Discourse analysis is an important qualitative research approach across social science disciplines for analyzing (and challenging) how reality in a variety of organizational and institutional arenas is constructed. However, the process of conducting empirical discourse analyses remains challenging. In this article, we identify four key challenges involved in doing discourse analysis and recommend several "tools" derived from empirical practice to address these challenges. We demonstrate these recommendations by drawing on examples from an empirical discourse analysis study we conducted. Our tools and recommendations aim to facilitate conducting and writing up discourse analyses and may also contribute to addressing the identified challenges in other qualitative methodologies.

In this paper I conceptualize experiences with technology as an object of study for educational technology research and propose phenomenology as a highly suitable method for studying this construct. I begin by reviewing existing research focusing on the construct of experiences with technology and the approaches utilized for its study. To augment this literature, I explain the phenomenological concept of experience and describe its utility for understanding experiences with technology. I propose the theoretical and methodological approach of phenomenology as a framework for developing a research agenda on experiences with technology and for unifying existing lines of research in this area. To illustrate the promise of this approach and to facilitate its application, I describe a research design consistent with the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology, including methods for collecting and analyzing data as well as ethical and validity considerations specific to this research design. I conclude by identifying several possible research directions utilizing a phenomenological approach in educational technology to incite further research in this area.

This article seeks to demystify, through deconstruction, the concept of interdisciplinarity in the context of qualitative research to contribute to a new praxis of knowledge production through reflection on the possibilities and impossibilities of interdisciplinarity. A review and discussion of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity leads the authors to formulate and explore the following questions: What is interdisciplinary knowledge? What is it that researchers observe as interdisciplinarity? Why do researchers pursue it? In demystifying interdisciplinarity, the authors focus on the legitimacy of the sign interdisciplinary and the process of (interdisciplinary) knowledge production. After investigating the former, the authors explore the latter by metaphorically mapping the terrain of knowledge production and conclude by proposing that interdisciplinarity, as a sign, may have the function of enabling knowledge-producing organizations to leverage resources by symbolically alluding to desired characteristics of knowledge-production processes whereas, as an act, it may de facto reproduce and maintain the disciplinary organization of knowledge and knowledge production.

Computer use is a widespread leisure activity for adolescents. Leisure contexts, such as Internet cafés, constitute specific social environments for computer use and may hold significant educational potential. This article reports a phenomenological study of adolescents’ experiences of educational computer use at Internet cafés in Turkey. The purposes of the study were to understand and describe the phenomenon in depth and arrive at the essence of adolescents’ experiences with the phenomenon. Data were collected through series of in-depth phenomenological interviews with six adolescents and analyzed using phenomenal analysis. The results include potential benefits of Internet cafés as specific social leisure contexts of educational computer use for adolescent development. Implications for designing and studying computer-based informal learning environments are presented.

Trends toward convergence on common methodologies and standardized templates restrict the diversity of qualitative methods in organizational research. Considering that graduate education is a critical process in the socialization of researchers into the norms and dominant practices of their discipline, graduate students’ socialization into research methodologies is vital for understanding methodological convergence. The purpose of our study was to understand how graduate students’ socialization shapes their methodological and paradigmatic preferences. Showcasing methodological bricolage as an alternative to qualitative templates, we constructed a research design that combined thematic, discourse, and narrative analyses to investigate graduate students’ reflections throughout a qualitative methods course introducing alternative research paradigms. Our findings highlight the role of institutional, disciplinary, and personal influences as well as identity work in researchers’ socialization and trace alternative trajectories by which socialization and methodological identity construction processes may unfold. We offer a sketch of methodological socialization and suggest that its understanding should be central to nurturing paradigmatic and methodological plurality in qualitative research. We conclude with implications for future research and for research methods training.