Foundations for Research (Inquiry and Pedagogy Across Diverse Contexts Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805836500 ISBN 13: 9780805836509

Publisher: Routledge, 2003

Designed for introductory research courses in the professional fields and social sciences, this text acquaints students and beginning researchers with a broad view of research methodologies and an understanding of the assumptions that inform each of these approaches. More experienced researchers will also find the book useful in acquainting them with methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are new to them.

The text is distinguished by its avoidance of using the discreet categories of qualitative and quantitative methods to organize the chapters. While some chapter authors rely more on one or the other, many employ multiple methodologies to investigate particular problems and questions. Further, the book is not organized into single, contradictory positivist-interpretivist categories of research; chapter authors often situate methodologies within a variety of, and sometimes multiple, theoretical positions, particularly as these approaches are shaped by the historical context of social science research.

Focus points in Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences:
*research ethics.
*intertwined relationship of theory and research design.
*systematic examination of ways to design and implement high-quality, trustworthy research across varying research designs.
*specific methods for implementing research within various frameworks.
*pedagogical strategies.

About the Author:

Kathryn Roulston is a Professor in the Qualitative Research Program at the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. Her research interestsinclude qualitative research methodology, qualitative interviewing, teaching qualitative research, ethnomethodology and conversationanalysis, doctoral education, and topics in music education. She has published on qualitative interviewing and the analysis of qualitativedata. In addition to her book on qualitative interviewing, Reflective Interviewing: A Guide to Theory and Practice (SAGE, 2010), she was acontributor to The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft (2nd ed.) (2012) as well as the forthcoming SAGEHandbook of Qualitative Data Analysis (edited by Uwe Flick).

Professor of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Juanita Johnson-Bailey, a professor at the University of Georgia, lives in Macon.

George W. Noblit became a sociologist in the 1970s, a time of turbulent social change. Research on crime, delinquency and deviance led to a focus on schooling in the lives and futures of youth. Through a study of school desegregation, he began a program of research on the social construction of race, using ethnographic research to study schools and other educational scenes. Noblit is intrigued with how knowledge often taken as good in its own right is implicated in creating the very problems it is asked to solve. Noblit studies the various ways knowledge is constructed and how the competition over which knowledge counts construct powers and difference. This process means exploring both the highest reaches of theory and the everyday lives of people as they struggle to make sense of the world. To Noblit, there is not a theory-practice gap, only a failure of imagination. Noblit conducts funded evaluation projects, most recently on A+ (arts-enhanced) schools (the subject of his 2009 book), charter schools and prison education for youth adult offenders in North Carolina. For me, evaluation and policy studies are a way to be part of larger political processes in our society, he says, and to help shape the agendas of important innovations.

Judith Preissle, a professor at the University of Georgia, is a teacher educator and an educational anthropologist who brings a dual insider-outsider perspective to issues of education and immigration. She is a native-born citizen of the United States whose forebears arrived on the continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is also one of the many internal migrants of the 20th century, who grew up moving around the country and attending schools in six different states. Beginning her educational experience teaching social studies and language arts to 12-year-olds, she has worked at the University of Georgia since 1975, teaching the social foundations of education, qualitative research methods, and educational anthropology to an increasingly diverse population of graduates and undergraduates. She has published widely in these areas with special concentration on research design and ethics and on gender and minority education. She is a graduate of Indiana University.

Kate Rousmaniere is Professor of Education and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, Ohio and is the author of City Teachers: Teachers and School Reform is Historical Perspective.

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for?the Art of Reportage in 2006. Her most recent novel, "The Clothes on Their Backs, " was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. She writes for "The""Guardian", "The""Telegraph, " and "Vogue".

Review:

A notable strength of the book is that it includes 19 chapters (by different authors) covering  almost as many approaches to qualitative research....The diversity of approaches found in the deMarrais and Lapan book exposes the reader to a number of research models, each argued and illustrated by a committed practitioner.
—Modern Language Journal

With its focus on ethics, the conceptual underpinnings of research, and the distinction between method and methodology, this text further dismantles the lingering dichotomies of theory/practice and qualitative/quantitative inquiry found in research texts and ways of thinking in higher education. The editors want readers to consider the act of research as conceptual in nature, fraught with technical complexities and ethical dilemmas, and always in need of thoughtful and informed practitioners....I am excited by this volume....It certainly fills a gap.
—Pamela Bettis
University of Idaho

I know of no other text that has all the attributes of this one--the combination of the philosophical and epistemological debates around research, the array of possible methods, and practical suggestions for engaging in research....I am anxious to use this text with my students.
—Kathleen Farber
Bowling Green State University