This academic article provides the essential steps for designing an effective English questionnaire in social science research, with a focus on ensuring clarity, cultural sensitivity and ethical integrity. Developed from key insights from related studies, it outlines potential practice in questionnaire design, item development and the importance…

Urban planning research usually requires researchers to undertake fieldwork. This fieldwork is frustrated or enabled by gatekeepers who can influence effective data collection. Traditionally, gatekeepers are perceived as monolithic, neutral, and static individuals, yet they are complex individuals with varying needs and expectations from the…

This case study, based on qualitative research, aims to examine the doctoral dissertation abstracts written between 2010-2017. Therefore, in education, 3463 doctoral dissertations abstracts were accessed through Turkey's National Thesis Center website. The researchers developed an abstract review form. Each dissertation abstract was examined…

Background: Data representing people's behaviour, attitudes, feelings and relationships are increasingly being harvested from social media platforms and re-used for research purposes. This can be ethically problematic, even where such data exist in the public domain. We set out to explore how the academic community is addressing these challenges…

The body of research in the field of postsecondary education and disability is wide ranging and continues to evolve. Specifically, the literature corpus includes contributions from a range of professions and a considerable number of journals. This breadth of diversity in perspective presents significant advantages; however, it also presents…

This paper examines the experiences of educational researchers undertaking fieldwork within three Central Asian countries -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Drawing on interviews with educational researchers from within and outside the region, the findings show that researchers encounter numerous ethical and methodological challenges in the…

The abundance of student records housed in K-12 schools across the country represents a largely untapped resource in the study of behavioral phenomena among children. Careful review of these existing records affords educational researchers an alternative to the heavily used survey method of data collection. While record review studies are common…

Missing data are a common occurrence in survey-based research studies in education, and the way missing values are handled can significantly affect the results of analyses based on such data. Despite known problems with performance of some missing data handling methods, such as mean imputation, many researchers in education continue to use those…

Among the plethora of action research books on the market, there is no one text exclusively devoted to understanding how to acquire and interpret research data. Action Research Methods provides a balanced overview of the quantitative and qualitative methodologies and methods for conducting action research within a variety of educational…

Embarking in an educational research paper is one of the daunting processes any scholar can go through. And the process is even harder for novice education students who wander through the plethora of terminology, styles and paradigms trying to figure out their way in that jungle called educational research. The following of the review presents the…

The use of focus groups may provide researchers with important insights into research questions via participant discussion and interaction. As a human services practitioner and researcher, I became interested in learning how to conduct focus groups in order to apply these steps to my research and gain valuable insights about the human experience…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…

The Common Core of Data (CCD) nonfiscal surveys consist of data submitted annually to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the four U.S. Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin…

The purpose of this article is to develop guidelines to assist practitioners and researchers in evaluating and developing rigorous case studies. The main concern in evaluating a case study is to accurately assess its quality and ultimately to offer clients social work interventions informed by the best available evidence. To assess the quality of…

A Focus Group Interview (FGI) involves 6-9 people guided through a pre-thought line of questioning for 1-2 hours by a trained Moderator. The Moderator gives participants the opportunity to express ideas, thoughts, and views. This is a robust qualitative data collection method IF there is a skilled FGI Moderator. The Moderator sets the tone,…