As a method for placing Latina college students at the center of research, authors present a dramatic, or performative, text illuminating participants' life stories. The dramatic text serves as a fictional event bringing to light how five Latina students view their ethnic identities and educational values based on messages from family and peers.…

The critical communicative methodology (CCM) is a methodological response to the dialogic turn of societies and sciences that has already had an important impact in transforming situations of inequality and exclusion. Research conducted with the CCM implies continuous and egalitarian dialogue among researchers and the people involved in the…

This article discusses the importance of mixed-methods research, in particular the value of qualitatively driven mixed-methods research for quantitatively driven domains like educational accountability. The article demonstrates the merits of qualitative thinking by describing a mixed-methods study that focuses on a middle school's system of…

A concern exists that mixed methods studies do not contain advocacy stances. Preliminary evidence suggests that this is not the case, but to address this issue in more depth the authors examined 13 mixed methods studies that contained an advocacy, transformative lens. Such a lens consisted of incorporating intent to advocate for an improvement in…

The use of numerical/quantitative data in qualitative research studies and reports has been controversial. Prominent qualitative researchers such as Howard Becker and Martyn Hammersley have supported the inclusion of what Becker called "quasi-statistics": simple counts of things to make statements such as "some," "usually," and "most" more…

The article concerns itself with the struggles that are prompted by the question, "What is my position as a teacher who whilst wanting to pursue emancipatory practices nevertheless is fearful of finding herself supporting and perpetuating normalizing structures?" An extract drawn from a journal entry serves as a base on which a series of…

This article illustrates how an emerging graduate researcher's conceptions of postpositivist, feminist, and poststructural theories of educational research affected data gathering and initial analysis. These macro theories are exemplified as the voices of an educational researcher, a feminist researcher, and a poststructural researcher,…

Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photo-elicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female…

This article proposes working criteria for guiding and judging the validity of performance-related qualitative work based on Conquergood's dialogical performance and Madison's performance of possibilities. A series of criteria is proposed considering three performance-based stages that pursue new meanings for performance in/as qualitative inquiry:…

Shadowing entails a researcher closely following a subject over a period of time to investigate what people actually do in the course of their everyday lives, not what their roles dictate of them. Behaviors, opinions, actions, and explanations for those actions are reflected in the resulting thick, descriptive data. There is little written that…

Autoethnographical research, though interesting and satisfying to conduct, presents a challenge to graduate students who are required to engage in data analysis to meet the needs of their degree. This article tells the collaborative story of how one such student balanced her academic, methodological, ethical, and personal imperatives and developed…