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…

Methodologists serve a critical role in the research enterprise. It is our contention that there is an imbalance between the need for methodologists and the needs of methodologists. Providing methodological support to substantive research and methodological reviews are critical service areas that strengthen the entire research enterprise.…

Quantitative methods have a long historical entanglement with oppressive ideologies, including eugenics, white supremacism, and anti-LGBTQ+ ideology. Increasingly, scholars have made attempts at rectifying quantitative methods by bringing them into conversation with critical theoretical frameworks. One such example is QuantCrit, which attempts to…

Not knowing the population size is a common problem in data-limited contexts. Drawing on work in Sierra Leone, this short take outlines a four-step solution to this problem: (1) estimate the population size using expert interviews; (2) verify estimates using interviews with participants sampled; (3) triangulate using secondary data; and (4)…

Systematic reviews (SRs) have an important role in the healthcare decision-making practice. Assessing the overall confidence in the results of SRs using quality assessment tools, such as "A MeaSurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2" (AMSTAR 2), is crucial since not all SRs are conducted using the most rigorous methods. In this…

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…

Much research has been conducted "on" young people as a population rather than "with" them. Traditionally, porn research has focused on effects--on the assumption that people, especially young people, are impacted by the sexual media they consume, which leads to negative outcomes such as violence and addiction. In this sense,…

Meta-analyses can be used to comprehensively summarize the state of a given literature base, understand development and relations between constructs, and synthesize intervention effects to identify "what works for whom," all of which can directly inform research, practice, and policy. In this tutorial, we first argue that data reporting…

Inspired by "choose your own adventure" books, this unit activity helps students differentiate between ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodology, and method. While completing the activity over two weeks, students apply these concepts to the study of a topic of the instructor's choosing (illustrated here through the lens of family…

In the 2020s, there are both societal and academic reasons to reflect on the field of history of education. In this article, we focus on the issue of the social, which remains central to the field as we acknowledge that society shapes education and education shapes society. By exploring the social on theoretical, methodological and broader…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are useful survey tools for estimating the prevalence of sensitive issues, such as the prevalence of doping in elite sports. One type of RRT, the unrelated question model (UQM), has become widely used because of its psychological acceptability for study participants and its favorable statistical properties.…

The increasing scholarship on queer Latinx/a/o people in higher education research demands scholars to propound epistemologies and methodologies throughout the inquiry process that centers such communities. Methodologies, such as "feminista pláticas" disrupt epistemological boundaries to traditional ways of knowing and thus offer an…

Measurement in the social sciences involves assigning values to particular empirical cases and plays a vital role in the research process, but it can be tricky to teach. Unless an undergraduate social sciences research methods course includes the collection of original data, many of the issues of measurement can seem abstract and arcane to…

What is the science of reading? The Reading League, in their document "Science of Reading: Defining Guide" (TRL, 2022), proposes that "The science of reading is a vast, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based* research about reading and issues related to reading and writing." (p. 11.) The asterisk is carrying a lot of…

Evidence syntheses that engage librarians as co-authors produce higher-quality results than those that do not. Trained as teachers, researchers, and information managers, librarians possess expert knowledge on research methodologies and information retrieval approaches that are critical for evidence synthesis. Researchers are under increasing…