The author feels that everyone who is engaged in research for purposes of public debate and enlightenment is entitled to protection from government coercion. (Author/PG)

Discusses problems of using observation techniques in hope of instigating a more general re-examination of the potentialities of observation as an instrument of educational research. (Author)

Discusses polarization among immigration researchers and attempts to reconcile the issues of acculturation and assimilation with ethnic retention. Two arguments to help prevent polarization are examined: that acculturation and accommodation occur without assimilation; and that researchers have studied different generations of immigrants and have…

Researchers should systematically seek out their subjectivity, not retrospectively when the data have been collected and the analysis is complete, but while their research is actively in progress. Demonstrates an example of this pursuit of subjectivity in the course of fieldwork. (Author/BJV)

Considers the doubts the author has had about the design of an award winning study, focusing especially on a researcher's obligation to help the teachers with whom the researcher is working, even at the risk of jeopardizing a study's design. Traces the way that her engagement with that question has led to her current professional commitments. (SC)

Discusses the negative experiences that the Cree of Quebec have experienced with behavioral scientists. Investigates this issue by conducting an experiment with a group of James Bay Cree, who were polled about their reaction to participating in the research. Several sources of reactivity were found: rigid protocols, requests for self-disclosure,…

This article explores some of the challenges and benefits of doing a dissertation with participants from a population to which I belong and on a topic some consider controversial, that of gay and lesbian educators. I describe the homophobia I experienced and how that homophobia affected my choice of topic, the research process, and my job…

The agonistic approach--aimed at embracing opposing perspectives as part of a qualitative research process and acknowledging that process as fundamentally political--sheds light on both the construction of and the resistance to research identities. This approach involves reflexively embedding interview situations into the ethnographic context as a…

Problems inherent in relying solely on statistical significance testing as a means of data interpretation are reviewed. The biggest problem with statistical significance testing is that researchers have used the results of this testing to ascribe importance or meaning to their studies where such meaning often does not exist. Often researchers…

Ethnographers find themselves among a family of researchers referred to as naturalists. This rather diverse family conducts research described by turns as qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, and interpretive. The focus of the ethnographer's inquiry is on the mundane,…

This paper addresses several issues in quantitative research that educational researchers should examine with more care. While the purposes of experimentation is to determine causality, the study of causal relations is difficult and problematic. Computational and conceptual errors in statistical analysis seem limited only by the creativity of the…

Researchers make little or no use of formal information systems. This is due, not so much to 'information apathy' on their part, as to faults inherent in information services as a whole. A formal information service may not come through at all. It is not capable of reaching behind a request to the real question that motivated it. By not being able…

Explores the fact versus value dilemma faced by researchers in behavioral science areas and concludes that scientific researchers are influenced by subjective and evaluative thinking in spite of their efforts to eschew value judgements in their work. (DB)

Provided are explanations of how research works, different approaches to research (naturalistic observation, correctional analysis, the experiment method, the theoretic and compendium approaches), and some of the problems inherent in research methodology in an attempt to encourage practitioners in the field of blindness to use and engage in…

This paper examines some of the problems encountered by a Japanese researcher in Japanese communities and Mennonite communities in California and Ontario. (Author)