This case study describes the research carried out in partial fulfilment of the degree of doctor of education. The study was qualitative in nature with a phenomenological interpretive paradigm. My primary objective is to share my experience of combining life story and grounded theory research. My main objectives for undertaking the research were…

This case study presents an overview of methods used to carry out an exploratory mixed-methods ethnographic study of video bloggers, or vloggers, on YouTube. Vlogs can be used as a multimedia data source for researchers who wish to explore topics such as digital culture or self-expression in social media environments. A combination of online…

Exploratory factor analysis involves five key decisions. The second decision, how many factors to retain, is the focus of the current paper. Extracting too many or too few factors often leads to devastating effects on study results. The advantages and disadvantages of the most effective and/or most utilized strategies to determine the number of…

This study investigates a sequence of item response theory (IRT) true score equatings based on various scale transformation approaches and evaluates equating accuracy and consistency over time. The results show that the biases and sample variances for the IRT true score equating (both direct and indirect) are quite small (except for the mean/sigma…

Hills and Hertwig (2012) challenge the proposed similarity of the exploration-exploitation transitions found in Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) between the 2 experimental paradigms of decisions from experience (sampling and repeated-choice), which was predicted by an instance-based learning (IBL) model. The heart of their argument is that in the sampling…

Learning about statistics is a lot like learning about science: the learning is more meaningful if you can actively explore. This eighth installment of "Explorations in Statistics" explores permutation methods, empiric procedures we can use to assess an experimental result--to test a null hypothesis--when we are reluctant to trust statistical…

The purpose of this study is to carry out a content analysis about the studies on teachers' professional development and to determine the tendencies in these studies. Within this scope, 60 studies that were registered to Turkish National Thesis Centre and ProQuest database between the years 2005-2015 were examined. Of the 60 studies, 37 of them…

Child abuse has profound immediate and long-term effects on a child's development. The long-term impact of abuse of a child can be seen in higher rates of psychiatric disorders, increased rates of substance abuse and relationship difficulties [Springer, K. W., Sheridan, J., Kuo, D., & Carnes, M. (2003). "The long-term health outcomes of…

The authors in this qualitative study examined international students' cultural and social experiences using data collected through case studies and semi-structured, in-depth, informant style interviews. Participants were all international students (n = 18), mostly postgraduate from Asian and Far Eastern countries studying at a British higher…

The present study was a causality study that investigate the effects of conditional factors; if x, y & z are the independent factors (e.g. socio-economic status, Anthropometric status, and home environmental status) on the dependent factors (e.g. memory, social skill, language acquisition, logical reasoning, and problem solving). The present…

This study examined a five-year project initiated by the Women's Global Connection (WGC) to train pre-primary teachers in schools serving HIV/AIDS orphans in Zambia. The researchers evaluated the contextual factors of the training initiative to clarify why some teachers possess high self-efficacy, while others do not. The article analyses the…

This study investigated whether children with disabilities are excluded from mainstream child development research. Fifteen per cent of 533 articles from "Child Development" and "Developmental Psychology" (1996-2010) were randomly selected. The exclusion rate was 89.9% when no mention of participants with disabilities was…

This chapter provides a guide to research logistics and ethics in studying immigrant families. The authors outline major pragmatic issues in research design and data collection to which all scholars must attend, although current practices often do not respond to the idiosyncratic issues related to vulnerable immigrant populations (e.g.,…

The goal of this chapter is to recommend quality criteria to guide evaluators' selections of sampling designs when mixing approaches. First, we contextualize our discussion of quality criteria and sampling designs by discussing the concept of interpretive consistency and how it impacts sampling decisions. Embedded in this discussion are…

Studies of the effects of class attendance on class performance typically are quasi-experimental because students choose whether or not to attend class; that is, the samples are self-selecting. The lack of random assignment prevents one from establishing a causal relationship between attendance and performance. Relating attendance to performance…