As canons for trustworthiness developed explicitly in the discourse of qualitative inquiry, the emphasis was on procedural matters rather than fundamentally relational ones. A nod was made to the relational in such strategies as "member checks" but the issues of how the evaluator actually relates to participants and to the larger communities of…

In this comment article on Coulter and Smith (2009), the authors raise concerns that focusing exclusively on issues of representation may lead readers to misunderstandings about narrative research. The authors argue that narrative ways of thinking about the phenomena under study are interwoven with narrative research methodologies. Drawing on…

The purpose of this essay is to discuss current views of public writing and contribute notions of qualitative research and cultural geography to these conversations. The author also provides two pedagogical examples of how these contributions inform student writing and civic participation in various public spaces. The author believes that public…

Furlong and Oancea's influential framework for assessing the products of applied and practice-based educational inquiry raises some important issues about the criteria by which research should be judged. They begin by outlining the current significance of the issue, and some of the uncertainties surrounding the definition of applied and…

This article presents the authors' response to commentaries that focus on the "Behavioral Constructs and Culture in Cancer Screening" (3Cs) study. The 3Cs study had an unremarkable beginning, with two colleagues discussing their frustration over the narrow range of behavioral theories and the limited guidance the theories offered for a study…

This paper presents the author's comments on the Michigan sex offender registration article "Family Experiences of Young Adult Sex Offender Registration" (Comartin, Kernsmith, & Miles, 2010). The article is an important piece of research that addresses a much neglected and almost invisible population in the annals of research: the…

As co-chairs of a tribute panel for their academic mentors, Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, the authors knew what the traditional responsibilities would require, but as a performer and a poet, they were inspired to do something more creative. Something poetic. Something performative. Something different. In this article, the authors present a…

Generally educational research is grounded in the empirical traditions of the social sciences (commonly called quantitative and qualitative methods) and is as such distinguished from other forms of scholarship such as theoretical, conceptual or methodological essays, critiques of research traditions and practices and those studies grounded in the…

A curious piece of ironic, partially-dramatised auto/ethnography, this paper reflects an ongoing attempt to explore the vapid certainties of my own faith, some of the brittle discomforts of contemporary schooling, and the possibilities of a social science research methodology which can artfully assemble on the same stage belief, empirics and…

This article began as a response to the article "Action research as narrative: five principles for validation" by Heikkinen, Huttunen and Syrjala, which appears in this issue of "Educational Action Research". In so doing it addresses the question "How can we tell whether an action research study is good?" by arguing that validity is a construct…

This article provides a brief rejoinder to Gorard and Smith's reply to an article I published in a previous issue of British Journal of Sociology of Education. In that original article I provided a critical review of their quantitative research on gender and education in the United Kingdom. In their reply to this article, Gorard and Smith seem to…

This article contains reflections provoked by the articles in this volume of "The Counseling Psychologist." As a relative outsider to counseling psychology, the author thoroughly enjoyed immersing herself in these contributions and then extracting a set of thoughts inspired by the writers.

Drawing on the literature on Asian international students, current debates surrounding English as an international language (EIL), and the conceptual tools of appropriation, this article reports the findings of a qualitative research study with eight Asian international students studying at a university in Thailand to explore their taking…

I argue in this article that recognizing the role of subjectivity and bringing in the researcher's positionality as a tool in the research process can not only enhance the ethical integrity of the research but also enhance both the research process and the analysis and interpretation of the data. Cultural studies theorists have long argued that…

This response to Slavin's article (2008) explores the issues of transparency, representation, and warranting of claims in Slavin's descriptions of the work of others and his suggestions for program evaluation syntheses. Through contrastive analyses between Slavin's representations of the program evaluation synthesis efforts of five organizations…