Doing Educational Research: A Practitioner's Guide to Getting Started

The second edition of Doing Educational Research keeps the many features that made it such a successful book when it was first released in 2005. The research process is broken down into manageable steps with easy-to-understand explanations and concrete examples. It is designed to support educators at all levels to feel confident that they can undertake sound and ethical research. It is a popular text in research methods courses in New Zealand and widely used internationally.

Doing Educational Research is organised around, and answers, many frequently asked questions: Why should we conduct educational research? What are the major approaches? How do you choose the approach that suits your purpose? Where does research fit with theory? Why are ethical and cultural considerations so important? How do you formulate a research question? What are the best methods for gathering data? How do you make sense of data? How do you write up your findings? How do you disseminate them? And so on. The why, how, and so what aspects of the research process that underpin these questions are threads woven through the book.

A new final chapter extends and updates many of the ideas introduced in the first ten chapters. It covers recent approaches to quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research. It updates information on research and technology, research ethics, cultural approaches and evaluation. Many of the examples in the chapter are drawn from the author's current research and that of her colleagues and research students. This book will appeal to those new to educational research as well as those who want to refresh and update their understanding.