ERIC Number: EJ1467438
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0007-1005
EISSN: EISSN-1467-8527
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Researching the Everyday Educational Lives of Low-Income Families: The Importance of Researcher and Participant Contexts
Emma Wainwright1; Kate Hoskins1; Refika Arabaci1; Junqing Zhai2; Jie Gao3; Yuwei Xu4
British Journal of Educational Studies, v73 n1 p5-25 2025
This paper highlights the importance of considering both researcher and participant contexts when exploring everyday educational lives. It emerges during a period of increasing and sustained social inequality in England, and against a backdrop of increasingly tight research timeframes and resources in higher education. Drawing on a project engaging low-income families in Greater London, the paper takes the everyday as its conceptual focus and questions how we can be critically attentive to everyday educational lives if we struggle to access and develop research relationships with particular social groups. We offer empirical insight into the hesitancies towards, and avoidances of, research participation that centre around knowledge, fear, and trust, and which are heightened concerns where aspects of family life, parenting, and children come to the fore. The paper considers how these can be mitigated in an academic environment where limited time and resourcing shape possibilities of research engagements and offers practical moves linked to research relationships, relevance and presence for how researchers can address these challenges to enable research to be more inclusive.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Low Income Groups, Higher Education, Researchers, Research Methodology, Interpersonal Relationship, Participant Characteristics, Inclusion, Time Management, Money Management, Fear, Trust (Psychology), Research Design, Selection Criteria, Context Effect
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom (London)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Education, Brunel University London, London, UK; 2Education, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China; 3Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK; 4Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK