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Abstract
This article re-assesses the methodological difficulties involved in researching the powerful in education. It reviews the major areas and issues that researchers focused on: problems of access, different types of interviewing, interpretation of data generated through interviews and ethical issues. It argues that in most aspects researching powerful people is not very different from researching any other people, and that the main difference is simply that we need to gain data from specified people. The article then discusses the implications of this claim for other forms of research.
Acknowledgements
This article was triggered by my being asked to write an on-line teaching resource for BERA on ‘researching the powerful in education’ with a strict and very low word limit of 1700 words. There is some overlap between this article and that resource. I acknowledge the insights provided by anonymous referees.