- Title
- Bringing theory to doctoral research
- Creator
- Gulson, K. N.; Parkes, R. J.
- Relation
- The Routledge Doctoral Student's Companion: Getting to Grips with Research in Education and the Social Sciences p. 76-84
- Relation
- Companions for PhD and DPhil research
- Relation
- http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415484121
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- In the USA, the UK and Australia, a combination of credential inflation and attendant instrumentalism has resulted in theory being a disparaged part of educational research, and thus also doctoral research in education. This disparagement comes in part from the conflation of theory with abstract purposelessness, and its connection with soft research as opposed to applied research into, and for, educational policy and practice. In many ways this dichotomy is paradigmatically located, in that it is only some forms of theory that are seen as under attack. In the UK in the mid-1990s, Ball lamented a-theoretical moves within sociology of education to issues of management, measurement, evaluation, and so forth, and the resultant creation of new fields such as 'school improvement', 'leadership', and so forth. In the early 2000s, qualitative researchers in the USA have felt the veracity of their work is undercut, and inadequately funded due to an emphasis on 'evidence-based' research, coded as large-scale 'scientific research in education', as 'gold standard' quantitative research. However, Atkinson and Delamont argue that this is a very insular viewpoint that conflates shifts in the USA with trends in other countries. They argue that in the UK rigorous qualitative research is not only respected, but also centrally located within research council funding schemes. Nonetheless, Sikes writes that in the UK the marketisation of education and research has meant that 'research which apparently provides value-free, objective, and quantifiable evidence that can directly inform practice is favoured and funded'. Clearly the world of theory and research is a fraught one.
- Subject
- doctoral research; educational research; theory; qualitative research
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/923853
- Identifier
- uon:9842
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780415484114
- Language
- eng
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