Texts and articles that put epistemological theories and methodologies to work in the context of qualitative research can stimulate scholarship in various ways such as through methodological innovations, transferability of theories and methods, interdisciplinarity, and transformative reflections across traditions and frameworks. Such…

This article explores some theoretical and methodological problems concerned with scale in education research through a critique of a recent mixed-method project. The project was framed by scale metaphors drawn from the physical and earth sciences and I consider how recent thinking around scale, for example, in ecosystems and human geography might…

In research textbooks, and much of the research practice, they describe, qualitative processes and interpretivist epistemologies tend to dominate visual methodology. This article challenges the assumptions behind this dominance. Using exemplification from three existing visual data sets produced through one large education research project, this…

In this article, we set out to explore what we describe as the use of video in various modalities. For us, modality is a synthesizing construct that draws together and differentiates between the notion of "video" both as a method and as a methodology. It encompasses the use of the term video as both product and process, and as a data collection…

Teachers' classroom-based action research is sometimes misunderstood by those who undertake it and support it, in three respects. First, it is wrongly assumed to fall into either positivist or interpretive paradigms (or perhaps a mixture of both) or to be critical. Second, there is little understanding as to why action research is necessarily…

This article presents accounts of four UK doctoral students' engagement in a Higher Education Academy project which used digital video (DV) to promote reflexivity on their doctoral journeys. Proceeding from participants' accounts of the production of their videonarratives, the article analyses the relations between doctoral research, reflexivity…

Raising standards in education has been the mantra for educational stakeholders in England for the past two decades and has informed national, regional and local agendas for school improvement. In the relentless pursuit of finding solutions to pedagogical problems, action research has been promoted as an effective strategy. Informed by an…

In recent decades, proponents of naturalistic and/or critical modes of inquiry advocating the use of ethnographic techniques for the narrative-based study of phenomena within pedagogical contexts have challenged the central methodological paradigm of educational research: that is, the tendency among its practitioners to adhere to quantitative…

The majority of social scientists continue to dismiss literary narratives as data that might lead to complex understandings of human phenomena. Introducing a method I call "novel inquiry", I argue that literary narratives merit inclusion as a source of data for educational inquiry. Utilizing literary narratives as a data source expands and…

The philosophical issues underpinning the quantitative-qualitative divide in educational research are examined. Three types of argument which support a resolution are considered: pragmatism, false duality and warranty through triangulation. In addition a number of proposed strategies--alignment, sequencing, translation and triangulation--are…

Calls for the quality of educational research to be monitored more carefully are examined in the context of the most widely used and trusted form of quality screening, namely, that afforded by peer review. The serious limitations of peer review for this purpose, especially in education, are outlined before discussing the place of peer review…

This paper develops a critical methodology which could be applied to the study and use of e-learning environments. The foundations are, first, an ontological appreciation of environments as multiple, dynamic and interactive: this is based on the environmental theories of Vladimir Vernadsky. The next step is then into epistemology, and here use is…