This article is a response to the methodological problems I experienced during fieldwork. It follows that the article is an experiment of creating alternative possibilities for thinking about ethnocentrism as a phenomenon in transformation in a contemporary, innovative, higher educational setting. Throughout the article, I argue for the…

The article is a critical sociological analysis of current transnational practices on creating comparable measurements of dropout and completion in higher education and the consequences for the conditions of scientific knowledge production on the topic. The analysis revolves around questions of epistemological, methodological and symbolic types…

Background: In science education today, there is an emerging focus on what is happening in situ, making use of an array of analytical traditions. Common practice is to use one specific analytical framing within a research project, but there are projects that make use of multiple analytical framings to further the understanding of the same data,…

This study investigates technical efficiency and productivity for Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs). One identified problem in previous research concerns adjusting efficiency scores for input quality. This problem is avoided using grades from upper-secondary schools. A second problem concerns heterogeneity with respect to subjects and…

When doing research, or for that matter working in school-age childcare, the researcher/teacher is required to develop a plan for her/his work in spite of knowing that unexpected things will happen. This article aims to explore the relationship between the process of planning and unexpected events in childcare practice and action research. The…

Previous research presented in this journal and elsewhere has suggested that vocational education is highly gender segregated and it is the heavy industrial sectors such as industry, vehicle and construction programmes that mainly attract boys with an anti-school attitude who are not interested in academic school work. However, there are good…

The neo-liberal restructuring of academia justifies research concerning what constitutes academic work, what it means to be an academic researcher and how researchers manoeuvre in academia. The aim of this article is to investigate how this reshaping of higher education affects how research careers are formed and impacts on "becoming…

Research supervisors' different ways of experiencing their supervision of doctoral students are analysed in terms of the students' questions and problems as they relate to the supervisor's research, and what consequences this connection, or non-connection, to the supervisor's research has for supervision and the role of supervisor. Thirty…

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific…

The purpose of this article is to point to some patterns dealt with in Swedish research with 1 to 3-year-old children in preschool. The analyses focus on questions posed, theoretical perspectives, methods and results. The results give a unique picture of how toddlers participate, interact and communicate while engaged in how to master various…

This article explores the deployment of triangulation in the service of uncovering subjugated knowledge and promoting social change for women and other oppressed groups. Feminist approaches to mixed methods praxis create a tight link between the research problem and the research design. An analysis of selected case studies of feminist praxis…

In the history of the scientific approach to educational issues in Sweden, educational research has been viewed as a scientific activity either because it is based in scientific institutions, because it uses scientific procedures, or because it is seen as a process of mapping reality. Initially, the creation of a specific discipline of education…

New data on retest reliabilities for three parental questionnaires, designed to measure children's temperaments at six months and at one and two years of age, were obtained with independent samples. The results showed a general level of retest reliability which was comparable to that of most temperament studies. (Author/RH)

Introduces the application of informetric methods to the World Wide Web (Webometrics). Presents a case study comparing the number of specific informetric analysis parameters of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway on the Web. Concludes that problems with data collection occur because current tools are inadequate and because collection methods, manual and…

When an interview is used as a research technique, the process of the dialogue between the experimenter and the subject is a part of the experimental conditions. The dialogue can be extensively structured, or it can be open-ended. Though the latter situation may provide more information about the subject's thought processes, there is a greater…