We have an urgent (ie by Friday) need to spend the last bit of library budget at work. We have £1500 for books to support staff research and only the Head of Dept and I have bought any. I have exhausted all the subject texts and even some that are near enough but there is still money in the pot and if we don't spend it we will get less next year. I'm running out of ideas. So if you had lots of money (there's at least several hundred left in the pot and maybe more) what would you buy?

I work in a Geography dept, my PhD is in geological tourism and I am using mixed methods (quant - visitor questionnaires, qual - observations, content analysis, interviews) - any suggestions of any good RM texts we can add to our list?

Are there any texts (co-)written by members of staff in your dept? If so, you could buy them - at least they'll get some royalties out of it!

Are there any texts (co-)written by members of staff in your dept? If so, you could buy them - at least they'll get some royalties out of it!

No there's nothing in that category (any co-authored stuff we already have in library).

These are quite good, particularly the second one.

Qualitative researching / Jennifer Mason
Ways of knowing : competing methodologies and methods in social and political research / Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen.
Case study research : design and methods / Robert K. Yin

I second the Robert Yin, Case Study Research (currently into its 4th edition). It is a real classic and seems to be cited by just about every second person-which is how I came to buy it.

For students who are not yet into their Phd but want helpful texts for structuring Master's theses then How to Write a Master's Thesis by Yvonne N Bui is really really useful. (However, I am recommending this for your Master's students only obviously). The Bui one isn't just research methods it is a thorough overall 'how to' book and it makes for a great substitute supervisor, when your own is some where else or otherwise unavailable! It basically tells you how to plan, write and present your research really methodically, step by step.

There is this really interesting (slightly alternative) book by Marilyn Lichtman on Qualitative Research in Education and of course the standard Creswell's Educational Research. These are focused on research in Education (obviously:)!) but they still go into methodologies really well. The Creswell one provides models or samples as does Yin and Bui. The Lichtman one seems a bit too alternative at times but she goes into the ethics and issues of conducting qualitative research very thoroughly and if you are working with people, then it can be really useful at times.

If we're going a bit more subject specific, Politics has two de facto core textbooks for research. You could probably get away with them in Geography, I'm sure there's some crossovers.

Research Methods in Politics / Burnham, Lutz, Grant and Layton-Henry
Theory and Methods in Political Science / Marsh and Stoker

I'll check tomorrow how much is left in the pot - the book are supposed to be for staff research but I have stretched it a bit to cover texts which are of tangential connection to my PhD but which will be useful to students. I'll take a look at the suggestions and order as many as I can. Thanks for the suggestions.