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Trustworthiness in qualitative research reports is considered a marker of quality and rigor. That rigor relies on factors like transparency and reflexivity, or the extent to which a researcher can accurately and clearly—read: believably—write the story of the research, the participants, and themselves. In this article, we argue that all representations of research participants, including the researchers themselves, are fiction, and distinctions between fiction and the “real” are actually undesirable when the goal is to maintain (or establish) trustworthiness. Indeed, it is essential to the research report not to claim those fictions but instead to establish verisimilitude by combining compelling descriptions with compulsory claims to the real. As such, we emphasize that trustworthiness is not an attribute of research that a study either has or does not; rather, we argue it is something authors achieve through a carefully constructed, fictionalized account of their research. © The Author(s) 2025

In this article, we explore transformative interviewing through the lens of new materialism. Rather than viewing transformation through a humanist perspective that centralizes a transcendent self, we draw upon Barad’s agential realism to reconsider transformation following the ontological turn. Thinking with agential realism, we engaged two interview studies, one on biracialism and one on masculinity, to demonstrate how the materiality of our interviews (e.g., research bodies, computer programs, questionnaires) intra-acted with our participants to both facilitate and hinder our attempts at transformation. We conclude by theorizing transformation as a type of purposeful entanglement that proceeds from the material-discursive intra-actions of our inquiries.

In this study, we investigated (1) whether adoptive parents suspected their children might have been victims of abduction for adoption in China and (2) for parents who were uncertain if their own children might be victims of child abduction for adoption, how they coped with the possibility. A total of 342 adoptive parents (representing 529 adopted Chinese children) completed an anonymous online survey on their experiences. Of the 342 parents, 154 (45%) described how they coped with the possibility that their children might be the victims of child abduction for adoption. In terms of suspicion, we found that for about 70% of the children, the parents responded Never; for 18.5% of the children, the parents responded Rarely; for 11.7% of the children, the parents responded Sometimes; and for about 1% of the children, the parents responded that they Always suspected that their children might be victims of abduction for adoption. In terms of coping with the possibility that their children might have been victims of child abduction for adoption, thematic analysis on the 154 parents’ descriptions revealed that parents experienced one or more of seven emotional reactions: sadness, frustration/helplessness, complicity/guilt, anger, fear/worry, hypervigilance, resolve, as well as the belief that they were not affected. Finally, we discussed contributing factors to child abduction for adoption and to adoptive parents’ suspicion of such a practice.

Send this e-mail to Rica and Travis: Rica and Travis, I wish you could have been at the duoethnography panel. The first presentation had some uneasy conversations. The second, Dr. Colomer's presentation, was cool: A performance with guest actors had some sad moments with death, health issues, and attrition. The next presentation was about miscarriage and grief counseling. I wondered if our paper is frivolous in comparison to the others. I think not. Our episodes of cultural starvation and indifference are there and painful, but our comebacks are so quick (nourishment as resistance), and therefore so is the celebration. Written by Agosto while flying home after presenting at the 2014 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.

A team of systematic reviewers successfully completed a government-commissioned review of ‘what works to improve post-school outcomes for youth with disabilities’ in 2012. Despite its success, interviews with 10 review team members revealed dissatisfaction with the process and indifference to its outcomes. The purpose of our analysis was to examine how the systematic review process itself led to review team members’ feelings of indifference, resignation, and pessimism. Drawing on the writings of Henry Giroux, Gert Biesta, and Hanna Arendt that warn of the death of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism, we explored how the systematic review certification process, examinations, rules, and structures deadened democratic deliberation and critique necessary, we argue, to conducting good educational science. We end with a call for systematic reviews in education whose researchers, products, and processes remain ethically oriented to keeping democracy alive. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article introduces the special issue, “Manufacturing Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research.” Rather than viewing trustworthiness as an inherent product of high-quality research practices, this special issue considers how researchers manifest and construct appearances of trustworthiness within and through academic texts. Conceptualizing trustworthiness as produced within scholarly writing opens the idea of trustworthiness to broader scrutiny, but also to a wider array of possibility—if trustworthiness is not singular or solely produced through methodology, then it is malleable and full of potential. It is not one trustworthiness, but a million tiny trustworthiness manifested and proliferated across multiple research accounts and readerly engagements. This is our special issue’s conceptual play space that sometimes pushes on and against the notion of trustworthiness itself, and in which the authors, coming from a range of orientations, explore and tinker with their ideas of trustworthiness, highlighting how they produce their research as “trustworthy.” © The Author(s) 2025

The purpose of this study was to examine hidden prejudice in two groups of adult students, international and American, against black compared to white teachers. Social desirability in the minds of participants may affect the result of a study involving racial bias (Mullins, 1982). For this reason, the researchers created a computer protocol using the standard Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure the implicit attitudes of participants. The IAT relies on the idea of automatic information process within the mind that is not impacted by social desirability. A clear concern in education is that the racial bias toward minority students will let those implicit biases affect the way they teach those students, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of poor student performance. But the implicit bias can work both ways and can impact a teacher's effectiveness. Traditional racial prejudice theories usually looked at white's attitudes toward blacks and other groups. This study had a significant directional shift by focusing on the international students' racial attitudes toward black and white teachers. The implicit racial attitudes of international students were also compared to those of American students. The result and evaluation of this study may be a valuable tool to improve student services and teacher professional development in higher education. Suggestions for future research are also provided.[For full proceedings, see ED570489.]

In this paper, we investigated adoptive parent–child relationship quality as a function of the adopted children's country of origin, pre-adoption adversity, age at placement, age, gender, and special healthcare needs status. From the 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP; N=2089), we identified 1906 families that had adopted children from the US foster care system, US private agencies, China, Guatemala, Russia and South Korea. Regression analysis showed that when country of origin was the sole predictor, adoption from the US private agencies (β=.18, p<.001), China (β=.21, p<.001), Russia (β=.06, p<.05) and South Korea (β=.07, p<.05) predicted higher parent–child relationship quality score than adoption from the US foster care system (referent) (R2=5.59%). Adoption from Guatemala was not different from adoption from the US foster care system in parent–child relationship quality (β=−.01, p>.10). In the absence of country of origin, being a boy (β=−.10, p<.05), older age at placement (β=−.20, p<.001), older age (β=−.11, p<.001), having special healthcare needs (β=−.19, p<.001), and more pre-adoption adversity (β=−.08, p<.05) all significantly predicted lower parent–child relationship quality scores (R2=17.56%). When country of origin and the above variables were entered into the regression model simultaneously, being a boy, age at placement, age, and special healthcare needs status remained significant. However, none of the countries of origin except China (β=.07, p<.05) remained significant in predicting higher parent–child relationship score. Our findings showed that the unique circumstances that fueled the availability of children from different countries to become available for adoption played some role in parent–child relationship quality. However, the adopted children's gender, age at placement, age, and special healthcare needs were more predictive of post-adoption parent–child relationship quality.

Academic success is now coupled with social media engagement. Social media has become so normalized in the academy that absent a carefully curated social media presence, scholars risk being seen as unscholarly, unproductive, and unpopular. This article lays bare the pressures, mechanisms, and monstrosities of using social media to promote scholarship. We argue that the widespread adoption of social media outpaces critical attention to its ethics and wonder about the future of public scholarship and the monstrous scholarly selves we are becoming. Thinking of monstrosity, with Krecˇicˇ and Žižek, as the preontological domain that rests beneath society and constitutes alterity and otherness, we ask what kinds of #scholarfamousmonsters we want to be, become, and promote in the digital era.

This special issue takes up urgent questions about how we education scholars might think and do policy and methodology in what has come to be known as the post-truth era. The authors in this special issue grapple with questions about the roles and responsibilities of educational researchers in an era in which research and policy have lost their moorings in T/truth. Collectively they reconceptualize educational research and policy in light of post-truths, anti-science sentiment, and the global rise of right-wing populism. At the same time we editors wonder whether post-truth is given a bad rap. Could post-truth have something productive to offer? What does post-truth open up for educational research and policy? Or, is the real issue of this special issue a collective despair of our own insignificance and obsolescence in the wake of post-truth. Whatever we editors and authors aimed to do, this special issue will not be heard by post-truth adherents and partisans. Perhaps its only contribution is encouragement to stay with the troubles of a post-truth era, even as we despair the consequences of our research and policy creations. © 2018, Arizona State University. All rights reserved.

Inspired by work/think/play in qualitative research, we centered the idea of “play” in a qualitative research project to explore what proceeding from the idea of work/think/play might look like and accomplish. We pursued play in an experimental qualitative inquiry over dinner one night at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Our article centers on one work/think/play inquiry three of us conducted. Through a playful account of how play unfolded in our work/think/play inquiry that evening, we explore research play as generative, deadly, and censored in the context of neoliberalism and other terrors. We reflect on what (good) play does in qualitative research, what our work/think/play/birth/death/terror/qualitative/research accomplished, if anything. Maybe research play is vital, what keeps us fit to do critical qualitative research. Yet research play moves (well) beyond normative rules of much qualitative research. Is it worth the risk? Can we know? Even after?