For emerging researchers, introductory content that is specific to the Aotearoa context can be hard to find. Research methods for education and the social disciplines in Aotearoa New Zealand draws on the thinking of numerous local researchers to deliver an overview and introduction to research methodology and methods, in a way that closely ties…

The swift evolution of digital spaces challenges the established norms of ethical research policy. Ineffective ethical review diminishes researchers' ability to conduct cutting-edge and socially sensitive research, institutions' ability to engage at the forefront of technology, and the relationship between researcher and committee. In criminology…

Introduction: The replication crisis in the behavioral and social sciences spawned a credibility revolution, calling for new open science research practices that ensure greater transparency, including preregistrations, open data and code, and open access. Statement of the Problem: Replications of published research are an important element in this…

Social scientists have frequently sought to understand the distinct effects of age, period, and cohort, but disaggregation of the three dimensions is difficult because cohort = period - age. We argue that this technical difficulty reflects a disconnection between how the cohort effect is conceptualized and how it is modeled in the traditional…

In the complex world of educational policy, causal inferences will be debated. As we review non-experimental designs in educational policy, we focus on how to clarify and focus the terms of debate. We begin by presenting the potential outcomes/counterfactual framework and then describe approximations to the counterfactual generated from the…

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…

Measuring the similarity of stimuli is of great interest to a variety of social scientists. Spatial arrangement by dragging and dropping "more similar" targets closer together on the computer screen is a precise and efficient method to measure stimulus similarity. We present Qualtrics-spatial arrangement method (Q-SpAM), a feature-rich…

Debates surrounding the use of data science in educational AI are frequently rather entrenched, revolving around commercial models and talk of teacher replacement. This article explores the potential for digital textual analysis within humanities and social science education, advocating for a sociologically-driven approach that complements, rather…

Purpose: Phenomenology has a long tradition as a qualitative research method in the social and health sciences. The application of phenomenological methods to understand lived experiences and subjectivities offers researchers a rich tapestry of methodological approaches, often however, the availability of these methods to researchers is tempered…

This paper reflects critically upon how the 'mobilities turn' in the social sciences, and its subsequent contribution towards 'policy mobilities', offers theoretical and methodological resources that can be usefully harnessed in education policy sociology. Just as there are new ways in which policy is being made and moved, there are equally new…

This article contributes to the discussion on research methods pedagogy by adding a technological dimension to Nind's use of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) in research methods education (RME). Within a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning approach, this research-inspired reflection is based on the literature, on the scholar's praxis and on…

Piecewise latent growth modeling (PLGM) is a class of longitudinal models using a structural equation modeling framework to describe stage-like, discontinuous change of individuals over time. PLGM breaks the overall time window into non-overlapped segments where separate functions can be fitted to represent differential growth patterns for each…

This paper critically reviews the research done in education faculties in Nigerian universities. This research, though categorized in postgraduate schools or colleges as mainly in the liberal arts/humanities and the social sciences, depends on the theories and methodologies from other disciplines. The arts and social sciences are disciplines where…

For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards…

In the past decade, moderated mediation analysis has been extensively and increasingly employed in social and behavioral sciences. With its widespread use, it is particularly important to ensure the moderated mediation analysis will not bring spurious results. Spurious effects have been studied in both mediation and moderation analysis, but this…