Engaging with primary researchers during qualitative secondary analysis is a practice much recommended but rarely written about. In this article, I reflect on my experience of crossing an imagined boundary between the discrete textual dataset and its creators, of acknowledging and engaging with those researchers who invested in constructing the…

This article offers insights into the ethics of engagement and methodological issues and dilemmas in cross-cultural interpretation for researchers who are positioned at different points of the insider-outsider spectrum. The discussion uses examples from qualitative research with Sikh families in Britain and focuses on the design of the methodology…

In the research project which formed part of my PhD study, I dealt with the topic of inequity in education. My main interest was to find out how (formal) educational careers can be fostered even if the starting position within the system is one which makes a successful educational career very difficult. Despite the fact that in the Austrian…

What do different research methods and approaches "do" in practice? The article seeks to discuss this point by drawing upon socio-material research approaches and empirical examples taken from the early stages of an extensive case study on an interdisciplinary project between two multidisciplinary fields of study, education and computer…

This article presents a dialogic qualitative interview design for a narrative study of six international UK university students' motivation for learning English. Based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, this design was developed in order to address the limitations of member-checking [Lincoln, Y. S., and E. G. Guba. 1985. "Naturalistic…

Participatory research can be seen as providing affordances for "listening" to student voices. This study contributes to the debate around its affordances in ameliorating democratic processes in schools. Students in a northern city secondary school in England used multimodal methods to research questions based on "where do students…

In the current article, we consider the influential position of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and discuss several methodological areas that demonstrate the need for caution when using and interpreting PISA results. We motivate our argument by briefly describing the program's increased influence in educational policy…

This handbook has been conceived as a guide for young researchers embarking on the exciting journey of investigating different aspects of plurilingual education. The text can also serve to review ideas previously encountered, and perhaps as a means of interrogating research methodologies in plurilingual contexts for those who already have ample…

This paper presents a review of the literature pertaining to the teacher actions that influence Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander student learning outcomes. This review investigates two foci: the identification of teacher actions influencing learning outcomes for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students and the methodological…

Engaging students in active learning can enhance their understanding and appreciation of a subject such as statistics. Classroom activities and projects help to engage students and further promote the learning process. In this paper, an activity investigating the influence of population size and wealth on the medal counts from the 2012 London…

Cross-language qualitative research in education continues to increase. However, there has been inadequate discussion in the literature concerning the translation process that ensures research trustworthiness applicable for bilingual researchers. Informed by the literature on evaluation criteria for qualitative data translation, this paper…

The authors describe the process whereby a student with a background in economics was guided to understand the central role in qualitative research of the researcher as instrument. The instructor designed a three-part mock research project designed to provide experiential knowledge of the enterprise of qualitative research. Students, as neophyte…

Consulting with children is widely recognised as an essential element in building understanding about children's lives. From a children's rights perspective, it is also a legal requirement on professionals working with children. However, translating the rhetoric into research and practice is still evolving. Previous studies report on working with…

In this article we address the issue of applying operant psychology to derive plausible and useful interpretations of complex firm behavior in natural settings. The objective is to discuss an appropriate methodology based on case study design, developed specifically in Vella and Foxall (2011), to produce an operant interpretation of secondary…

This article presents a reflection on an aspect of research methodology, particularly on the interpretation strategy of data from a Science and Indigenous Knowledge Systems Project (SIKSP) in a South African university. The data interpretation problem arose while we were analysing the effects of a series of SIKSP-based workshops on the views of a…