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How does the application of research in settings affect appropriate methods? This is the third edition of a well-respected text intended to address research needs in applied settings and guide non-academic or early researchers who are interested in research with ‘real world’impacts. The author Colin Robson brings his own particular life history to this engaging and useful handbook, together with the tensions experienced by a former biological and experimental scientist who discovers himself to be a ‘closet realist’(Robson 2002, xi). We think it is fair to say that he is torn at times between critical realism and a deeply embedded positivist past, so that psychological methods seem to occupy a greater proportion of the book than sociologically informed research approaches. He is also undecided about the extent to which research can be designed and undertaken without the underpinning theory of methodology. This …