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The contributions of qualitative research to the study of behavioral–emotional disabilities, mild intellectual disabilities, and learning disabilities (the three types of high-incidence disabilities) are relatively recent and far from abundant. This chapter discusses qualitative, or “naturalistic” research by briefly examining the methodology used in such inquiry, reviewing many of the available studies concerning those with high-incidence disabilities, and providing implications from the existing empirical literature. It is not recommended that qualitative research takes the place of quantitative research in special education, but well-designed and executed naturalistic studies can contribute additional knowledge that is worthwhile to the field.

Sub-Saharan businesses share resemblance with contemporary post-modern organisations in the western world by blurred divisions between job and non-job activities. Ethnographic immersion then means that negotiations of trust and rapport take place across arenas ranging from business meetings till bars. The ethno-informed approach shows flirtation as a finely tuned interaction collaboratively constituted that may prolong field relations and access to a variety of data. This constitutes the background to the discussion of the dilemmas of good rapport.

I claim that flirtation should be regarded a resource the ethnographer can draw upon, but one that demands an awareness of negotiating alternative identities as buffer towards delicate or troublesome dimensions in field relations.

I was a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 1977 until 1982, and Norman K. Denzin was my mentor. In this essay, I review what I learned from him in two graduate seminars as well as his own research during this period. His theoretical framework drew from the writings of Simmel, Mead, Blumer, Schutz, Goffman, and Garfinkel, but, for Denzin, theory was never divorced from empirical inquiry. The logic of naturalistic inquiry, his fundamental approach to methodology, provided the procedural framework for the formulation and assessment of theory. In addition, Denzin made important contributions to the study of self, socialization, social interaction, emotions, and deviance (especially criminogenic processes in the alcohol industry and the dynamics of domestic violence).

In his book Pasteur's Quadrant, Donald Stokes (1997) argued that research projects can be described by their contributions to theoretical understanding and the solution of practical problems. Building on this model, scholars have suggested that educational research should focus more or less exclusively on what Stokes called “use-inspired basic research.” With this move has come a focus on projects with the potential to create systemic change – and the concurrent devaluation of naturalistic studies of learning in context and design research to develop innovative educational interventions. We argue that this current predilection is based on a fundamental misreading of the processes through which scientific investigation addresses practical problems, and (more important) is counter-productive for the field of educational technology. To make this case, we look more closely at the operationalization of Stokes’ quadrant model in the field of education, suggesting that its short-term focus on systemic change is based on a misunderstanding of history. We use Latour's (1983) study of Pasteur to suggest an alternative lever model for the research-based transformation of educational practices through educational technologies. By way of illustration, we use a brief example of a research project in educational technology to ground a discussion of the broader implications of this alternative conceptualization of the process of education research.

This chapter enters an old debate on the shape of validation processes in qualitative research. We discuss a reflective research validation framework related to teaching approaches and practices. The majority of investigations in this area draw mainly on indirect observation, semi-structured interviews or the application of questionnaires and inventories. To this extent, only “half-the-story” has been reported. The validation framework here develops a five-part three stage structure, conceptualized as an “iterative-interactive-process,” integrating a set of strategies aimed at the “minimization of invalidity.” The application of the framework is illustrated through a longitudinal study investigating the relationship between classroom questioning practices and teachers’ preferential teaching approaches. Fieldwork in this naturalistic-interpretative research was conducted during four academic years and entailed close collaboration with a group of four university teachers lecturing biology to undergraduates.

Purpose – This chapter overviews surrogate measures of safety to help better understand the related challenges and opportunities. The chapter is meant to serve as a primer for practitioners looking for alternative methods of evaluating safety where crashes are lacking or are insufficient.

Approach – The historical perspective and the current state-of-the-art thinking are presented in an organised manner with a focus on fundamental concepts, traffic measurement techniques and estimation of the relationships between surrogate events and collisions.

Findings – An analysis of the published research and its findings indicates that traffic conflicts are the most promising surrogates. They enable evaluation of the safety implications of a wide range of road and traffic conditions. The required ecological consistency between conflicts and collisions can be ensured by sufficient nearness of conflicts to collisions. Several methods of estimating the relationship between conflicts and crashes are discussed. Behavioural measures of safety are also discussed. Although easier to measure than conflicts, behavioural measures should be used with caution. Research on surrogate measures of safety may provide a basis for improving microsimulation models as tools of safety evaluation.

Practical implications – Current changes in vehicle and road instrumentation affect safety at a rate that exceeds the efficiency of the traditional crash-based methods of safety analysis. Accurate and quick measurement of safety with surrogate measures offers a viable solution. They are also a necessary condition of gaining a better understanding of safety and finding more effective solutions for safety problems.

Ethnography is a qualitative, naturalistic research method derived from the anthropological tradition. Ethnography uses participant observation supplemented by other research methods to gain holistic understandings of cultural groups’ beliefs and behaviors. Ethnography contributes to bioethics by: (1) locating bioethical dilemmas in their social, political, economic, and ideological contexts; (2) explicating the beliefs and behaviors of involved individuals; (3) making tacit knowledge explicit; (4) highlighting differences between ideal norms and actual behaviors; (5) identifying previously unrecognized phenomena; and (6) generating new questions for research. More comparative and longitudinal ethnographic research can contribute to better understanding of and responses to bioethical dilemmas.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

This chapter offers a deeper understanding of the symbols and meanings attached to tourists’ special possessions as well as of the functions they fulfill in contemporary consumption. Nineteen informants have been interviewed and observed at home in a naturalistic interpretive perspective. Interview transcripts, field notes, and pictorial material were analyzed and interpreted through the grounded theory approach. This results in a new typology of symbolic souvenirs including touristic trinkets, destination stereotypes, paper mementoes, and picked-up objects. Such a typology relates to four major functions souvenirs may fulfill in terms of meanings and identity construction, that is, categorization, self-expression, connectedness, and self-creation.