In the paper the qualitative research in which the researcher has been directly involved, and has himself been examining the research phenomenon in the studied environment, is presented. The aim of this qualitative study is to gather data in the form of rich content-based descriptions of people, events, and situations by using different, especially non-structural, techniques to discover the stakeholders' views and similar, to orally analyze the gathered data, and finally to interpret the findings in the form of a concept or contextually dependent grounded theory. The main purpose of the paper is to identify research approaches used by authors who have published in respected international science education journals in the last three years. It can be concluded from the results that authors have been using qualitative and mixed research approaches in more than half of the published papers in the last three years in order to address the research questions in their studies. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)