Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

67 results found in Research Methodology.

Ethnography (Ethnographic Research, Ethnographic Methods)
A qualitative research methodology originating in anthropology that involves observing people in their natural environments to understand their behaviours, practices, and social interactions in contex…
Ethnomethodology
A sociological approach, founded by Harold Garfinkel, that studies the everyday methods people use to make sense of and produce social order in interaction - the implicit rules and shared practices th…
Evaluator Effect
The evaluator effect refers to the phenomenon where different accessibility evaluators identify different sets of problems when assessing the same website, leading to variability in evaluation results…
Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD)
A participatory methodology originally developed in UK health services research that treats people's lived experience - their 'emotional touch-points' of confusion, frustration, or insight - as the co…
Explanatory Sequential Design (Sequential Explanatory Design, QUAN → QUAL)
A mixed-methods research design in which a quantitative phase is conducted first — typically a survey or other structured measurement — and its results are then used to guide a follow-up qualitative p…
Feasibility Study (Feasibility Trial, Pilot Study)
A feasibility study is a small-scale investigation conducted before a full-scale trial to determine whether a planned intervention or system can be delivered as intended in its real-world setting. Fea…
Feminist HCI
An approach to human-computer interaction research and design articulated by Shaowen Bardzell that brings feminist theory, values, and methods into HCI practice. Feminist HCI foregrounds pluralism, em…
Implementation Science
The study of methods and strategies that promote the systematic uptake of research findings and evidence-based practices into routine clinical, educational, or service settings. Implementation science…
Information Foraging Theory (IFT)
A theory proposed by Pirolli and Card describing how people seek information by adaptively optimising for maximum information gain with minimum effort, analogous to animal foraging. Key constructs inc…
Information Power
A sample-adequacy principle for qualitative research, proposed by Malterud, Siersma, and Guassora (2016), which holds that the more information a study sample holds that is relevant to the research qu…
Infrastructural Inversion
A methodological move, articulated by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, that foregrounds the usually invisible infrastructure underpinning everyday action — categories, standards, procedures, sile…
Infrastructuring
A theoretical lens from HCI, CSCW, and participatory design (developed from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Karen Ruhleder, Volkmar Pipek, and Volker Wulf) that treats infrastructure not as a finished a…
Interaction Analysis
A qualitative research method for studying knowledge and action in interaction with people, objects, and environments — typically through close observation of video or screen recordings, annotating vi…
Krippendorff's Alpha (Krippendorff Alpha, Kalpha)
A statistical measure of inter-rater agreement used to assess how consistently two or more coders classify the same qualitative data. Developed by Klaus Krippendorff, the metric handles any number of …
Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)
A concept from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's situated-learning theory describing how newcomers join a community of practice by first participating in peripheral, lower-stakes activities and gradually…
Likert Scale (Likert-type Scale, Rating Scale)
A psychometric scale commonly used in surveys and questionnaires where respondents indicate their level of agreement with a statement, typically using options ranging from "strongly disagree" to "stro…
Literacy Bias (Literacy bias of a metric)
In accessibility research methodology, a literacy bias describes the phenomenon where an evaluation metric systematically produces different scores for participants with different reading-literacy lev…
Narrative Engagement (Story Engagement)
A multidimensional construct used in media studies and HCI research to capture how deeply a viewer is drawn into a story, including narrative understanding, attentional focus, narrative presence (the …
Narrative-Flip Method (Narrative flip)
A qualitative HCI research method in which participants first encounter a technology or artifact without knowing its origins or intent, reflect on it, and only afterwards are told its disability-led, …
Non-Participation
In Wenger's Communities of Practice framework, the active (rather than merely absent) relationships people have with a community they do not fully join. Wenger identifies four forms: compromise (stepp…