In this article, the authors address some of the scientific challenges associated with using observation as a research method. The authors ask how researchers contextualise and understand observation in terms of its theoretical underpinnings and how it is conducted. Using a vignette in the kindergarten context, the authors explore how observation…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how an academic researcher and a practitioner experience scepticism for their qualitative research. Design/methodology/approach: The study applies Olt and Teman's new conceptual phenomenological polyethnography (2019) methodology, a hybrid of phenomenology and duoethnography. Findings: For the…

Participatory research actively engages participants in some or all stages of the research process -- from deciding on scope and problem statement to actively collecting data to disseminating results and effecting change. Considering the shifting roles of participants and researchers in participatory ageing research, to the academic, participatory…

Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary…

Prompted by discovering a paper written in 1980 which described a process of 'ethnography by proxy', I revisit this concept in the light of two research projects: a workplace study of an electronics company conducted in the early 1990s and a later home-based study of young children's encounters with toys and technology. The paper defines…

As ethnographers we are familiar with methodological debates problematising ethnography's inherited and inherent connections to ideas of authenticity commonly mobilised to legitimate modes of representation. In this paper, we engage with the post-structural philosophies of Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler, to argue that methodological tools of…

University researchers face a significant obstacle when studying schools: their lives as researchers began in schools. How can researchers enter the contemporary high school and see the movement of bodies through those halls as something other than a confirmation or rejection of their own schooling experiences? What special intellectual and…

This article contributes to the debate on decolonising methodologies in qualitative research by considering how a white researcher can try and destabilise white supremacy when explicitly conducting research with social justice aims. It draws on data from a recent ethnographic study of minority ethnic pupils' experiences in secondary schools in…

When conducting research on sensitive topics, it is challenging to use new methods of data collection given the apprehensions of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). This is especially worrying because sensitive topics of research often require novel approaches. In this article a brief personal history of navigating the IRB process for conducting…

Over the past few years, the focus group method has assumed a very important role as a method for collecting qualitative data in social and behavioural science research. This article elucidates theoretical and practical problems and prospects associated with the use of focus groups as a qualitative research method in social and behavioural science…

Yorks et al. present a case study of participant observation in an Action Reflection Learning program, labeling researchers as sophisticated barbarians because they have knowledge to ask questions but their distance from the culture might make some questions "barbaric." Baldwin's reaction describes additional challenges beyond boundary…