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To become informed consumers of research, students need to thoughtfully evaluate the research they read rather than accept it without question. This second edition of a classic text gives students what they need to apply critical reasoning when reading behavioral science research. This second edition updates the original text with recent developments in research methods, including a new chapter on meta-analyses. Part I gives a thorough overview of the steps in a research project. It focuses on how to assess whether the conclusions drawn in a behavioral science report are warranted by the methods used in the research. Topics include research hypotheses, sampling, experimental design, data analysis, interpretation of results, and ethics. Part II allows readers to practice critical thinking with a series of fictitious journal articles containing built-in flaws in method and interpretation. Clever and engaging, each article is accompanied by a commentary that points out the errors of procedure and logic that have been deliberately embedded in the article. This combination of instruction and practical application will promote active learning and critical thinking in students studying the behavioral sciences.

Humans are a fundamentally social species. As individuals, we construct our identity through our affiliation, interaction, and identification with larger groups. And in diverse and multiethnic societies like ours, ethnic identity takes on an especially profound importance. In recent years, social scientists have been increasingly studying the meaning, process, and content of ethnic identity, but these efforts have been piecemeal, and the field as a whole has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity and methodological rigor. In this book, editors Carlos Santos and Adriana Umaña-Taylor bring together a diverse group of social and applied scientists from a wide range of fields including educational anthropology, developmental, community and social psychology, and sociology. Together, they investigate the process by which ethnic identity is formed and maintained throughout the lifespan. Authors present qualitative and quantitative approaches to conceptualizing and measuring ethnic identity, including narrative psychology and ethnographic approaches, cognitive schemas and semi-structured interviews, as well as analyses of social networks. Throughout, authors present contextually-rich accounts of ethnic identity that keep the focus where it belongs, on the lived experience of real people.