The global scale of COVID-19 has constrained academics from conducting much person-facing research. Reactively, trend is increasing for digital-based methodologies capturing already existing online data. Scholars often 'scrape' user-postings from internet forums using coding algorithms and text capture tools, before analysing data, drawing…

In this article, we argue for increased participant choice in early years research and beyond. Drawing on relevant literature and our own empirical work, we demonstrate that giving participants more choice leads to richer data and more robust findings. We also show that more choice for participants is closely aligned with co-creation and…

Qualitative interviews and focus groups are commonly used methods to elicit participants' voices in program evaluations. However, the use of these data-gathering methods can fall short of the goal; even with open-ended questions, the protocols guiding and shaping interviews and focus groups heavily reflect the evaluators' understanding and…

While digital tools are often recommended for researchers, there is a lack of evidence around effective social media strategies among researchers to optimise participant recruitment and data collection. However, an 'add Facebook and stir' approach could create extra burden for participants or foil researchers' efforts. Participant recruitment…

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…

Although anthropological methods have been appropriated by qualitative and mixed-methods educational researchers, visual anthropology has had virtually no impact on educational research. Furthermore, video, in general, despite its widespread impact on 21st century culture, has played only a limited role in the conducting of education-related…

This paper aims to critique approaches to qualitative coding that carry a bottom-up or inductive thinking. Despite the wide contributions of this epistemology to the social sciences, this paper contends that contemporary research and methodological debates have inadequately explored different epistemologies for coding. As such, this paper proposes…

In this article I explore Serres' idea of science and how it impacted his overall work. This approach to understanding Serres' idea of science is much like working with Nietzsche. I look at the areas Serres viewed as the dangers of science including what he referred to as a tsunami of data and the primary focus on methods. I end with Serres third…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of the exemplar methodology (ExM) as a method for selecting exemplars in education research. ExM is a systematic approach to selecting outliers that can be used to education researchers who investigate outliers to better understand phenomena among students, teachers, schools, and communities. While…

Childhood research is increasingly being conducted from different disciplines, and research methods for showing the child's world are also increasing and evolving. This article examines the challenges and opportunities of childhood research in an early childhood education and care (ECEC) environment from an ethnographic approach. The purpose of…

Meeting appropriate ethical standards for research involving human participants, mean ensuring confidentiality. It is assumed that the research participant will accept the safeguarding protocols necessary to ensure confidentiality. This assumption however oversimplifies the variation of motivations that goes into participants' decisions to…

Researchers in gifted and talented education (GATE) have increasingly taken on the role of advocating equity and access for minoritized populations. However, subgroups of racially and ethnically diverse students are rarely disaggregated from monolithic racial and ethnic categories. Studies on academic achievement of Asian American and White…

School attendance/absenteeism (SA/A) is a crucial indicator of health and development in youth but educational policies and health-based practices in this area rely heavily on a simple metric of physical presence or absence in a school setting. SA/A data suffer from problems of quality (reliability, construct validity, data integrity) and utility…

As wider social and societal changes have led to moves towards equality as a response to a better understanding of inequalities, ethical considerations in research are now more consciously focussed on power dynamics. As a consequence, participatory research methods have gained traction. Simultaneously, artistic and creative methods are used within…

This article draws on a new materialist paradigm to explore bricolaging data from an early childhood research project through an immanent ethical lens. This lens enables the researcher to stretch towards non-hierarchical relationships in between subjects and objects, thinking and doing. A bricoleur explores and builds different…