Research Methods in Education

Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, Keith Morrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315456515
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This thoroughly updated and extended eighth edition of the long-running bestseller Research Methods in Education covers the whole range of methods employed by educational research at all stages. Its five main parts cover: the context of educational research; research design; methodologies for educational research; methods of data collection; and data analysis and reporting. It continues to be the go-to text for students, academics and researchers who are undertaking, understanding and using educational research, and has been translated into several languages. It offers plentiful and rich practical advice, underpinned by clear theoretical foundations, research evidence and up-to-date references, and it raises key issues and questions for researchers planning, conducting, reporting and evaluating research.

This edition contains new chapters on:

• Mixed methods research
• The role of theory in educational research
• Ethics in Internet research
• Research questions and hypotheses
• Internet surveys
• Virtual worlds, social network software and netography in educational research
• Using secondary data in educational research
• Statistical significance, effect size and statistical power
• Beyond mixed methods: using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to integrate cross-case and within-case analyses.

Research Methods in Education is essential reading for both the professional researcher and anyone involved in educational and social research. The book is supported by a wealth of online materials, including PowerPoint slides, useful weblinks, practice data sets, downloadable tables and figures from the book, and a virtual, interactive, self-paced training programme in research methods. These resources can be found at: www.routledge.com/cw/cohen.

Part 1
The context of educational research

This part introduces readers to different research traditions, with the advice that ‘fitness for purpose’ must be the guiding principle: different research paradigms for different research purposes. A major message in this part is that the nature and foundations of educational research have witnessed a proliferation of paradigms over time. From the earlier days of either quantitative or qualitative research have arisen the several approaches introduced here.

This part commences by introducing positivist and scientific contexts of research and some strengths and weaknesses of these for educational research, followed by post-positivist views of research. As an alternative paradigm, the cluster of approaches that can loosely be termed interpretive, naturalistic, phenomenological, interactionist and ethnographic are brought together, and their strengths and weaknesses for educational research are examined. Postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches are also introduced, and these lead into an introduction to complexity theory in educational research. The paradigm of mixed methods research is introduced, and its foundations, strengths, weaknesses, contribution to and practices in educational research are discussed.

Critical theory as a paradigm of educational research is discussed, and its implications for the research are indicated in several ways, resonating with curriculum research, participatory research, feminist research, post-colonial research and queer theory. These are concerned not only with understanding a situation or phenomenon but with changing it, often with an explicit political agenda. Critical theory links the conduct of educational research with politics and policy making, and this is reflected in the discussions of research and evaluation, noting how some educational research has become evaluative in nature.

This part includes a new chapter on the role of theory in educational research, indicating its several meanings, its origins and roles in educational research, and what makes a theory interesting and useful. It also includes the discussion of causation in educational research and key elements in understanding and working with causation.

The term research itself has many meanings. We restrict its usages here to those activities and undertakings aimed at developing a science of behaviour, the word science itself implying both normative and interpretive perspectives. Accordingly, when we speak of social research, we have in mind the systematic and scholarly application of the principles of a science of behaviour to the problems of people within their social contexts, and when we use the term educational research, we likewise have in mind the application of these same principles to the problems of teaching and learning within education and to the clarification of issues having direct or indirect bearing on these concepts.

Chapter 1
The nature of enquiry

Setting the field

This large chapter explores the context of educational research. It sets out several foundations on which different kinds of empirical research are constructed:

• the search for understanding
• paradigms of educational research
• scientific and positivistic methodologies
• naturalistic and interpretive methodologies
• post-positivism, post-structuralism and postmodernism
• complexity theory in educational research

Educational researchers cannot simply ‘read off’ the planning and conduct of research as though one were reading a recipe for baking a cake. Nor is the planning and conduct of research the laboratory world or the field study of the natural scientist. Rather, it is to some degree an art, an iterative and often negotiated process and one in which there are typically trade-offs between what one would like to do and what is actually possible. This book is built on that basis: educational research, far from being a mechanistic exercise, is a deliberative, complex, subtle, challenging, thoughtful activity and often a messier process than researchers would like it to be. This book provides some tools for such deliberation and planning, and hopefully some answers, but beyond that it is for the researcher to consider how to approach, plan, conduct, validate and evaluate the research, how to develop and test theory, how to study and investigate educational matters, how to balance competing demands on the research, and so on. There is no one best way to plan and conduct research, just as there is no one single ‘truth’ to be discovered. Life is not that easy, unidimensional or straightforwardly understood, just as there are no simple dichotomies in educational research (e.g. quantitative or qualitative, objective or subjective). Rather, we live in a pluralistic world with many purposes and kinds of research, many realities and lived experiences to catch, many outcomes, theories and explanations, many discoveries to be made, and many considerations and often contradictions or sensitivities to be addressed in the planning and conduct of the research.

Whilst arguing against simple foundationalism, this chapter sets out some conceptions of research which researchers may find helpful in characterizing and deliberating about their studies. The chapter considers paradigms and their possible contribution to educational research, positivism, post-positivism, post-structuralism, postmodernism and interpretive approaches.

1.1 Introduction

Our analysis takes an important notion from Hitchcock and Hughes (1995, p. 21), who suggest that ontological assumptions (assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature of things) give rise to epistemological assumptions (ways of researching and enquiring into the nature of reality and the nature of things); these, in turn, give rise to methodological considerations; and these, in turn, give rise to issues of instrumentation and data collection. Added to ontology and epistemology is axiology (the values and beliefs that we hold). This view moves us beyond regarding research methods as simply a technical exercise to being concerned with understanding the world; this is informed by how we view our world(s), what we take understanding to be, what we see as the purposes of understanding and what is deemed valuable.

1.2 The search for understanding

People have long been concerned to come to grips with their environment and to understand the nature of the phenomena it presents to their senses. The means by which they set out to achieve these ends may be classified into three broad categories: experience, reasoning and research (Mouly, 1978). Far from being independent and mutually exclusive, however, these categories are complementary and overlapping, features most readily in evidence where solutions to complex problems are sought.

In our endeavours to come to terms with day-to-day living, we are heavily dependent upon experience and authority. However, as tools for uncovering ultimate truth, they have limitations. The limitations of personal experience in the form of common-sense knowing, for instance, can quickly be exposed when compared with features of the scientific approach to problem solving. Consider, for example, the striking differences in the way in which theories are used. Laypeople base them on haphazard events and use them in a loose and uncritical manner. When they are required to test them, they do so in a selective fashion, often choosing only that evidence which is consistent with their hunches and ignoring that which is counter to them. Scientists, by contrast, construct their theories carefully and systematically. Whatever hypotheses they formulate have to be tested empirically so that their explanations have a firm basis in fact. And there is the concept of control distinguishing the layperson’s and the scientist’s attitude to experience. Laypeople may make little or no attempt to control any extraneous sources of influence when trying to explain an occurrence. Scientists, on the other hand, only too conscious of the multi-plicity of causes for a given occurrence, adopt definite techniques and procedures to isolate and test the effect of one or more of the alleged causes. Finally, there is the difference of attitude to the relationships among phenomena. Laypeople’s concerns with such relationships may be loose, unsystematic and uncontrolled; the chance occurrence of two events in close proximity is sufficient reason to predicate a causal link between them. Scientists, however, display a much more serious professional concern with relationships and only as a result of rigorous experimentation, investigation and testing will they postulate a relationship between two phenomena.

People attempt to comprehend the world around them by using three types of reasoning: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning and the combined inductive-deductive approach. Deductive reasoning is based on the syllogism, which was Aristotle’s great contribution to formal logic. In its simplest form the syllogism consists of a major premise based on an a priori or self-evident proposition, a minor premise providing a particular instance, and a conclusion. Thus:

All planets orbit the sun;

The earth is a planet;

Therefore the earth orbits the sun.

The assumption underlying the syllogism is that through a sequence of formal steps of logic, from the general to the particular, a valid conclusion can be deduced from a valid premise. Its chief limitation is that it can handle only certain kinds of statement. The syllogism formed the basis of systematic reasoning from the time of its inception until the Renaissance. Thereafter its effectiveness was diminished because it was no longer related to observation and experience and became merely a mental exercise. One of the consequences of this was that empirical evidence as the basis of proof was superseded by authority and the more authorities one could quote, the stronger one’s position became.

The history of reasoning was to undergo a dramatic change in the 1600s when Francis Bacon began to lay increasing stress on the observational basis of science. Being critical of the model of deductive reasoning on the grounds that its major premises were often preconceived notions which inevitably bias the conclusions, he proposed in its place the method of inductive reasoning by means of which the study of a number of individual cases would lead to a hypothesis and eventually to a generalization. Mouly (1978) explains it by suggesting that Bacon’s basic premise was that, with sufficient data, even if one does not have a preconceived idea of their significance or meaning, nevertheless important relationships and laws will be discovered by the alert observer.

Of course, there are limits to induction as the accumulation of a series of examples does not prove a theory; it only supports it. Just because all the swans that I have ever seen are white, it does not prove a theory that all swans are white – one day I might come across a black swan, and my theory is destroyed. Induction places limits on prediction. Discoveries of associations of regularities and frequent repetitions may have limited predictive value. We are reminded of Bertrand Russell’s (1959) story of the chicken who observed that he was fed each day by the same man, and, because this had happened every day, it would continue to happen, i.e. the chicken had a theory of being fed, but, as Russell remarks, ‘the man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead’ (p. 35), indicating the limits of prediction based on observation. Or, to put it more formally, theory is underdetermined by empirical evidence (Phillips and Burbules, 2000, p. 17). Indeed Popper (1980) notes that the essence of science, what makes a science a science, is the inherent falsifiability of the propositions (in contrast to the views of the method of science as being one of verifiability, as held by logical positivists).

This is not to discard induction: it is often the starting point for science. Rather, it is to caution against assuming that it ‘proves’ anything. Bacon’s major contribution to science was that he was able to rescue it from the stranglehold of the deductive method whose abuse had brought scientific progress to a standstill. He thus directed the attention of scientists to nature for solutions to people’s problems, demanding empirical evidence for verification. Logic and authority in themselves were no longer regarded as conclusive means of proof and instead became sources of hypotheses about the world and its phenomena.

Bacon’s inductive method was eventually followed by the inductive-deductive approach which combines Aristotelian deduction with Baconian induction. Here the researcher is involved in a back-and-forth process of induction (from observation to hypothesis, from the specific to the general) and deduction (from hypothesis to implications) (Mouly, 1978). Hypotheses are tested rigorously and, if necessary, revised.

Although both deduction and induction have their weaknesses, their contributions to the development of science are enormous, for example: (1) the suggestion of hypotheses; (2) the logical development of these hypotheses; and (3) the clarification and interpretation of scientific findings and their synthesis into a conceptual framework.

A further means by which we set out to discover truth is research. This has been defined by Kerlinger (1970) as the systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of hypothetical propositions about the presumed relations among natural phenomena. Research has three characteristics in particular, which distinguish it from the first means of problem solving identified earlier, namely, experience. First, whereas experience deals with events occurring in a haphazard manner, research is systematic and controlled, basing its operations on the inductive-deductive model outlined above. Second, research is empirical. The scientist turns to experience for validation. As Kerlinger puts it, subjective, personal belief must have a reality check against objective, empirical facts and tests. And third, research is self-correcting. Not only does the scientific method have built-in mechanisms to protect scientists from error as far as is humanly possible, but also their procedures and results are open to public scrutiny by fellow professionals. Incorrect results in time will be found and either revised or discarded (Mouly, 1978). Research is a combination of both experience and reasoning and, as far as the natural sciences are concerned, is to be regarded as the most successful approach to the discovery of truth (Borg, 1963).¹

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