Decades of research has assessed the benefits of children's and adolescents' friendships, but friendships among youth often dissolve within a matter of months or years. Studies have investigated predictors and consequences of friendship stability with the expectation that, in order for friendships to have a positive or negative influence on youth,…

We delineate the underlying homogeneity assumption, procedural variants, and implications of the comparative method and distinguish this from Mill's method of difference. We demonstrate that additional units can provide "placebo" tests for the comparative method even if the scope of inference is limited to the two units under comparison.…

This research examines public care and support services for young people at risk of entering care in other European countries and the lessons that can be learnt for England's care system.

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi-sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it…

New theories and theory-based methodological approaches have found their way into Comparative Education--just as into Comparative Social Science more generally--in increasing number in the recent past. The essays of this volume express and critically discuss quite a range of these positions such as, inter alia, the theory of self-organizing social…

This is a unique and groundbreaking collection of questions and answers coming from higher education institutions on diverse fields and across a wide spectrum of countries and cultures. It creates routes for further innovation, collaboration amidst the Sciences (both Natural and Social), the Humanities, and the private and public sectors of…

Contrasts two types of research methodologies based on two modes of apprehension of the educational sphere, phenomenological-subjectivist and scientific-objectivist. Suggests a third, alternative in action-research which establishes a system of dialectic relations between theory and practice. The French ARPEGE action-research project on home and…

The methodologies employed in comparative higher education and comparative education are briefly summarized and analyzed. Weaknesses of the following approaches used by scholars/researchers in the field are identified: (1) locating decision-making structures and relations in broadly differentiated aggregations of systems; (2) case study; (3)…

This paper discusses the contribution of international studies on educational effectiveness in the light of 4 papers presented at the new ICSEI Methodology of Research and Effectiveness (MORE) Network in Barcelona in January 2005 and published in this issue of the journal. A brief historical overview is used to provide a context for these papers…

This report reviews the research and development (R&D) structures and practices for vocational education, training, and employment in the United States, Germany, France, Sweden, and England. The organization and management of each country's R&D system as well as R&D agendas and priorities are analyzed. General observations and…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…