Educational researchers continue to polarize into 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' camps, with these terms often functioning as global identity markers, rather than as styles of research that are available to anyone. Many scholars have lamented the drawbacks of researchers being siloed into opposing, apparently incommensurable research paradigms,…

Research designs that include planned missing data are gaining popularity in applied education research. These methods have traditionally relied on introducing missingness into data collections using the missing completely at random (MCAR) mechanism. This study assesses whether planned missingness can also be implemented when data are instead…

Common method variance refers to the amount of uncontrolled systematic error leading to biased estimates of scale reliability and validity and to spurious covariance shared among variables due to common method and/or common source employed in survey-based researches. As the extended use of self-report questionnaires is inevitable, numerous studies…

Criteria are briefly proposed for final conclusions, research problems, and research hypotheses in quantitative research. Moreover, based on a proposed definition of applied and basic/general research, it is argued that (1) in applied quantitative research, while research problems are necessary, research hypotheses are unjustified, and that (2) in…

The authors of this article present arguments for why and how qualitative research should be used in economic education. These arguments recognize the nature of economics as a discipline and economics educators' current expertise and preferences. The authors have five goals: (i) clarifying how and why the use of qualitative research in economic…

Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a…

Whether you believe you need a methodologist is very much dependent on academic training and your experience working with methodologists in pursuit of research. Methodologists are indispensable at all phases of the research process but perhaps nowhere more than at the beginning, when formulating your research questions and specifying what it is…

Missing data is a common challenge to any researcher in almost any field of research. In particular, human participants in research do not always respond or return for assessments leaving the researcher to rely on missing data methods. The most common methods (i.e., Multiple Imputation and Full Information Maximum Likelihood) assume that the…

Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) are a useful tool for evaluating the effects of interventions at an individual level and can play an important role in the development and validation of evidence-based practices. Historically, researchers relied on visual analysis of SCED data and eschewed statistical approaches. Although researchers…

Contrary to its typical presentation in scientific publications as a certain and linear process, in reality, the experimental method, not least the design aspect of it, requires a great deal of trial-and-error and ad hoc decision-making on the part of the researchers. This uncertain and contingent aspect of research, although little known outside…

Students often believe that statistical significance is the only determinant of whether a quantitative result is "important." In this paper, I review traditional null hypothesis statistical testing to identify what questions inferential statistics can and cannot answer, including statistical significance, effect size and direction,…

This study explores the methodology presented in four leading educational leadership journals for a period of three years to investigate the predominant methodologies reported in journals most read by faculty members in educational administration or leadership programs. This content analysis study uses frequency and percentages to gather data on…

This paper reports on an integrative literature review of published articles that used either quantitative or qualitative observation methods to research creativity in learning contexts. Observation is an empirical research method used in quantitative and qualitative naturalistic studies focused on understanding behavior and interactions as they…

We present a versatile scenario to introduce students to statistics: the test that spaghetti sticks only if sufficiently done. The statistical analyses can be performed at different levels of complexity and formal correctness, adapting it to the students' age.

Systematic reviews often encounter primary studies that report multiple effect sizes based on data from the same participants. These have the potential to introduce statistical dependency into the meta-analytic data set. In this paper, we provide a tutorial on dealing with effect size multiplicity within studies in the context of meta-analyses of…