Status of Qualitative Research in Early Childhood...

written by Nasima Shakeel The field of human development has recently gained considerable importance globally. This results in shifting the contemporary educational discourse, one that moves ECED closer to the front of policy formation. Literature shows that developed nations are investing enormous resources into their early intervention programs, hence, during the last decade international aid agencies, and some education systems, have promoted the creation and expansion of ECED programs in developing nations too. With the innovations in ECED, there has been conducted a large number of researches to form an objective theoretical foundation (Penn, 2004) to support this advancement. Following passage presents the literature review on†¦show more content†¦Among multiple methods of data collection observation and semi-structured interviews remained the dominant strategies; however, some of the researchers have also analyzed related documents and artifacts. In some studies anecdotal notes and reflective journals are also used to get more comprehensive data. Addition to these, in the phenomenological and ethnographic studies participant observations were used as compare to the case studies where the researcher took the role of non-participant observer (Maxwell, 1997). Moreover, in majority of the studies interviews and discussions were audio taped and observations were videotaped. After the transcription of the data in some of the studies, data was rechecked by the research participants, which, is important to maintain reliability and validity of the collected data (Robson, 2002). Addition to this, ethical considerations like, maintaining the confidential ity of the research participants, prior permission for interviews, respecting participants’ autonomy were taken into consideration throughout the studies; however, none of the writer could describe their ethical framework in more detail, probably due to the word limits. Another very critical trend was found between the backgrounds of the researchers. All 0f the qualitative researches were being conducted by the people related to the field of ECED, however, only 1 of the studies were conducted by the ECED practitioner who teaches in the ECED