Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, in-person data collection methods have been considerably hampered by requirements for social distancing and safety. Consequently, academic inquiry has shifted largely to virtual means, leading to the considerable growth of virtual qualitative research. Conducting virtual research in post-conflict contexts, such…

Constant changes to COVID-19 restrictions have required adaptability from social scientists including responding to new challenges such as infiltration by bots. This research note presents unexpected encounters of bot infiltration and recruitment during survey data collection under pandemic conditions. The note draws from a household survey on a…

In this article, I present how I navigated unexpected apprehension that I faced while communicating with teacher participants during my PhD data collection (via interviews, observations and document study). I mediated the apprehension by strategies such as disclosing my teacher identity, expressing an interest in their practice and assuring them…

This paper reports how I addressed the issue of extensive missing values in my PhD study, "Digital Competencies of High School Mathematics Teachers". I collected data using an online survey. Several methods exist to address the issue of missing values. I utilised multiple imputation (MI) as it provides more accurate results. The mean…

An increasingly multicultural Aotearoa early childhood education (ECE) landscape forms the context for my doctoral study in progress. My research explores the culturally embedded and negotiated environmental identities of a growing number of migrant Indian teachers. This article documents my experiences of confronting and navigating the unexpected…

A significant share of education and development research uses data collected by workers called "enumerators." It is well-documented that "enumerator effects"--or inconsistent practices between the individual people who administer measurement tools-- can be a key source of error in survey data collection. However, it is less…

Qualitative research has been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the possibilities that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Zoom offer to qualitative scholars. Based on the experience of using such technologies to collect qualitative data for our PhD studies, we present how we dealt…

This article is developed from the contents from one of the chapters the researcher has written as part of her PhD thesis. It discusses various methodological challenges the researcher had to face during the phase of data collection in the prisons of Kerala, India, and the strategies adopted to overcome these challenges. This article is intended…

The ubiquitous use of social platforms across the globe makes them attractive options for investigating social phenomena including migration. However, the use of social media data raises several crucial ethical issues around the areas of informed consent, anonymity and profiling of individuals, which are particularly sensitive when looking at a…

This article describes a nexus analysis of the lengthy, complex process of negotiating access to schools for a research project surveying 1,002 children (aged 9-12 years) about their digital and language practices. The analysis distinguished layers of adult-centered gatekeeping, each of which needed to be tackled in sequence. Bottlenecks…

This research focused on the context of educational leadership, which sought to explore the possibilities of leadership opportunities for students with disabilities in a Malaysian secondary school. We utilized a phenomenological case study approach. We were keen on exploring this niche area as often leadership opportunities for students with…

This article focuses on an investigation of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher (de)motivation in Spain which underwent a methodological transformation from mixed methods to a qualitative approach. Unexpected statistical results from the questionnaire in the piloting phase led to the creation of interview prompts, a dynamic data collection…

Researchers are combining self-reports from mobile surveys with passive data collection using sensors and apps on smartphones increasingly more often. While smartphones are commonly used in some groups of individuals, smartphone penetration is significantly lower in other groups. In addition, different operating systems (OSs) limit how mobile data…

This case study describes a Q methodology study which captured and analyzed the viewpoints of 45 UK teachers online. The teachers might liken their participation in the study to a "card sort" activity: their relative placement of statement cards revealed their opinions of mastery in mathematics. Factor analysis of the completed sorts…

In some studies, participants are assigned ethnographic or communicative tasks, such as field-work observation, life-story interviews, and photography. These studies usually involve in-person interaction, both for the participants doing the task and for the researchers in engaging with participants throughout the research process. Our study was…