Thursday, December 4, 2014

The new book is officially IN PRESS!

It really has been a while since we have written, but it's not because we have forgotten you or moved on to something else - quite the contrary!  We finished the manuscript to our next book and completed the revisions.

We thought we would take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about it because WE ARE SO EXCITED!  Like our first book, we provide readers with a software freebie.  This time it is a database that practitioners and smaller agencies can use to track clients.

The book is called Making Your Case:  Using R for Program Evaluation.

There have been lots of books written about research methodology and data analysis, and many books have been written about using R to analyze and present data; however, this book specifically addresses using R to evaluate programs in organizational settings.  

The book is divided into three sections.  The first section addresses background information that is helpful in conducting practice-based research.  The second section provides  background to begin working with R.  Topics include how to download R and RStudio, navigation, R packages, basic R functions, and importing data.  This section also introduces The Clinical Record, the software we mentioned earlier.  The remainder of the book uses different case studies to illustrate how to use R to conduct program evaluations.  Techniques include visualizing and describing data, bivariate analysis, simple and multiple regression, and logistic regression.  The final chapter illustrates a comprehensive summary of the skills demonstrated throughout the book using The Clinical Record as a data repository. 

We will also be providing readers with the sample files and scripts so you will be able to work through all the examples in our book.

We're not quite sure when the book will be available, but we are working closely with our editor at Oxford University Press to move it along as quickly as possible.