Getting Started in Your Educational Research

Design, Data Production and Analysis

Clive Opie,Desma Brown

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526480477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

A one-stop shop for anyone undertaking educational research for the first time, this text focuses on the development and application of key skills necessary for successful research. Packed with useful exercises, checklists and case studies, this book will allow the reader to apply their skills across a range of essays, presentations and reports. Using digestible language to explain complex terminology and processes simply, the authors explore working with and presenting data and the software options available to students, including NVivo, SPSS and Excel. The text will help students to:

• Understand the language of educational research
• Frame their research questions and design their research
• Judge the quality of educational research
• Explore and justify research approaches and procedures (methods)
• Analyse and present their data

1 Carrying Out Educational Research – The Start Of Your Journey

Clive Opie

Overview

If you are faced with the task of undertaking a research project for the first time, it is not uncommon to find yourself asking a plethora of questions such as:

• Where do I start?
• I have never done anything like this before – can I do it?
• How do I go about selecting a topic for my research?
• How do I know if what I want to research is doable?
• I know little about research theory – how do I find out what I need to know?
• What are the key elements my research project will need to present?
• What procedures are available and appropriate for any research I do?
• How will I present what my research finds?

The aim of this chapter is to begin to explore the answers to these questions and, in so doing, provide initial guidance to help you get started on your research project journey. It can only offer initial guidance. What this book sets out to do is to offer sufficient, clearly written, but not overly technical, detail supported by example material, to take you from first thoughts through to completion of your educational research project. In employing as straightforward and as readily understandable means as possible, this book aims to inspire you with confidence to travel your journey and realise you can do educational research.

Introduction

Your undergraduate studies in a field of education, e.g. Childhood Studies, Early Years, Education, Education and Psychology, Education Studies, Social Work, Teacher Training or Youth Studies, or M-level degree which you might be taking while being employed in related fields, will invariably require you to complete a small research project. Such projects will involve some form of investigation with the aim of acquiring some new knowledge associated with the degree you are studying. Whilst the focus of any research project will have to be negotiated with your supervisor, for reasons which will become apparent through the chapters in this book, it will also, hopefully, reflect an interest you have. You will almost certainly have limited time to carry it out, and for many the research project element of your degree will usually last around 3–6 months.

Although the time available for your research project will be limited and this will impact upon the depth of research and content, this does not mean it should not be regarded as an important piece of work nor adhere to fulfilling basic criteria as highlighted (see Table 1.1). Doctoral students, who will typically have several years to complete their research, may find the contents of this book a useful starting point, and even possibly enough for some of their requirements (see Chapter 7). There is no question though that the requirements of their degree will need them to delve far more deeply into the various aspects of educational research contained within it.

It is worth re-iterating at this early stage that the context for this book is to provide for the needs of new researchers. Years of personal experience of working with undergraduate and M-level students new to research in completing their degrees has taught all those contributing to this book that following a well-trodden pathway can go a long way in helping to alleviate the apprehensions you may feel in the initial stages of your project. This apprehension is common and felt by many new and even more experienced educational researchers. The order of chapters in this book has been deemed to offer one such pathway, but to say it doesn’t have pitfalls, or that it is travelled in a sequential manner, would be to deny the realities of undertaking research, or indeed the needs of the researcher. For example, you would be wise at least to think about your data presentation whilst considering your research procedures, to ensure the latter will provide you with the data you need.

As noted in the Preface each of the chapters can be considered as self-contained. For example, Chapter 2 by Jon Scaife, provides a critical insight into the importance of engaging with theory; Desma Brown’s Chapter 3 articulates what is one of the key stepping stones in conducting any research, framing your research question; and Chapter 12 by Lee Fallin on ‘Understanding Qualitative Data Analysis’ provides a clear, easy-to-follow introduction for anyone wanting to start applying the intricacies of NVivo, the most commonly used qualitative data analysis software (QDAS). Similarly, engaging with the contents of this book, or indeed any other text, cannot guarantee that any advice offered, or suggestions made, will ensure a straightforward, trouble-free research project. It might be convenient to think this could be the case, but educational research is often not this obliging. At this point I would like to emphasise the critical role tutors have in providing support and guidance, and you will be constantly reminded of this throughout this book.

The audience this book aims to cater for – undergraduates and M-level students who are new, or relatively new, to educational research – also underpins the decision taken to limit the research terminology engaged with, and to use certain terms in preference to others. The truth of the matter is that, to ‘do’ educational research at undergraduate and M-level, you need only work with a subset of the research terminology that exists. To help you the terminology and terms deemed most important are italicised the first time they are raised in this book, indicating they are detailed further elsewhere.

What terms should be included? What criteria for their selection have been used? Why are those that have been excluded so treated? What is the validity (a term which will be explored more fully later in this book) for making these choices? One could, and rightly so, be criticised for a level of personal subjectivity in selection of the terminology deemed to be ‘appropriate’ at undergraduate and M-level. However, the terms are chosen to reflect the recurring needs of such students, as experienced by those supervising them and the authors of this book. In this way, the terminology presented here takes on a level of objectivity. If you wish to widen your knowledge of educational research terminology then there are numerous other eloquently written texts on the market, far more detailed, which more than adequately cover any ‘deemed missing’ elements (Coe et al., 2017; Cohen et al., 2018; Creswell, 2014a; Newby, 2014; Walliman, 2011).

Main elements of educational research

Everything associated with your research project will require writing up, and will include such sections as an abstract (or summary) of the research; why, with appropriate supporting literature, the research undertaken was deemed to be necessary; how it was carried out i.e. the approach and procedures (methods) used; and presentation of what it revealed and what was learnt in the process.

I have presented each of the key sections of any research project in Table 1.1 along with a few notes for some exemplification of what they should aim to achieve. No attempt is made to develop these elements as this is provided in future chapters either in this book or the associated website. For example, in Chapter 7 David Hyatt develops each of these sections with his constructive advice on writing up a project, and in Chapters 8 and 9 I go into much more detail about research approaches and procedures (methods).

Table 1.1

Having provided a brief overview of key sections required when undertaking a research project, Exercise 1.1 is aimed to help you further appreciate their significance.

Exercise 1.1

Assessing the presence of key elements of a research project

For Chapter 1 the website holds five published articles: Able et al., 2015; Marsh et al., 2017; Odhiambo and Hii, 2012; Spencer et al., 2017; Yamamoto, 2015, all of which are related to some aspect of educational research. It is suggested you choose one of these to read and then critically reflect on it in terms of the key sections indicated earlier in Table 1.1. To help you, a template Assessing Key Elements of a Research Project has been provided on the accompanying website, where you can jot down notes for your own use or as an aide-mémoire for discussion with others. It is likely to be more advantageous if you can get several people, new to research, to read the same article, make comments and share these. The website also holds comments on these published articles in the folder Assessment of Articles for Chapter 1 put together by the editors of this book, although it is suggested that these are looked at only after your own initial analysis of the article. You may not agree completely with the editor’s comments and/or pick up other points for consideration, but this is the nature of educational research.

Note: Tutors are welcome use this template for an assignment, e.g. a 2000-word report.

Throughout this book reference is made to the accompanying website https://study.sagepub.com/opie. The website holds a series of articles and templates to support example exercises as well as additional notes to complement the contents of this book and to support the researcher. The material has also been cleared for use as potential teaching materials.

You will often hear the request to be ‘critically reflective’ and this is something you need to get into the habit of doing. It is easy to criticise aspects of an article, others’ research procedures or the recommendations from a piece of research. Your task, though, is to reflect on your criticism by asking yourself, and providing answers for, questions such as ‘Why am I being critical?’, ‘Do I see this as a key issue that, whilst not major, would have improved the overall tenor of the article/research if addressed?’, ‘How would/might I have minimised this criticism?’, ‘How might the author of the article have minimised this criticism?’, ‘How have others avoided this criticism?’. In short, y...