The early phase of doctoral education is a critical yet under-researched period in PhD programs, when doctoral researchers must solidify their thesis projects prior to embarking on data collection. What makes this time particularly challenging is that new doctoral researchers synthesize their research thinking while they are still learning the…

The COVID-19 pandemic posed many ethical and practical challenges for academic research. Some of these have been documented, particularly in relation to health research, but less attention has been paid to the dilemmas encountered by educational and social science research. Given that pandemics are predicted to be more frequent, it is vital to…

Are social science, cross-border research projects, where recruitment and data collection are carried out remotely (e.g. through social media and online platforms), required to follow similar ethical and data-sharing procedures as 'on-the-ground' studies that use traditional means of recruitment and participant engagement? This article reflects on…

Much care has been paid to reflexivity, including considering emotional sensitivities?in relation to face-to-face interviews. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of sensitivities on the process of data?analysis and the presentation of research findings. This paper focuses on?what constitutes 'the data' to be analysed, who analyses…

Organising and participating in Knowledge Exchange (KE) events represent a considerable commitment by social science academics. Yet academics' participation in KE activities is not professionally rewarded as are other academic endeavours, so why do they do it? Understanding academics' perspectives regarding their own motivations for engaging in KE…

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field's flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing…

Background: Research clearinghouses (CHs) seek to play an important role in identifying successful social programs and practices. The evidence-based policy movement has grown tremendously over the last few decades and has gotten institutionalized in the form of CHs in the US. CHs (1) specify standards for evaluating the quality of evidence from…

Purpose: Teamwork has long featured in social science research. Further, with research increasingly "cross-national," communication becomes more complex, for instance, involving different cultures, languages and modes of communication. Yet, studies examining team communicative processes that can facilitate or constrain collaboration are…

Participatory action research (PAR) investigates issues through collaboration and cooperation between academics and nonacademic community members. Recently, awareness of such approaches has increased as the need for transformative research and contribution to social goods has become clear. However, participatory methods have been deployed unevenly…

As massification of higher education developed, employment challenges in changing labour markets aroused the attention of scholars globally. An interdisciplinary approach called world-system theory is applied by scholars from the social sciences, history, anthropology and cultural studies. This study applied the theory in a bibliometric analysis…

The challenge of research methods teaching is gaining attention among policy-makers keen to build social science research capacity and, critically, among educationalists keen to enhance the pedagogy. This paper addresses pedagogy, presenting a new conceptual-empirical typology of pedagogy for social science research methods teaching. Taking a…

The study of social mobility can be traced back around 100 years, but up until the turn of the millennium it remained largely an academic topic. While a few seminal papers on income mobility had been published in the 1990s, the Sutton Trust's 2005 report, 'Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America' signalled a new wave of social…

In this short reflection on how research and policy can connect fruitfully, I briefly outline three key concepts that have arisen in my work on inter-professional collaboration in the caring professions: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. I have argued that these concepts describe the work that is done at sites of…

A novel approach to integrating Cluster Analysis (CA) within qualitative inquiry is presented, grounded in a large, unstructured dataset from open and rather unstructured interviews. This dataset was previously subjected to typical (theory sensitive) thematic analyses. Transformed into quantitative binary matrix structures, the CA offers…

This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into…