Interest in applied educational research methodology is growing as educators and researchers strive to seek empirical evidence about what is effective teaching within distinctive contexts. However, for beginner researchers who are interested in conducting case studies within educational settings and are looking for an appropriate starting point,…

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…

Consultation relies on story. This is true for researchers, for practitioners, and for clients. Given this fact, qualitative and mixed methods (QMM) research are particularly well suited to listening to the stories that compose the clinical practice of consultation in order to extend understanding and to support improvement and innovation. In this…

In this case, I discuss my progression from ethnography toward multimodal ethnography as a necessary methodology to study multiliterate and multimodal lives. I view daily life, social interactions, and meaning-making practices as inherently multimodal. By multimodal, I mean that individuals continually read, interpret, and create meanings that…

In this manuscript, we describe the use of debriefing interviews for interviewing the interpretive researcher. Further, we demonstrate the value of using debriefing questions as part of a qualitative research study, specifically, one doctoral student's dissertation study. We describe the reflexivity process of the student in her study and the…

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…

As aspiring professionals, pre-service teachers must become good consumers of educational research as well as competent researchers who can use tools of inquiry to improve their practice and conduct their own educational research. Many, however, resist learning research skills or find difficulties in doing so. This article presents ways in which…

This article examines ethnomethodology in order to consider its particular yet under-used perspective within literacy research. Initially, the article outlines ethnomethodology, including its theoretical position and central concepts such as indexicality and reflexivity. Then, selected studies are used to illustrate the application of the…

Background: Scholars have called for research approaches that actively include and are driven by people with intellectual disabilities, but the process of inclusive data analysis has been scarcely documented in the literature. This paper demonstrates the process university researchers and a group of self-advocates used to analyse and interpret…

Two basic data sources required for research studies have been secondary and primary. Secondary data collection helps the researcher to provide relevant background to the study and are, in most cases, available for retrieval from recorded sources. Primary data collection requires the researcher to venture into the field where the study is to take…

In this paper, two beginning qualitative researchers describe the challenges and successes of conducting a collaborative self-study. For two academic years, the authors wrote and analyzed personal narratives related to their experiences as a lesbian and a gay man, respectively, in educational contexts. This article addresses the data analysis…

Problems inherent in relying solely on statistical significance testing as a means of data interpretation are reviewed. The biggest problem with statistical significance testing is that researchers have used the results of this testing to ascribe importance or meaning to their studies where such meaning often does not exist. Often researchers…

This commentary on the previous article on an interpretive research approach discusses the journey of a researcher from radical behaviorism, to interpretive social science, to an emerging viewpoint in which art more than science is used as a way of seeing issues related to disability, education, and change. (Contains 10 references.) (CR)

Much composition research, even qualitative research, posits a world "out there" waiting to be understood and seeks causes of phenomena without considering the subjective states of researchers or study participants. Because of this, many researchers consider social phenomena as "things" which coerce human behavior. But even…