Contents: The nature of enquiry: setting the field -- Critical educational research -- Evaluation and the politics of educational research -- The search for causation -- The ethics of educational and social research -- Choosing a research project -- Planning educational research -- Sampling -- Sensitive educational research -- Validity and reliability -- Nauralistic, qualitative and ethnographic research -- Historical and documentary research in education -- Surveys, longitudinal, cross-sectional and trend studies -- Case studies -- Ex post facto research -- Experiments, quasi-experiments, single-case research and internet-based experiments -- Meta-analysis, research syntheses and systematic reviews -- Action research -- Virtual worlds in educational research -- Questionnaires -- Interviews -- Accounts -- Observation -- Tests -- Personal constructs -- Role-playing -- Visual media in educational research -- Approaches to qualitative data analysis -- Organizing and presenting qualitative data -- Coding and content analysis -- Discourses: conversations, narratives and autobiographies as texts -- Analysing visual media -- Grounded theory -- Approaches to quantitative data analysis -- Descriptive statistics -- Inferential statistics -- Multidimensional measurement and factor analysis -- Choosing a statistical test.

Includes bibliographical references (p.711-752) and index.

This rewritten, expanded and updated seventh edition of the long-running bestseller Research Methods in Education encompasses the whole range of methods currently employed by educational research at all stages. It offers plentiful and rich practical advice, underpinned by clear theoretical foundations, research evidence and up-to-date references. -- [publisher]