Drawing on our experiences of interviewing elites, this article suggests that methodological reflexivity yields insights into the construction of symbolic and social hierarchies in contextualised interactions. The paper focuses on "academic culture" as the "locus" through which power relations were experienced in interview…

Drawing on a larger study on "Gender practices and violence between peers: the stakes of mixed-sex education", this paper examines the methodological challenges specific to carrying out ethnography in an elite high school. The researcher's subjective experience in the field reveals the power dynamics at play in the elite setting. We also…

This article focuses on the methodological approaches used in the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) research project "Learning for Career and Labour Market Transitions--individual biographies". In particular, it illuminates how biographical approaches were employed to help the in-depth understanding of…

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…

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article…

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…

The increasing use of job training or retraining and employment programs in response to high rates of unemployment in France has spurred interest in program evaluation to see what results have been achieved. The contribution of traditional standardized evaluations and of emerging methodologies is being examined. Traditional evaluation methods…

In this article, we have examined how historical events shape the research process, even when research is carefully planned and rigorously executed. Through an examination of our experiences conducting international data collection during a three-year SSHRC funded period in which the War on Terrorism and the War in Iraq began, we suggest that…

This document contains three papers from a symposium on characteristics orientation, needs, and expectations. "Characteristics Orientation of Emerging Professions: Implications for Research, Policy, and Practice of Continuing Professional Education" (William H. Young, Margot B. Weinstein) reports on a qualitative study that examined…