Research Methods in Education 6th Edition

1. ACCOUNTS
© LOUIS COHEN, LAWRENCE
MANION & KEITH MORRISON

2. STRUCTURE OF THE CHAPTER
• Characteristics of the ethogenic approach
• Characteristics of accounts and episodes
• Procedures in eliciting, analyzing and authenticating
accounts
• Network analysis
• Discourse analysis
• Analyzing social episodes
• Account gathering in educational research
• Problems in gathering and analyzing accounts
• Handling quantitative and qualitative accounts
• Strengths and weaknesses of ethogenic approaches
• A note on stories

3. ACCOUNTS
• Accounts focus on language in context
• Speech acts
• Ethnomethodology
• Conversation analysis
• Discourse analysis
• Ethnographic paradigm: see situations
through the eyes of participants, their
intentionality and their interpretations of
situations, their meaning systems and the
dynamics of the interaction as it unfolds

4. THE ETHOGENIC APPROACH
• Synchronic analysis: the analysis of social
practices and institutions as they exist at any one
time
• Diachronic analysis: the study of
stages/processes by which social practices and
institutions are created and abandoned, change
and are changed.

5. THE ETHOGENIC APPROACH
• Concentrates upon the meaning system, the
sequence by which a social act is achieved.
• Concerned with speech which accompanies
action.
• Founded upon the view that humans tend to be
the kinds of person that their language, traditions,
tacit and explicit knowledge tell them they are.
• Ethogenic studies make use of commonsense
understandings of the social world.
• The ethogenic study employs an ongoing
observational approach that focuses upon
processes rather than products.

6. CHARACTERISTICS OF
ACCOUNTS AND EPISODES
• Accounts must be seen within the context of
social episodes.
• Accounts serve to explain our past, present and
future oriented actions.

7. PROCEDURES IN ELICITING, ANALYZING
AND AUTHENTICATING ACCOUNTS
• Attention to informants, the account-gathering
situation, the transformation of accounts and
researchers’ accounts, and control
procedures
• Eliciting, analyzing and authenticating
accounts
• Experience-sampling: a qualitative technique
for gathering and analyzing accounts based
on interviews that were themselves prompted
by given situations

8. NETWORK ANALYSIS
• There are structural regularities – regular
patterns) – in social relations between entitities
• These macro-structural relations influence
people’s agentic decisions, actions, values and
behaviours.
• Network analysis is an attempt to measure and
chart these, e.g. through graphic means.
• Relations are context-specific and dynamic.
• Two main components:
– Actors
– Relations

9. NETWORK ANALYSIS ADDRESSES . . .
• The units (the actors)
• The relational form
– Dyads, triads, stars, chains etc.
– The nature of the relationship
– The strength, intensity and frequency of
the relationship
• The relational content
• The type of tie
• The level of data analysis

10. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
• The organization of ordinary talk and
everyday explanations and the social
actions performed in them.
• Discourses are sets of linguistic material
that are coherent in organization and
content and enable people to construct
meaning in social contexts.
• Speech acts: utterances express content
and intentions.
• Talk as contextualized dialogue.

11. ANALYZING SOCIAL EPISODES
• Quantitative analysis
– Factor analysis
– Linkage analysis
– Multidimensional measurement
– Cluster analysis
• Qualitative analysis
– Coding
– Classifying
– Within-site and cross-site analysis

12. PROBLEMS IN GATHERING AND
ANALYZING ACCOUNTS
• Many meanings present in a social episode
• Actors may have biased meanings
• Whose meaning(s) predominate/are valid
and reliable