Qualitative Research in Education

Liz Atkins, Susan Wallace

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446208076, 9781446208069
• eBook ISBN: 9781446289686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

This accessible and practical book is a perfect quick guide for postgraduate researchers in education. Looking at the interdependence of teaching and research, the authors show that a critical and analytical exploration of policies and practices is a necessary part of what we mean by being a ?professional? in education.

Drawing on the authors? substantial experience of teaching research skills at postgraduate level, as well as on their own experiences as active researchers, the book will guide you through:

- discourse analysis

- visual methods

- textual research

- data collection and analysis

This co-authored book is structured around a range of methods applicable to educational research and appropriate for use by practitioners at all stages of their professional development. It takes recognisable, ?real life? scenarios as its starting point for each discussion of method, so that readers are able to start from the known and familiar.

As well as exploring theoretical aspects of research method, each chapter provides practical tasks and points for discussion and reflection. These approaches, taken together, are designed to build confidence and encourage reader engagement and enjoyment.

Liz Atkins is a lecturer and researcher in education at the University of Huddersfield.

Susan Wallace is Professor of Continuing Education at Nottingham Trent University.

Research Methods in Education series:

Each book in this series maps the territory of a key research approach or topic in order to help readers progress from beginner to advanced researcher.

Each book aims to provide a definitive, market-leading overview and to present a blend of theory and practice with a critical edge. All titles in the series are written for Master?s-level students anywhere and are intended to be useful to the many diverse constituencies interested in research on education and related areas.

Other books in the series:

- Using Case Study in Education Research, Hamilton and Corbett-Whittier

- Action Research in Education, McAteer

- Ethnography in Education, Mills and Morton

---

CHAPTER 1

RESEARCH IN EDUCATION

---

---

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to explore the concept of educational research, its purposes and processes. It presents research as an integral and essential part of professional practice, and it explores some of the key issues which researchers need to consider when planning their research, such as questions of subjectivity and scope; positivist and interpretivist approaches; and the distinction between assumptions and hypotheses. In the process, it introduces some vocabulary that will be useful to you as a researcher. By the end of this chapter you should be able to formulate your own answers to the questions: ‘Why do we do educational research?’ and, ‘How do we articulate and pursue our research questions?’

---

Key words used in this chapter: qualitative, quantitative, subjectivity, inter-pretivist, positivist.

Educational research – why do we do it?

---

If someone asked us why we do educational research, we would probably come up with an answer along the lines of: ‘We carry out research into education in order to help us – and others – to a better understanding of what constitutes effective teaching and learning.’ The focus of the research may be about issues as disparate as funding, student behaviour, inclusion, teacher education or social justice; but in the end the purpose of the enquiry – the use to which its discoveries are put – will normally be to improve the effectiveness of our professional practice and the systems within which we operate to support learners in their learning. We shall be arguing throughout this book that research, both into our own professional practice and into the impact which policies have upon its context and content, is central to the concept of teaching as a profession.

Gender and the geography teacher

---

Mo teaches Geography to 11- to 16-year-olds. He has noticed over the past three years that the girls consistently perform better than the boys, both in their homework and in classroom activities. This pattern is apparent across all year groups. Mo is undertaking a Master’s degree in education as part of his continuing professional development, and decides that he would like to focus on this issue as part of his research project. As a first step he must formulate his research question. After some thought, he comes up with the following:

• Why do the boys in my classes achieve less well overall than the girls?

---

Building critical research skills: activity

We shall return to the wording of Mo’s question shortly, but first take a moment to think of a question about your own teaching, or the way your institution operates, or the functioning of the education system as a whole – the question you would most of all like to discover an answer to at this moment. For example, it might be:

• To what extent do my head teacher’s (or principal’s) beliefs and priorities affect my classroom practice?

Or it might be:

• Would my students be better behaved if I changed the seating arrangement in my classroom?

Or perhaps it would be:

• If national standards of achievement for post-16 learners are continuing to rise, why does classroom behaviour seem to be deteriorating?

Take some time to think of your own particular question, and then write it down before reading on.

---

Now let’s look again at Mo’s question – ‘Why do the boys in my classes achieve less well overall than the girls?’ – and consider it in more detail. Why, for example, might he need the answer, and what use could he make of it?

An obvious reason for wishing to answer this question is that it might help him to arrive at strategies which would enable him to help the boys improve their attainment levels and work to their full potential as the girls already appear to be doing. Even as he formulates the question, he might well have some possible answers in mind. For example, he might suspect that the subject matter, or the teaching resources, or even his own style of teaching are likely to engage the girls more easily than the boys. The answer that he might have in mind we can call his hypothesis. It might be a conclusion which he’s come to as a result of his own observation and experience; or it might be an idea which has been proposed by another researcher whose work he’s read in an academic journal, and which he wants to test out for himself. On the other hand, he may have no preconceived idea of the answer at all. In that case, his research will not be testing a hypothesis, but will be a case of collecting data in order to form a possible answer or set of answers – answers which may in some cases take him by surprise.

Having formulated his question, his next step will be to look at what has been published on this topic by other teachers and academics. He may find that some possible answers or theories have already been suggested, tested and even ‘proved’. If this is the case he may feel that his curiosity is satisfied. On the other hand, he may decide to see whether these answers really do work when applied to his own professional practice. In other words, he will continue to pursue the research question. The steps he will have taken to this point can be summarised like this:

1. Reflection on his professional practice in order to identify a question.
2. Formulation of the question.
3. Review of the literature which already exists on this topic.
4. Design of a research process to answer the question, or to test existing theories, for himself.

His next task will be to collect the necessary evidence; analyse it to discover what it tells him; compare what he finds with what was claimed in the literature; and draw some conclusions. If we summarise this process, the steps in his research journey now look like this:

Step 1. Reflection on his professional practice in order to identify a question. Mo has been thinking about his teaching and the main issue which concerns him is the achievement level of boys, compared to girls.

Step 2. Formulation of the question. He decides to formulate this as a research question in order to explore possible ways in which the issue could be addressed: ‘Why do the boys in my classes achieve less well overall than the girls?’ One advantage of phrasing the research title as a question is that it will help him to keep his focus when he is exploring the literature and planning the collection and analysis of his data.

Step 3. Review of the literature which already exists on this topic. He uses the key words, ‘boys’ achievement’ to find articles in academic journals which throw some light on this question. He uses the same key words to search specialist publications such as the Times Education Supplement (TES) for recent, relevant reports. He discovers a number of theories relating to boys’ achievement. One of these suggests that boys respond less well than girls to continuous assessment, and tend to perform better in time-constrained tests and examinations.

Step 4. Design of a research process to answer the question, or to test existing theories, for yourself. In the light of the literature, he decides to rephrase and refine his research question, giving it a sharper focus. It becomes: ‘Do the boys in my class perform better on timed tests and less well on coursework than girls?’ Now he will test this theory by introducing some timed tests as supplements to the students’ coursework.

Step 5. Collection of data. He assesses the class using both timed tests and coursework.

Step 6. Analysis of data. He analyses the results of the timed tests and the coursework according to student gender, and also compares the results of individual students in both assessment methods. He finds that, overall, boys score better in the tests than girls, and that the majority of individual boys’ scores in the tests are higher than their scores in the coursework.

Step 7. Conclusion. He finds that his own research appears to confirm the claim that boys achieve better in time-constrained tests than in continuous assessment, and resolves that he will look at ways in which a greater element of timed testing could be introduced into school-based coursework.

He may – and we hope he will – want to add a further step, which is:

Step 8. The dissemination of his findings so that other educational professionals can learn and benefit from them.

---

Activity

Mo’s was a fairly straightforward example of practitioner research. Now let’s look again at the other examples that we listed:

To what extent do my head teacher’s (or principal’s) beliefs and priorities affect my classroom practice?

Would my students be better behaved ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Research in education
• 2 Ethical research in education
• 3 Insider research
• 4 Writing a literature review
• 5 Interviewing in educational research
• 6 Case study
• 7 Action research
• 8 Ethnographic research
• 9 Discourse analysis and policy analysis
• 10 Text and image in qualitative research (by Lydia Spenceley)
• 11 Analysing and reporting qualitative data
• 12 Disseminating your research
• Conclusion
• Index