The content of research methods courses in tertiary education, as revealed by popular textbooks, tends to focus largely on procedural aspects of research investigations. Although following proper procedures is essential for reaching valid and reliable outcomes, there is another attribute of good quality research that is often missing from research…

Teacher research is lauded as a beneficial enterprise both for practitioners and for learners. However, teachers are sometimes accused of not possessing the necessary knowledge and skills to conduct research effectively. This article focuses on the need for teacher-researchers to find means of addressing the methodological challenges of engaging…

When researchers selectively report significant positive results, and omit non-significant or negative results, the published literature skews in a particular direction. This is called 'reporting bias,' and it can cause both casual readers and meta-analysts to develop an inaccurate understanding of the efficacy of an intervention. This paper…

Conducting literature review is a complicated, sometimes confusing and laborious process that beginning educational researchers, especially graduate students, often find challenging. However, in the past these challenges were hardly considered, but in more recent times they have been increasingly considered by various faculties and graduate…

Social capital is an exciting and growing field in academic circles. However, its research has often been criticised by youth theorists for its lack of relevance to youth life and experience--the portrayal of young people as consumers rather than producers of social capital--and a failure to acknowledge the complexity of youth life. Many of these…

Instrumentation rigor and bias management are major challenges for qualitative researchers employing interviewing as a data generation method in their studies. A usual procedure for testing the quality of an interview protocol and for identifying potential researcher biases is the pilot study in which investigators try out their proposed methods…

The August 16, 2011, "Chronicle of Higher Education" article "Want Data? Ask Students. Again and Again" by Sara Lipka posits that in higher education there is a culture of oversurveying students and too often relying on surveys as the main, or only, way of assessing the impact of programs and services on student satisfaction and learning. Because…

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…

In this article I discuss my growing worry over the use (and nonuse) of photographs of young children in social research. Taking a view of child protection as paramount, I situate the discussion in the context of ethical governance of research, young children as research participants, changing views of childhoods, and the juxtaposition of the Arts…

In this article we argue that when university researchers engage in democratic participatory action research with schools the process requires a special type of attention to the ethical difficulties which can arise. We note how current professional standards of ethics are inadequate to fully address many of the dilemmas faced in collaborative…

This article focuses on the complexity of researching institutional culture and the ethical dilemmas posed in representing staff according to race and gender, drawing on three qualitative studies undertaken at a previously white South African university between 2000 and 2007. During the research process, issues of representation became a concern…

The purpose of this article is to contribute to methodological discussions on elite interviewing. The point of departure is that elite interviewing constitutes/represents continuous challenges for researchers. This may be due to several reasons; one of these concerns the possible critical incidents that may occur in the course of the interview.…

Over the past few years, the focus group method has assumed a very important role as a method for collecting qualitative data in social and behavioural science research. This article elucidates theoretical and practical problems and prospects associated with the use of focus groups as a qualitative research method in social and behavioural science…

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to describe a design that mixes single-case (sometimes referred to as single-subject) and qualitative methods, hereafter referred to as a single-case mixed methods design (SCD-MM). Minimal attention has been given to the topic of applying qualitative methods to SCD work in the literature. These two…

Upset because the University of California at Davis did not support her charges of misconduct among scientists, Melinda M. Zaragoza left her career in microbiology to run a general store in Kentucky. Although no wrongdoing was found on the Davis campus, Ms. Zaragoza's whistle-blowing now is being joined by a powerful chorus. Officials of the…