Guest post from David Scott, co-author of Researching Education

Researching Education: Data, Methods and Theory in Educational Enquiry is a second edition of a book first published in 2000. This new version includes a substantially rewritten account of philosophical issues relating to educational research, a new chapter on judgemental criteria for educational research, and a detailed account of feminist approaches to research. The focus and substantive content of the book is the same as it was when it was first published. It sets out to examine the theory and practice of researching education, focusing on the philosophical, historical, political and social contexts in which such research is conducted, and the implications of these contexts for the collection and analysis of data. The point is that everyone thinks that they know what research is and how to do it; whereas in fact most research is poorly constructed, inadequately conceptualised and over-claiming of its results. In part, this is because those ontological and epistemological frameworks within which all research is located are rarely surfaced for attention and the methods and approaches used to collect and analyse data are subsequently misconceived. So, this book serves as a corrective to research studies which deny the sociality of the research process and the implicit power relations that underpin these works. In short, it seeks to problematise the practice of research and examine how power is ever present in the construction of research texts, not in a partisan sense nor indeed so that it is deliberately biased and distorted, but rather in the sense that it imposes a closure of the world, when openness is to be preferred.