Purpose: This article develops a methodological framework to support qualitative analyses of legal texts. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities use qualitative methods to study legal phenomena but often overlook formal legal texts as productive sites for analysis. Moreover, when qualitative researchers do analyze legal texts, they…

This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five…

The use of codebooks to categorise qualitative data and to increase consistency in coding between multiple researchers is a well-established strategy in qualitative research. However, due to the focus on team-based research projects, the possibilities for the use of codebooks by individual researchers are rarely discussed. With the aim of adding…

In this paper, we explore the methodological implications of conducting qualitative interviews when researchers and participants come from different social classes. Singling out class on its own terms, rather than considering it as an auxiliary structural factor, we examine the unique challenges that arise during cross-class interviews. Such…

This chapter presents an innovative, cross-disciplinary methodological approach to systematically reviewing and comparing large bodies of literature using big data, Natural Language Processing, network analysis, and supplementary qualitative analysis. The approach is demonstrated through an analysis of the literature surrounding four common…

This article challenges the idea that mixed methods research (MMR) constitutes a coherent research paradigm and explores how different research paradigms exist within MMR. Tracing paradigmatic differences at the level of methods, ontology, and epistemology, two MMR strategies are discussed: nested analysis, recently presented by the American…

This study traces the evolution of grounded theory from a nuclear to an extended family of methods and considers the implications that decision-making based on informed choices throughout all phases of the research process has for realizing the potential of grounded theory for advancing adult education theory and practice. [This paper was…

The question of generalizability or the usefulness of qualitative research results beyond the confines of the primary site, sample, and study has been hotly debated by qualitative researchers for decades. When examining this question of generalization the first surprising finding is there appears to be no general consensus about the definition,…

Little work in the social sciences or in the field of education has fully explored the methodological issues related to the study of race and racism, yet qualitative researchers acknowledge that race plays (and should play) a role in the research process. Indeed, race frames and informs the context, practices and perspectives of everyday lived…

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), founded on the seminal work of Vygotsky and evolving in the subsequent work of Leont'ev and Engestrom, continues to emerge as a robust and increasingly widely used conceptual framework for the research and analysis of the complex social mediation of human learning and development. Yet there remains…

Arts-based researchers distinguish themselves from other qualitative researchers on the grounds that they use artistic processes and practices in their inquiries and in the communication of their research outcomes. Like artists, they operate out of a particular community of practice, with its own distinctive history of emergence, set of…

The classification by many scholars of numerical research processes as quantitative and other research techniques as qualitative has prompted the construction of a third category, that of "mixed methods", to describe studies that use elements from both processes. Such labels might be helpful in structuring our understanding of phenomena. But they…

Through two narrative inquiries, in this article I explore the challenges for qualitative researchers in working with multiple languages in capturing, translating, analyzing, and representing narratives. I discuss the effect on research when we engage in these processes considering what was happening as we translated both texts and experience from…

This article explores epistemological awareness and instantiation of methods, as well as uninformed ambiguity, in qualitative methodological decision making and research reporting. The authors argue that efforts should be made to make the research process, epistemologies, values, methodological decision points, and argumentative logic open,…

In this article, the authors demonstrate how researchers can integrate qualitative and quantitative methods to gain a deeper understanding of the prevalence and nature of cultural taxation among black professors. In doing so, they show how the impact of cultural taxation on the experiences of black faculty in the academy is best captured using…