One of the common frustrations for students trying to make sense of the various debates and concepts that inform contemporary educational and social science research methods-such as structuralism, postpositivism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism-is that most books introducing these topics are written at a level that assumes the reader comes to this material with a basic grasp of the underlying ideas. Too often, fundamental concepts and theories are presented without adequate preparation and without providing practical examples to illustrate key elements. When the first edition of Conceptual...