This paper contrasts mixed methods design with strategic research design. Mixed methods research both advocates for itself as always better than singular research methods, while also seemingly allowing a wide variety of researchers to count their work under the very large umbrella of mixed methods. We argue for strategic research design as a set…

Hybrid communities using online and face-to-face communications to construct their practices are increasingly part of everyday life amongst people who have easy access to the internet. Researching these communities raises a number of challenges for researchers in the pursuit of ethical research. The paper begins by exploring what is understood by…

The study reports on a small international qualitative research project on the implementation of national curriculum reform in Chinese middle schools, involving a team of eight researchers from the University of Leeds and two Chinese partnership institutions in Zhejiang and Beijing. Data were collected from six case study schools based on a…

There are few high-quality studies using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the adventure and wilderness therapy literature. Thus, a unison call is heard for more such studies to be carried out. This article presents a Norwegian wilderness therapy research project that planned to incorporate this "gold standard" that is regarded as…

This article reports on the experiences of a novice researcher undertaking a National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) scholarship programme. A summary of the research is provided, which involved a survey of international students completing vocational education and training (VET) courses in Tasmania. Whilst many students reported…

Threshold concepts were introduced nearly 10 years ago by Ray Land and Jan Meyer. This work has spawned four international conferences and hundreds of papers. Although the idea has clearly gained traction in higher education, this sub-field does not yet have a fully fledged research methodology or a strong critical discourse about methodology.…

Understanding faculty work practices can translate into improved library services. This study documents how education and behavioral science faculty locate, retrieve, and use information resources for research and writing and how they publish and store their research materials. The authors interviewed twelve professors using a structured interview…

Using John Creswell's Research Process Cycle as a framework, this article describes various web-based collaborative technologies useful for enhancing the organization and efficiency of educational research. Visualization tools (Cacoo) assist researchers in identifying a research problem. Resource storage tools (Delicious, Mendeley, EasyBib)…

Research synthesis of evaluation findings is a multistep process. An investigator identifies a research question, acquires the relevant literature, codes findings from that literature, and analyzes the coded data to estimate the average treatment effect and its distribution in a population of interest. The process of estimating the average…

This article begins by raising issues around the way in which ethical approval for research is managed in university settings, where committees often base their assumptions on a principlist approach making a number of assumptions that we consider to be contestable, such as a neat separation between researcher and researched. However, collaborative…

This paper examines what is arguably the most important issue in qualitative research--access to willing participants--specifically in the context of companies. This is of considerable importance in vocational education and training (VET) as workplaces are the site of much VET activity. While research textbooks discuss many issues in research, few…

Using contemporary research methodologies with young people can, and does, pose many ethical challenges for researchers keen to fully incorporate principles of participation and voice into their research endeavours. Adding to the challenge, when the project is grounded outside of an academic context in a not-for-profit community setting, ethical…

Ralph LaRossa's (2012) article on the multidimensional world of qualitative research provides family scientists with a set of innovative tools to guide writing and reviewing. He proffered an engaging challenge: to view the "Journal of Marriage and Family" ("JMF") as a meeting place of scholars, a thought community (Zerubavel, 1997), even a culture…

This paper discusses the significance of conducting respectful research within urban schools, using the example of one large-scale university-school board partnership in northwestern Toronto. The authors, three research assistants on the project, use their experiences within three of the participating schools to interrogate the research approach…

This introductory article frames the contributions for this issue on everyday ethics--moments that demand moral considerations and ethical choices that researchers encounter. We discuss concerns raised within the research community about the tendency to observe merely obligatory ethical procedures as outlined in Human Subjects Review regulations.…