An ongoing oral history project at the University of Cumbria seeks to uncover the lived experiences of people with learning difficulties who lived at the Royal Albert Hospital. A recently made video exposed the apparent distress this caused one of the participants. Ethical discussions about the project reached a point of being "stuck".…

The purpose of this study was to examine (a) factors that influence effective cross-cultural collaboration, and (b) challenges and issues that face researchers in cross-cultural collaboration. During the summer of 2010, 20 researchers and student interns from Ghana Education Service, Chicago State University (CSU-USA), Winneba University of…

This article examines the political project of Cultural Studies by calling for a re-examination of the cultural studies research practices. The metaphors used by cultural studies researchers are explored, as these demonstrate the ways in which researchers have sought to emphasize openness and fluidity. However, it is argued that the desire for…

This study presents the results of a teacher research project. The analysis aimed to explore both the four teacher researchers' interpretations of conducting research in English language teaching and the nature of their collaboration with their supervisor in the procedure. The results showed that qualitative data analysis and interpreting the…

This article begins by raising issues around the way in which ethical approval for research is managed in university settings, where committees often base their assumptions on a principlist approach making a number of assumptions that we consider to be contestable, such as a neat separation between researcher and researched. However, collaborative…

This paper examines what is arguably the most important issue in qualitative research--access to willing participants--specifically in the context of companies. This is of considerable importance in vocational education and training (VET) as workplaces are the site of much VET activity. While research textbooks discuss many issues in research, few…

Being a novice researcher undertaking research interviews with young children requires understandings of the interview process. By investigating the interaction between a novice researcher undertaking her first interview and a child participant, the authors attend to theoretical principles, such as the competence of young children as informants,…

This article is derived from a recently completed research study on the "Schooling Experiences of HIV+ Children in Jamaica". It is written against the background of researching children generally, and also in the context of researching vulnerable children, specifically those who are HIV+. Research carries with it various notions of power…

Two basic data sources required for research studies have been secondary and primary. Secondary data collection helps the researcher to provide relevant background to the study and are, in most cases, available for retrieval from recorded sources. Primary data collection requires the researcher to venture into the field where the study is to take…

This article applies to class size research Grant and Graue's (1999) position that reviews of research represent conversations in the academic community. By extending our understanding of the class size reduction conversation beyond published literature to the perspectives of researchers who have studied the topic, we create a review that includes…

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…

In this article, the authors discuss the utility of combining quantitative and qualitative methods in conducting intersectional analyses. First, they discuss some of the paradigmatic underpinnings of qualitative and quantitative research, and how these methods can be used in intersectional analyses. They then consider how paradigmatic pragmatism…

Do researchers make a difference with the research they conduct? Most people would like to think so. In this paper, the author argues that much of the research conducted by researchers is guided primarily by personal interests and needs and not because of professional needs or identified gaps in knowledge. The author also argues that experiential…

This paper explores the possibility of fashioning a queer methodology for educational research through analysis of three research studies. It begins with the question of queer visibility, asking about the ethics and utility of remaining closeted vs. disclosing one's identity. It then explores the question of researcher subjectivity and of putting…

Written as four scenes that span a five-year period, this article examines the summative evaluation of an organized school reform programme in the United States from the teacher perspective. The study provides fine-grained details of how the evaluation of the particular reform effort went "awry" in the view of some teachers who directly…