The transition from school to university is challenging and a greater knowledge of the first-year student experience will enable staff to better support their students. University- and government-run student surveys fail to capture the depth and breadth of the first-year experience and so qualitative research is needed to get a more nuanced and…

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the…

Emerging from projects that have involved working with primary school children in school-related research, this article offers suggestions of how drawing as a principal means of data gathering can be either constructive or of little value. The qualitative research projects discussed include investigations of school improvement and consideration of…

This method case reports on part of a doctoral investigation into the process of metaphorical language production in second language learners' writing with a combination of computer keystroke logging and stimulated retrospective interviews. The case describes the research procedure and methodological considerations behind each decision in detail.…

This paper considers the use of identity boxes as a data collection method to elicit experiences. Participants were asked to respond to questions using objects to represent their answers. The rationale for using identity boxes was to allow for a more embodied, less textual approach. The identity boxes were then also used to create an artistic…

Deleuze and Guattari's principles of the rhizome were used to inform the design of a massive open online course (MOOC), "Rhizomatic Learning: The Community is the Curriculum," which came to be known as Rhizo14. In a previous paper about learner experiences in this course our reported findings from a qualitative survey (which enabled…

This paper utilises the conceptual lens of intersectionality to explore gendered academic career trajectory in the context of one participant's challenge to a normative reading of the link between her private life and its relation to a "successful" academic career. The paper then charts the recalibrations that needed to take place to…

This article describes the journey of a research study from the initial experience that provoked a set of questions through to the final outputs. We suggest that a narrative methodology emerged from our work with our data as the most appropriate vehicle for answering our questions. We describe our engagement with some of the many issues this…

This study uses interpretive sociological methods to explore parallels between fictional accounts of cyborgs and educational technology-based practices currently present in some e-learning environments. Specifically, the cyborg in fictional accounts ("Star Trek" and "Doctor Who") and the cyborg in academic accounts (Donna…

Design solutions have become increasingly complex and based on a rapidly growing body of knowledge. In order to articulate a design solution to a client, the graphic use of the design narrative can effectively communicate complex ideas. Two case study interventions were conducted in an interior design program in which students were introduced to…

This paper reports on the ground-breaking research in the study of languages in doctoral education. It argues for democratizing the production and dissemination of original contributions to knowledge through activating and mobilizing multilingual Higher Degree Researchers' (HDRs) capabilities for theorizing through them using their full linguistic…

This article proposes an answer to the primary question of how the American Sign Language (ASL) community in the United States conceptualizes (im)politeness and its related notions. It begins with a review of evolving theoretical issues in research on (im)politeness and related methodological problems with studying (im)politeness in natural…

At the time of this research, protests of farmers against new environmental policy measures received much media attention. News reports suggested that farmers' organizations rejected the idea that modern farming techniques cause damage to the environment and even tried to undermine attempts to reconcile the goals of modern agriculture with…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges faced by tutors who were providing remedial literacy support to New Zealand apprentices. Design/methodology/approach: As part of a wider, triangulated study of employers, tutors, apprentices, and industry training coordinators, the author undertook a qualitative analysis of ten…

In the current article, we introduce a new methodology for detecting whether a word in a sentence is conceptually represented as plural and use it to shed light on a debate about whether comprehenders interpret singular indefinite noun phrases within a distributed predicate as plural during online reading. Experiment 1 extended a methodology…