An interdisciplinary conversation on research method best practices for nonprofit studies

✍ Scribed by Jo Anne Schneider

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 61 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1048-6682
• DOI: 10.1002/nml.116

✦ Synopsis

N ONPROFIT RESEARCH can provide nonprofit managers with a range of insights regarding the management, program development, and evaluation of local agencies. However, the interdisciplinary nature of nonprofit scholarship sometimes presents challenges because scholars educated in various disciplines conceptualize the research process differently. Pracademics (Van Til, 2000) schooled only in a particular discipline may not appreciate the ways that different methods or approaches could enhance activities in their organization. This collection of articles addresses the questions: How can research be useful to nonprofits, and which combination of methods would be most useful given a particular need or question? In each article, case examples from research on nonprofit issues are provided to outline the basic conceptual issues for that discipline (research goals, connections between theory and practice, generalizability or reliability), explain key methods, and identify the hallmarks of quality research. Each article also outlines the implications of that particular research method for nonprofit management.

As Wolfgang Bielefeld points out in this issue, the study of nonprofits is a relatively new discipline. The major research associations for nonprofits such as the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) and the International Society for Third-Sector Research draw an interdisciplinary membership. This diversity of research approaches provides a genuine strength for this evolving topic area, but it also leads to much confusion because scholars from different disciplines may not be familiar with what constitutes quality research in other disciplines.