Numerous articles and textbooks advise qualitative researchers on accessing "hard-to-reach" or "hidden" populations. In this article, I compare two studies that I conducted with justice-involved women in the United States: a yearlong ethnography inside a state women's prison and an interview study with formerly incarcerated…

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…

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…

An advantage of well-designed survey research is that, typically, it yields large volumes of quantitative and qualitative data. A key challenge researchers face is mining and reporting these data appropriately and promptly to inform research publications and presentations. When mixed methods are employed, and researchers attempt to master computer…

This project was a qualitative longitudinal research study into cultural and structural change in an English secondary school. The schools' consistent underperformance led to its conversion to "academy" status as part of a development under the Labour administration of 1997-2010. The Labour policy for academization was designed, first,…

This article examines the developments and challenges of higher education in developing countries. Using a thorough qualitative interview of deans, directors and heads of Department of the University of Ghana, this paper draws on their analysis to discover unexplored issues that affect the universities in developing countries. The study identifies…

Research in the engineering field is often entrenched in the quantitative paradigm. Recent literature and studies have realised that not all research questions in engineering can be addressed through quantitative approaches. These areas include studies in engineering professional development, education and gender issues. This article describes one…

In 2014, we, the above authors and others on our research team, embarked on Phase II of an examination of how teacher educators were implementing diversity concerns in literacy teacher education courses and programs. The electronic survey data used in Phase I did not allow us to adequately address our research questions: What are the beliefs and…

The study reports on a small international qualitative research project on the implementation of national curriculum reform in Chinese middle schools, involving a team of eight researchers from the University of Leeds and two Chinese partnership institutions in Zhejiang and Beijing. Data were collected from six case study schools based on a…

This case study presents an overview of the major challenges and tensions I encountered exploring the social-class experiences of university students from low-income backgrounds. The study presented here was a qualitative study using phenomenology and a critical theoretical lens to gain a depth of understanding of low-income university students'…

This research project case study describes the research practicalities and design of a mixed methods dissertation study about the language-learning motivation of students who had attended a language immersion school. Mixed methods research, an approach to research in which elements of both quantitative (numbers-focused) and qualitative…

This case is based on my dissertation research project, which I began in 2007. My objective was to examine the process of cross-cultural competence development as international students experience it, not as a theoretical construct. Most of the previous studies address the issue of cross-cultural competence development from the theoretical…

This paper describes a component of a larger cross-national comparative study on faculty development for teaching international students. Here we describe the study and report preliminary findings that offer analyses of the informal and formal means by which Italian and US university instructors enhance the knowledge and skills they find necessary…

Although methodological discussions abound in qualitative research, little time is devoted to access, arguably one of the most important methodological components of social research. Access has often been treated as a side issue by scholarly sources, receiving only cursory attention, generally in a way that reduces it to a mere strategy and severs…

For decades, policy makers, advocates, and researchers have been engaged in efforts to make educational opportunity more equal for students from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. A great deal of research has been conducted on their efforts; however, there is some disagreement on the extent to which the research has been…