In this article, the authors utilize C.W. Mills' Racial Contract Framework as a tool to unpack how racial power dynamics manifested in a mixed-race focus group interview designed to understand the participants' insights on race, incarceration, and community. The focus group interview included four research participants: Two White women, one Black…

With today's technology, Extension professionals have a variety of tools available for program evaluation. This article describes an innovative platform called VoiceThread that has been used in many classrooms but also is useful for conducting virtual focus group research. I explain how this tool can be used to collect qualitative participant…

To understand expertise and expertise development, interactions between knowledge, cognitive processing and task characteristics must be examined in people at different levels of training, experience, and performance. Interviewing is widely used in the initial exploration of domain expertise. Work and cognitive task analysis chart the knowledge,…

Inclusive education (IE) and the special education services related to it are relatively new in Oman. Efforts to manage special/inclusive education face many challenges due to a number of culturally rooted factors. Further, empirical research on IE in Oman is scarce and there is a need to advance IE discourse based on empirically validated…

Cross-cultural studies of mental health and illness generally adhere to one of two agendas: the comparison of mental health between sites using standard measurement tools, or the identification of locally specific ways of discussing mental illness. Here, we illustrate a methodological approach to measuring mental health that unites these two…

Purpose: This article reports on the practical application of Learning Elements advocated by the multiliteracies approach to classroom practice. Its ideas are grounded in the multiliteracies pedagogical principles of teaching and learning that address issues on literacy and learning in today's globalised world. The main objective of this study was…

A focus group of 49 teachers revealed that teachers do use research, but they seek it out under very specific conditions. They also use different criteria than researchers use to judge the quality of research. For teachers, important factors include an ethos of localized learning, a shortage of time, and the primacy of local context. Researchers…

Despite the deleterious mental health and health consequences experiences of perceived discrimination can have on ethnic and racial minorities in the United States, a dearth of qualitative studies exist to develop a better understanding of such experiences. As part of a larger study examining psychosocial stress events, and in an effort to fill…

In this article we propose that in order to advance our understanding of motivation in collaborative learning we should move beyond the cognitive-situative epistemological divide and combine individual and social processes. Our claim is that although recent research has recognized the importance of social aspects in emerging and sustained…

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate application of a new framework, the validation framework (VF), to assist researchers in evaluating mixed research studies. Based on an earlier work by Dellinger and Leech, a description of the VF is delineated. Using the VF, three studies from education, health care, and counseling fields are…

This article discusses how methodological practices can shape and limit how mixed methods is practiced and makes visible the current methodological assumptions embedded in mixed methods practice that can shut down a range of social inquiry. The article argues that there is a "methodological orthodoxy" in how mixed methods is practiced…

In this paper we present our experiences of conducting focus groups with young people as part of a participatory approach to research design and participant recruitment. The research is a prospective, 10-year, qualitative, longitudinal project investigating young people's daily lives, relationships, and identities, and the ways these change over…

This article provides an innovative meta-framework comprising strategies designed to guide qualitative data collection in the 21st century. We present a meta-framework comprising strategies for collecting data from interviews, focus groups, observations, and documents/material culture. We present a template for collecting nonverbal data during…

The mere fact that a library service is being used does not mean that the service makes a difference or has a positive impact on the user. This has significant implications for Special Library and Information Services (SL&IS) that have to constantly prove that they add value. Because of the difficulty of measuring impact effectively, the…

Many campuses are adopting freshman learning communities (FLCs) in order to boost retention. FLCs take many forms, but they typically involve enrolling small groups of students in two or more classes together during their first semester in order to create community and promote academic and social involvement. At Georgia State University, a large…