Contents: The nature of enquiry: setting the field -- Critical educational research -- Evaluation and the politics of educational research -- The search for causation -- The ethics of educational and social research -- Choosing a research project -- Planning educational research -- Sampling -- Sensitive educational research -- Validity and reliability -- Nauralistic, qualitative and ethnographic research -- Historical and documentary research in education -- Surveys, longitudinal, cross-sectional and trend studies -- Case studies -- Ex post facto research -- Experiments, quasi-experiments, single-case research and internet-based experiments -- Meta-analysis, research syntheses and systematic reviews -- Action research -- Virtual worlds in educational research -- Questionnaires -- Interviews -- Accounts -- Observation -- Tests -- Personal constructs -- Role-playing -- Visual media in educational research -- Approaches to qualitative data analysis -- Organizing and presenting qualitative data -- Coding and content analysis -- Discourses: conversations, narratives and autobiographies as texts -- Analysing visual media -- Grounded theory -- Approaches to quantitative data analysis -- Descriptive statistics -- Inferential statistics -- Multidimensional measurement and factor analysis -- Choosing a statistical test.