This article discusses how the design of research should follow the questions the study seeks to address. The article provides practical and diverse examples of broad research questions applicable to researchers or program architects and summarizes how different methods should be employed to respond.

Integration is a valuable yet underutilized process in scientific literatures, including the achievement motivation literature. In this piece, we advocate for and illustrate the benefits of giving integration a central place within the achievement motivation literature. We pay particular attention to the hierarchical model of achievement…

"Researching Practices Across and Within Diverse Educational Sites" explores the role of educational research in uncertain, risky times. Researching practices and their consequences transpire unpredictably, depending on how we set about to understand these practices. The authors consider the unknowns in research action, and what promises…

Mixed methods research, or mixed research, is an area with a great deal of promise for applied linguistics, especially given the field's diverse range of topics and methods. However, when mixed research mixes qualitative and qualitative methods, this can be problematic as researchers suppose this implies mixing mutually exclusive 'quantitative'…

I start with a detailed but "partial" analysis of a case regarding grade inflation. The case is inspired by the discussion in Crumbley et al. (2010) and its elaboration in Roberts (2016). I supplement the case description by introducing certain facts that are not in the original discussion. The subsequent analysis is based on this…

It is now half a century since Joey explained to Paul Willis: 'Vandalising […] that's the opposite of boredom -- excitement, defying the law', one of many similar comments subsequently recorded in "Learning to Labour" (34). The book rapidly became an academic best-seller, and has since become an academic 'national treasure'. But, before…

Practitioner researchers have much to gain from using stimulated recall, a powerful data collection method whereby structured observations are followed by introspectively focused interviews. The close insider positions that practitioner researchers maintain, however, mean that they are liable to very powerful intuitions. Working under the…

In this essay, we explore the tension between research using continuous improvement (CI) paradigms, such as improvement science, and conventional research, and the role and regulation of Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight. We argue that the current regulatory structure privileges traditional research and hinders collaborative inquiry that…

Over the past 35 years, the dance domain has adopted sports medicine as a key driver of professional practice. However, similar to limitations identified within sport, research is yet to achieve its full translational potential within applied settings. This "Viewpoints" paper begins to identify and unpick key philosophical and…

Research in mathematics education constantly oscillates between theoretical or 'Is' questions and practical or 'Ought' questions: Researchers are not only pursuing theoretical questions by investigating what those involved in the teaching and learning of mathematics do, but they are also working on practical recommendations for what they ought to…

This paper considers what it could mean to say that epistemologies and methodologies are racially just or unjust. It has been argued that this has nothing to do with whether an individual researcher is racist: he or she could be anti-racist but still use an epistemology that is racially biased. To explore this issue, some pioneering research by…

This paper presents a model of recurrent multinomial sequences. Though there exists a quite considerable literature on modeling autocorrelation in numerical data and sequences of categorical outcomes, there is currently no systematic method of modeling patterns of recurrence in categorical sequences. This paper develops a means of discovering…

The article focuses on infrastructures as heterogeneous assemblages. Our claim is that to examine something as elusive as data infrastructure calls for an epistemological and methodological approach consistent with the fluid ontology of the object of study. Moreover, we assert that there is no position of exteriority from which to critique data…

The global scale of COVID-19 has constrained academics from conducting much person-facing research. Reactively, trend is increasing for digital-based methodologies capturing already existing online data. Scholars often 'scrape' user-postings from internet forums using coding algorithms and text capture tools, before analysing data, drawing…

In response to considerable critique of its rigour and relevance, the field of educational research has sought to prove its validity, both in terms of its scientific legitimacy and its relevance to policy and practice. One result of this has been a heightened concern with methodology, to the extent that a form of methodolatry has developed. In…