While ethical norms for conducting academic research in the United Kingdom are relatively clear, there is little empirical understanding of how university research ethics committees (RECs) themselves operate and whether they are seen to operate well. In this article, we offer insights from a project focused on the Scottish university context. We…

Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid…

In Swedish preschools teachers seem to struggle with the concept of "teaching" in their day-to-day practices. A three-year collaborative research project involving preschool teachers, managers and researchers therefore aimed to describe and further develop knowledge about what could characterize teaching and co-assessment based on…

Ongoing colonial power has long been ascribed to government bureaucracy and institutions of higher learning. By consequence, Indigenous communities today are still experiencing challenges regarding the function, foundation and fabric of research that impacts Indigenous peoples, including in the arena of social work education. Writing as an…

This paper examines the challenges of developing research resources for leading Vietnamese universities. The first part of the paper presents the background to the study, including literature review on the challenges to research resources development, and describes the research questions and research methods. The next part provides empirical…

Researchers are guided by their ideological and ethical viewpoints when conducting research. Doing research for government challenges them to confront these ideals head-on. This article explores the uncertain terrain researchers sometimes have to negotiate when conducting research for government, and discusses relations between researchers and…

The researcher recounts her own experiences as an educational administrator in a central office who examined that position in a research study of the power relations and effectiveness of women in administrative authority. The researcher's reactions to being the object of study, and being perceived in a way that differed from her self-perceptions,…

A community-wide survey to examine needed changes in the Sacramento City Unified School District high school program was designed and implemented. Because of problems encountered in presenting a proposal, a major initial and ongoing objective was the education of administrators and board members in conducting a valid community survey. Underlying…

The positive and negative experiences a professional educator had in in the role of researcher are used to discuss several dilemmas that this dual role brings: presentation of self; preparation and conduct of the study; reciprocity for subjects; presentation of findings; researcher bias; and anticipation of concern. Several conclusions drawn were:…

The relationship between life history, gender, and the discourse of modernization was examined from the perspective of a researcher with extensive experience performing evaluations about modernization within human services in Denmark. Three stories about site-based management in two human service institutionsa youth center and a boarding school…