Background: People with intellectual disability encounter substantial healthcare discrepancies, yet are under-represented in research. While people with intellectual disability can make valuable contributions to research and consequently improve their quality of life, researchers encounter multiple challenges including them in research. One…

The paper offers a critical appraisal of the global knowledge developments in education using China's contributions in a fashion similar to a case study. The paper scrutinizes the complicity of Western educational research to euro-centric biases and discusses the pursuit of a global epistemological eclecticism. To support this claim, the magnitude…

Perspectives and approaches to health and wellbeing education vary considerably over time and space even as certain contextual and critical features may be maintained. Through an analysis of a range of studies published in the "Journal of Curriculum Studies", we illustrate what unites as much as divides various positions taken by their…

Nowadays, technologies play a key role in educational research processes, especially in the context of complex designs or integrative perspectives (qualitative and quantitative). Affordances provided by new tools and technological devices are constantly impacting the way educational research is carried out. Consequently, this growing importance…

Data analysis is a significant methodological component when conducting quantitative education studies. Guidelines for conducting data analyses in quantitative education studies are common but often underemphasize four important methodological components impacting the validity of inferences: quality of constructed measures, proper handling of…

Ethics dumping is the practice of undertaking research in a low- or middle-income setting which would not be permitted, or would be severely restricted, in a high-income setting. Whilst Kenya operates a sophisticated research governance system, resource constraints and the relatively low number of accredited research ethics committees limit the…

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…

This research note discusses opportunities and challenges of using online survey engines for social network analysis (SNA) data collection and assessing sample size and representativeness. The discussion is based on a case study of SNA data collection for a pilot research on health-relevant policy networks in Canada. Our approach demonstrates how…

Short message service (SMS or text messaging) surveys can collect data quickly and inexpensively. However, SMS surveys have space constraints that pose difficulties to questionnaire designers: Questions can only be 160 characters or less, surveys must be short, and many respondents use phones with small screens. In this article, we compare SMS and…

While other fields such as statistics and education have examined various issues with quantitative work, few studies in physics education research (PER) have done so. We conducted a two-phase study to identify and to understand the extent of these issues in quantitative PER. During phase 1, we conducted a focus group of three experts in this area,…

Although over the past decades the numbers of studies investigating international student mobility and migration (ISM) increased, methodological challenges in empirical research on the topic have remained mainly unaddressed. This is particularly the case for sampling, which is a crucial but often less considered part of qualitative research…

This essay argues for the urgent need for philosophy as the necessary first step in any educational undertaking. Philosophy is involved with making fine distinctions which are necessary to clarify concepts and terms. The paper focuses primarily on the problems with an overreliance on scientific research in the social sciences, with special…

Routing examinees to modules based on their ability level is a very important aspect in computerized adaptive multistage testing. However, the presence of missing responses may complicate estimation of examinee ability, which may result in misrouting of individuals. Therefore, missing responses should be handled carefully. This study investigated…

Interview-based research in multilingual situations can present researchers with specific ethical challenges relating to language-based power play, data handling and presentation. Studies indicate favouring the L1 (first language) as an interviewing language may produce better quality data, but external pressures can favour English as the dominant…

Researching ethically is an institutional requirement and cornerstone of good everyday practice in conducting research, adopting a mindful consideration for participants and resisting the temptation to use methodological approaches which may exploit participants or their trust in the research process or researcher. In the context of outdoor…