PART 1: The context of educational research 1 The nature of enquiry: setting the field; 2 Mixed methods research; 3 Critical educational research; 4 Theory in educational research; 5 Evaluation and research; 6 The search for causation PART 2: Research design 7 The ethics of educational and social research; 8 Ethics in Internet research; 9 Choosing a research project; 10 Research questions; 11 Research design and planning; 12 Sampling; 13 Sensitive educational research; 14 Validity and reliability PART 3: Methodologies for Educational Research 15 Qualitative, naturalistic and ethnographic research; 16 Historical and documentary research, Jane Martin; 17 Surveys, longitudinal, cross-sectional and trend studies; 18 Internet surveys; 19 Case studies; 20 Experiments; 21 Meta-analysis, systematic reviews and research syntheses, Harsh Suri; 22 Action research; 23 Virtual worlds, social network software and netography in educational research, Stewart Martin PART 4: Methods of Data Collection 24 Questionnaires; 25 Interviews; 26 Observation; 27 Tests; 28 Using secondary data in educational research; 29 Personal constructs, Richard Bell; 30 Role play and research, Carmel O’Sullivan; 31 Visual media in educational research PART 5: Data Analysis and Reporting 32 Approaches to qualitative data analysis; 33 Organizing and presenting qualitative data; 34 Coding and content analysis; 35 Discourses: conversations, narratives and autobiographies as texts; 36 Analyzing visual media; 37 Grounded theory; 39 Statistical significance, effect size and statistical power; 40 Descriptive statistics; 41 Inferential statistics: difference tests; 42 Inferential statistics: Regression analysis and standardization; 43 Factor analysis, cluster analysis and structural equation modelling; 44 Choosing a statistical test; 45 Beyond mixed methods: using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to integrate cross-case and within-case analyses, Barry Cooper and Judith Glaesser