Research Methods in Public Administration and Public Management

Sandra van Thiel is Professor of Public Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research and teaching focus on executive agencies and research methods. She is a frequent consultant to public sector organizations, and she is Editor-in-Chief of IJPSM.

‘The second edition of Research Methods in Public Administration and Public Management has built on the strengths of its predecessor. The revised book has been carefully crafted to offer a comprehensive coverage of all dimensions of the research process and includes an up-to-date literature, and relevant cases and sensible exercises that are lucidly explained. It is an excellent contribution to this quality series of texts in public management.’John Halligan, Emeritus Professor of Public Administration and Governance, Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Australia ‘This new edition after such a short time proves how indispensable this book is. Studying and doing research in Public Administration and Public Management has become ever more relevant, and in doing that we utilize all modern research methodologies of the social sciences, as we should! But at the same time research in these areas poses unique problems and challenges. Here we finally have our own textbook which explicates these problems and demonstrates how to handle them, using inspiring examples from all areas of up-to-date public administration research.’Prof. Dr. Werner Jann, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Administration and Organization, Faculty for Economics and Social Sciences, Potsdam University, Germany

• 1 Research in Public Administration; 2 The research problem; 3 Theoretical framework; 4 Operationalization; 5 Research design; 6 The experiment; 7 The survey; 8 The case study; 9 Desk research; 10 Analysing quantitative data; 11 Analysing qualitative data; 12 Reporting results