ABSTRACT
There are many introductory books on social and educational research methods. Some of the most well known of these textbooks, such as those by Moser and Kalton (1982), Cohen and Manion (1980) and Hoinville et al. (1978) are widely used on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in universities and colleges and have been reprinted many times to serve successive cohorts of students. These books, and others like them, present research largely as an unproblematic process concerned with sampling, questionnaire design, interview procedures, response rates, observation schedules, and so on. They present an idealized conception of how social and educational research is designed and executed, where research is carefully planned in advance, predetermined methods and procedures followed, and ‘results’ are the inevitable conclusion. In essence, such books take what they perceive to be the methods used in the natural sciences as their model, and seek to present social and educational research as being equally ‘scientific’ in its methods.
