With the rise of the impact assessment revolution, governments and public opinion have started to ask researchers to give evidence of their impact outside the traditional audiences, i.e. students and researchers. There is a mismatch between the request to demonstrate the impact and the current methodologies for impact assessment. This mismatch is…

Purpose: This article explores the policy context in the UK around securing impact from academic research, particularly from the perspective of a social science education researcher. Approach: The article locates impact studies within debates about broader accountability frameworks. Insights from this literature are applied to a case study about…

This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from…

While there are increasing numbers of fixed-term researchers internationally, their experiences are relatively under-examined. As a result, I argue their developmental needs are not well understood and rarely addressed. This study--a cross-case analysis of social science researchers in two universities in the UK--builds on the few existing…

"Children as Researchers in Primary Schools" is an innovative and unique resource for practitioners supporting children to become "real world" researchers in the primary classroom. It will supply you with the skills and ideas you need to implement a "children as researchers" framework in your school that can be adapted for different ages and…

This paper emerges from a case study of the system of statutory reviews in older people's care homes in the UK. Informed by a review of selected literature on gaining access, this paper provides a critical account of the process of negotiating access with gatekeepers (chiefly, care home managers). The negotiations were time-consuming and largely…

"Seven Rules for Social Research" teaches social scientists how to get the most out of their technical skills and tools, providing a resource that fully describes the strategies and concepts no researcher or student of human behavior can do without. Glenn Firebaugh provides indispensable practical guidance for anyone doing research in the social…

The paper examines aspects of the relationship between teaching and research in higher education in social science research methods, with particular reference to the subject area of Education. There are three main themes: reflections on how social science research methods should be (or are) taught; a review of current debates about the…

It is argued that careful attention to the role of the researcher's experience in qualitative research is desirable for several reasons. A rationale for such examination is established, and the research and scholarly activity pursued by the author for the last 11 years are described to present a kind of career case study for analysis of the…

This paper argues that in addition to being an important source of data for a project evaluator, project humor also provides a check on the evaluator's comprehension of background and events (i.e., if an evaluator does not understand a joke, he or she has probably not attained an insider's perspective). In addition, humor becomes a source of…

Discusses anthropology's role in policy-relevant educational research, drawing on experiences in evaluating Chicago (Illinois) city schools' restructuring. Questions raised by case studies in school restructuring include qualitative researchers' role in studying educational policy, issues of objectivity in policy research, and networking…

Few dissertations on vocational educational history are being written by graduate students. Reasons for this paucity of research include: (1) few opportunities exist for employment in the foundations of education field; and (2) few mentorships are availabile for those with training in both historical methods and vocational education fields. The…

The movement toward integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods within the same study has been most evident in social policy research. Four major approaches to integrating can be identified in recent studies. The sequential, the parallel, and the fused models have been rather widely used. The interactive model, developed during…

Six papers are presented from an American Educational Research Association symposium. The symposium explored the kind of research needed for increasing understanding of college and university faculty and examined the manner in which different scholarly techniques can contribute. The symposium objective was to open for discussion four modes for…