This article describes a project involving 13 community focus groups on the topic of anti-racism and belonging where the researchers concluded each group with a robust discussion about how the group would prefer to receive the findings from the project. Analysis of this data, existing literature, and the practical experiences of the researchers…

All people vary in their needs and abilities; however, typical research practices do not consider these variations, which likely impacts who participates in research studies. Additionally, few PER studies have investigated aspects of disability or reported disability identity. Combined, this means that PER researchers typically do not seek out the…

In the twenty-first century, visual media are an undeniable component of everyday culture and sensemaking of race, yet when studying racism in education, researchers rarely centre the visual in their methods and analysis. This trend is alarming considering how racialised messages and violence (e.g. the murder of George Floyd) are routinely…

Although peer-led focus groups are widely used in research with children and young people, surprisingly little has been written that evaluates their methodological appropriateness. Drawing on data from 10 peer-led focus group sessions across 5 international schools, this article demonstrates how focus group discussions around moral and social…

In qualitative methods, there are various approaches that can be used to answer particular social questions, for example ethnography and case study. Two studies conducted by different researchers in China and Australia using these approaches were described and analysed in order to find out their similarities and differences in terms of…

Evaluation research focusing on educational initiatives that impact on the learning and lives of young people must be challenged to incorporate 'student voice'. In a context of conventional evaluation models of government-led initiatives, student voice is a compelling addition, and challenges the nature of traditional forms of evaluation. It…

This article explores challenges and opportunities associated with sharing qualitative data in engineering education research. This exploration is theoretically informed by an existing framework of interpretive research quality with a focus on the concept of Communicative Validation. Drawing on practice anecdotes from the authors' work, the…

The re-emergence of student voice presents a challenge to schools and researchers to become more responsive to the voice of adolescents in education and in research. However, the poor articulation of the nature of student voice to date is confirmation of the complex and important nature of the personal advocacy and human agency that is involved in…

I argue for the continuing relevance of the Bourdieusian theoretical schema to research related to higher education. The paper discusses my use of Bourdieu in two research projects: an examination of the educational and occupational decision-making of final-year vocational A-level students; an analysis of the perceptions of final-year…

In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have chosen to examine various sociological dimensions of music education (e.g., inclusion, civic engagement) through the lens of social capital. Yet, there has been no systematic discussion of the capacity and limitations of this conceptual framework to shed light on these sociological…

Critical thinking is frequently proposed as one of the most important learning outcomes of a university education. However, to date, it has been difficult to ascertain whether university students in low-income contexts are improving in their critical thinking skills, because the limited studies in this domain have relied on instruments developed…

Traditionally there has been a tension between evaluation research and so-called pure research which has resulted in evaluation research seldom being recognized by the UK Research Assessment Exercises. The newly configured Research Excellence Framework (REF) will use similar criteria to judge research, notwithstanding the introduction of…

This article explores qualitative shadowing as an interpretivist methodology, and explains how two researchers participating simultaneously in data collection using a video recorder, contextual interviews and video-stimulated recall interviews, conducted a qualitative shadowing study at six early childhood centres in Norway. This paper emerged…

The ubiquity of mobile devices and their use for collecting and sharing data require a reconsideration of approaches taken to managing ethical concerns in the educational research context. In the mobile age, the concept of educational research extends beyond traditional understandings and contexts due to: the wide range of mobile learning research…

In evaluation and applied social research, focus groups may be used to gather different kinds of evidence (e.g., opinion, tacit knowledge). In this article, we argue that making focus group design choices explicitly in relation to the type of evidence required would enhance the empirical value and rigor associated with focus group utilization. We…