Considering ‘time’ is a crucial issue for researchers of education because development and change are fundamental to understand learning. Neil Mercer’s influential work (Mercer, 2008) suggests that research should always look at time in relation to content and impact – how does a teacher’s action invoke learner change which subsequently alters teacher activity?
When looking at the concept of time, we can think of it in terms of its scale (seconds and minutes, or months and years), or its trajectory (unfolding and linear, or cyclical and interconnected), or its categorisation (within a single event, or across a series of events).
Accommodating the effects of time on qualitative research design can be problematic for a number of reasons: people can suffer from recall weaknesses, and there are well-known problems relating to participant dropout. Time also implicates a whole bunch of contingencies in the research process – for example, what we say as researchers influences what participants say, which then influences the subsequent direction of the research activity.
