CHALLENGES, PITFALLS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF RESEARCHING SHADOW EDUCATION THROUGH THE INTERNET
CHALLENGES, PITFALLS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF RESEARCHING SHADOW EDUCATION THROUGH THE INTERNET

Summary/Abstract: The private supplementary tutoring phenomenon (in the literature often described as the shadow education) has expanded worldwide, and thus captured the interest of researchers and scholars in various fields. The usage of the internet as a source of potential information on the phenomenon is rather scarce as only a few studies have benefited from its potential so far. The aim of the paper is to thoroughly describe the methodological challenges and pitfalls encountered in the author’s quantitative content analysis of online advertising of private tutoring lessons. The paper deals with problems and issues in various stages of research proces (e.g., definition of population, sampling strategy, ways of acquiring and coding data and assessing its validity) and suggests ways to cope with these challenges. It addresses the limitations of the research and mentions the opportunities for employing the methodology in international comparative studies or as a secondary method for data triangulation.

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