The importance of children's perspectives is now well-established and there has been much attention afforded to appropriate methods for listening to children within the research. Whilst language-based research methods, such as interview, remain commonplace, children's representations are increasingly included as data in educational research.…

Our research community has limited understanding about the potential of video. This paper uses double stimulation and transformative agency to analyse two video modalities, extraction, and reflection; in a study about learning as it develops through family interactions. As researchers we were interested in children's motives. However, the children…

Although educational researchers will acknowledge that they have a moral imperative to avoid harming their participants whilst carrying out research, it does not necessarily mean that they can describe the nature of what this harm might be or how it can be recognised and so avoided. This is particularly important for those working with vulnerable…

This article examines young people's films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for…

This article reports on the use of a visual methods approach to collecting and analysing data in relation to the area of leadership curriculum development. The focus of the study is the structure of the current leadership curriculum for the National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) in England. In particular, the authors explore the extent to…

Autistic children and adults who are non-verbal/minimally verbal or have an intellectual disability have often been excluded from Autism Spectrum Disorder research. Historical, practical and theoretical reasons for this exclusion continue to deter some researchers from work with this underserved population. We discuss why these reasons are neither…

This project was a qualitative longitudinal research study into cultural and structural change in an English secondary school. The schools' consistent underperformance led to its conversion to "academy" status as part of a development under the Labour administration of 1997-2010. The Labour policy for academization was designed, first,…

Accurately documenting the occupational biographies of older people can be challenging given their lengthy duration and the complexity of contemporary employment. This paper shows how a traditionally quantitative occupational history calendar (OHC) instrument can be adapted for use in a mixed methods research design, to gather in-depth information…

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) asked the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) to undertake research to explore the current issues around academic teaching qualifications in the HESA Staff record and to offer recommendations to improve data quality and coverage in future…

This article reports on the findings of a PhD research project into the improvisatory nature of teacher expertise. The data are taken from a series of comparative case studies of seven experienced teachers working in secondary schools in the South West of England and who have been identified as being expert within their school setting. Constant…

While numerous studies examine perceptions of research held by university researchers, studies examining perceptions held by school pupils are rare. To address this gap and following analysis of questionnaire data (N = 2634, KS3/4/5 pupils), we conducted 11 group interviews with 100 pupils in England to investigate their experiences of research…

Becoming familiar with "the field" location and its inhabitants is a natural and important part of ethnographic research. However, little has been written about how operationalising a "familiarisation period" within an ethnography can form the foundation on which fieldwork can be built. By reflecting on the experience of…

The draw-and-write technique for collecting data relating to both adult and children's perceptions of their world is receiving increasing attention as one which has status within the field of visual methods. This paper appraises the draw-and-write method and reflects on the methodological lessons learned by using the technique in two studies…

This article draws on the experience of three research projects where photography was used with children as a data collection method and presentation tool. It was used as a way of trying to enhance opportunities for adults to hear about topics from the perspective of children. The projects were not designed to investigate the use of cameras as a…

Some methodological issues are discussed that arise from our comparative research conducted since the early 1990s into primary schooling in Finland and England. This research has been identified as part of a "new" comparative education that uses qualitative research strategies and which prioritises sensitivity to cultural context in data…