The role of research ethics committees, and research ethics issues more broadly are often not viewed in the context of the development of scientific methods and the academic community. This topic piece seeks to redress this gap. I begin with a brief outline of the changes we experience within the social sciences before exploring in more detail…

Given the importance of local scholars' understanding of research in their integration into global academia, this study explored the way scholars conceptualised and perceived the meaning of research and their identities as researchers. This article reports data from a qualitative case study using semi-structured interviews to explore the…

Video data offer important insights into social processes because they enable direct observation of real-life social interaction. Though such data have become abundant and increasingly accessible, they pose challenges to scalability and measurement. Computer vision (CV), i.e., software-based automated analysis of visual material, can help address…

One of the most important developments in the current era of social sciences is the growing availability and diversity of data, big and small. Social scientists increasingly combine information from multiple data sets in their research. While conducting statistical analyses with linked data is relatively straightforward, borrowing information…

A previous meta-analysis found that active learning has a positive impact on learning achievements for college students in STEM fields of study. However, no similar meta-analyses have been conducted in the humanities and social sciences. Because major dissimilarities may exist between different fields or domain of knowledge, there can be issues…

Outside of a specialist literature, the study of violence occupies a marginal position within comparative and international education scholarship. A key contributing factor is the absence of a holistic conceptual framework that can capture the nature, extent and causes of violence in education. The article proposes such a framework, by updating…

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 responds to the work by Marginson and Yang in this special issue from an epistemological lens. It focuses on how to observe China and Chinese education. After offering an overall review of contemporary social sciences, it then reminds us of the need for overcoming dichotomous mode of thinking in social research in the context of…

Ensuring a credible literature base is essential for all research fields. One element of this relates to the replicability of published work, which is the probability that the results of an original study would replicate in an independent investigation. A critical feature of replicable research is that the sample size of a study is sufficient to…

Fetters et al.'s (2013) mixed methods integration framework uses construction metaphors: building, connecting, merging, and embedding. In a similar vein, this article uses an architectural metaphor and introduces design patterns as building blocks for mixed methods research design. A design pattern embeds one specific design decision into its…

Research at the intersection of social science and genomics, 'sociogenomics', is transforming our understanding of the interplay between genomics, individual outcomes and society. It has interesting and maybe unexpected implications for education research and policy. Here we review the growing sociogenomics literature and discuss its implications…

Longitudinal studies including a time-to-event outcome in social research often use a form of event history analysis to analyse the influence of time-varying endogenous covariates on the time-to-event outcome. Many standard event history models however assume the covariates of interest to be exogenous and inclusion of an endogenous covariate may…

International publications in social sciences by scholars based in mainland China have been increasing in volume, but little is known about the characteristics of China's contribution. This study examines the characteristics and patterns of international publications by Chinese scholars in higher education research. Data from three…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a widely used technique for detecting unobserved population heterogeneity in cross-sectional data. Despite its popularity, the performance of LCA is not well understood. In this study, we evaluate the performance of LCA with binary data by examining classification accuracy, parameter estimation accuracy, and coverage…

In this article, the author uses speculative essay to take up the metaphor of the blank canvas and critique it as part of a majoritarian narrative in educational research. To do this, the author applies the work of Sylvia Wynter (1992, 2003, 2020) and others on the creation of Knowledge and Man in terms of how canonical educational research…