Book reviews: Research proposal: Little quick fix
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1035719X19827671 |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Rhianon Vichta |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1035719X19827671
Evaluation Journal of Australasia
2019, Vol. 19(1) 54 –57
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1035719X19827671
journals.sagepub.com/home/evj
Book reviews
Zina O’Leary, Research proposal: Little quick fix. London, Great Britain: SAGE, 2018; ISBN
9781526456892 (paperback); 120 pp., AU$19.99/NZ$20.86.
Reviewed by: Rhianon Vichta, Brisbane Youth Service, Australia.
The Little Quick Fix series, Sage’s 2018–2019 contribution to supporting emerging
researchers, sees three internationally renowned research authors contributing to a
set of colourful, affordable pocket guides to the key tasks of undertaking social
research. Contributors to this series include Helen Kara with two data-focused
series, John McInnes, who unpacks and simplifies statistics across five series and
Zina O’Leary, who has two published books that provide a framework for develop-
ing a strong research question and advice on how to present research with impact
and producing a winning research proposal. While it may ultimately be more cost-
effective to invest in more substantive research method texts with chapters covering
a wide range of topics, at less than AU$20 each, the Little Quick Fix books provide
an affordable bite-sized workbook for achieving core research activities. Each Little
Quick Fix guide is designed to be purposeful, outcomes-focused, interactive, highly
pragmatic and readable in under an hour.
The Little Quick Fix: Research Proposal edition of the series gives us an acces-
sible insight into Zina O’Leary’s wealth of experience in bringing research inspira-
tion to life. With an extensive research consultancy history across both the
government and the private sector, O’Leary has an abundance of applied experience
as well as internationally recognised expertise in research methodology. The author’s
range of published texts demonstrate her commitment to demystifying and enabling
quality research practices, including The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research
Project (3rd Ed, 2017), Workplace Research: Conducting small-scale research in
organizations (2016), The Social Jargon Buster (2014) and Researching Real-World
Problems (2014). As Senior Fellow at the Australia and New Zealand School of
Government (ANZSOG), O’Leary’s writing has strong relevance to the Australasian
context as well as the broader international research environment.
The Little Quick Fix: Research Proposal sees O’Leary cutting straight to the
essentials of guiding the reader into and through the research proposal process with
827671EVJ0010.1177/1035719X19827671Evaluation Journal of AustralasiaBook Reviews
book-review2019
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