
Marketing Metaphoria reveals the powerful unconscious viewing lenses--called "deep metaphors"-- that shape what people think, hear, say, and do.
Drawing on thousands of one-on-one interviews in more than thirty countries, Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman describe how some of the world's most successful companies as well as small firms, not-for-profits, and social enterprises have successfully leveraged deep metaphors to solve a wide variety of marketing problems. Marketing Metaphoria should convince you that everything consumers think and do is influenced at unconscious levels--and it will give you access to those deeper levels of thinking.
"An imaginative and insightful application of cognitive science to the world of business, rich with implications for both fields."
-Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and author, How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought.
"Marketing Metaphoria is one of the most fascinating business books I have read in a long time. A brilliant combination of deep insight and actionable advice, it will forever change how you think about marketing."
-Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind
"Despite the availability of increasingly sophisticated methods, most customer relationships remain standardized, superficial, and lacking in informed customization. Through deep metaphors, the Zaltmans provide an insightful and provocative framework for identifying and learning from the implicit cognitive influences on customer decision making that can enhance and deepen intimacy and loyalty."
-Gary W. Loveman, Chairman, CEO and President, Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.
"Any business seeking to build global brands should read the Zaltmans' groundbreaking work on metaphors. The universal power of deep metaphors crosses borders and generations, and enduring brands trade off this thinking, whether their owners know it or not."
-Tom Long, President and CEO, Miller Brewing Company
"A disruptive book that will change how you think about customer insights. The emotional power offered within these pages will energize you to dig deeper into your business and turn thin functional insights into rich emotional messages that will propel your business."
-Donna J. Sturgess, Global Head of Innovation, GlaxoSmithKline
"With the profound advances in psychology and neuroscience over the past two decades, I'm convinced that now is the time for practitioners to rewrite the 'principles of marketing.' Marketing Metaphoria transforms insights from the authors' research into a rich framework that will help you think more deeply about your consumers and develop more innovative ideas for action. Read it twice, then keep it on your desk for ready reference."
-Bob Woodard, Vice President, Global Consumer and Customer Insights, Campbell Soup Company
Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches
by John W. Creswell
from Sage Publications, Inc
"Creswell does an excellent job categorizing the various qualitative methods into five approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study...The author has expanded on and updated the information he presented in the first edition of the book (Creswell, 1998), including discussion of the various schools of thought that have developed among qualitative researchers since the mid 1990's...Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing among five approaches is a highly informative book; researchers will likely return again and against to the book as they expand their comfort zone within qualitative research."
âPeggy M. Delmas, University of Alabama
âCreswell has produced an even more outstanding and valuable text for qualitative research than the First Edition.â
âEdith King, University of Denver
Like the bestselling First Edition, this new version explores the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of each of five qualitative inquiry approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. Using an accessible and engaging writing style, author John W. Creswell compares theoretical frameworks, ways to employ standards of quality, and strategies for writing introductions to studies, collecting data, analyzing data, writing a narrative, and verifying results.
New to the Second Edition:
- Brings the philosophical and theoretical orientations to the beginning of the book: This grounds students in the foundational thinking behind these methods much earlier.
- Gives broader coverage of narrative research: One of the original five approaches is expanded from "Biography" to "Narrative," thus exploring a wider range of narrative opportunities, biography still being one of them.
- Offers a much deeper discussion of interpretive approaches: There is much more emphasis on interpretive and postmodern perspectives such as feminism and critical theory.
- Provides more specific steps for doing research within each approach: The actual procedure for each approach is discussed and includes the sub-types of qualitative research within each of the five approaches.
- Illustrates phenomenology and ethnography: Two new, recent sample journal articles: one covering a phenomenological study; the other on an ethnographic study are included.
- Includes additional examples: More examples from the human services add to the robust examples in education, sociology, and psychology already present in the text.
An accompanying Instructorâs Resource CD contains many useful resources including PowerPoint slides, syllabi, checklists, exercises, annotated references to SAGE journal articles, and relevant Web links.
Intended Audience:
This is an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in introductory qualitative research methods across the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. (20071207)
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