Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
229 results found in Research Methods.
- Corpus (Language Corpus, Text Corpus, British National Corpus, BNC)
- A corpus is a large, structured collection of texts used to train, tune, or evaluate language-processing systems. Representative examples include the British National Corpus (BNC, 100 million words of…
- Counternarratives (Counter-storytelling, Critical Counter-narrative)
- A qualitative research and pedagogical technique, rooted in critical race theory and education research (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), in which members of marginalized groups write and share their own sto…
- Criterion Validity
- A psychometric property indicating whether an instrument's scores relate to some external measurable criterion. In practice, this is assessed by comparing the instrument's results with scores from ano…
- Critical Disability Theory (Critical Disability Studies, CDT)
- An interdisciplinary theoretical framework that examines disability as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon rather than solely a medical condition. Critical disability theory draws on disabili…
- Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
- An interdisciplinary research methodology that examines how language and texts both reflect and shape power structures, ideologies, and social practices. Originating from the work of Michel Foucault, …
- Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ)
- A short, open-ended reflective tool developed by Stephen Brookfield for teaching and learning contexts, typically consisting of five questions asking participants to recall moments from a recent exper…
- Cross-Cultural Adaptation Theory (CCAT, Kim's Cross-Cultural Adaptation Theory)
- A communication theory, developed principally by Young Yun Kim, that describes how individuals adjust to an unfamiliar cultural environment over time through cycles of stress, adaptation, and growth. …
- Cross-Disability
- A research, advocacy, or design orientation that deliberately engages multiple disability communities at once rather than treating disability as a single-axis category or focusing on a single impairme…
- Cultural Probes (Design Probes, Probes)
- A design research technique in which participants are given a kit of open-ended, often playful artefacts - such as disposable cameras, diaries, maps, or prompts - to document aspects of their daily li…
- Cumulative Link Mixed Model (CLMM, Ordinal Mixed Model)
- A statistical model for analysing ordinal outcome data (such as Likert-scale ratings) that includes both fixed effects (experimental conditions) and random effects (participants, stimuli). CLMMs use a…
- DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise)
- A density-based clustering algorithm introduced by Ester, Kriegel, Sander, and Xu (1996) that groups data points located in dense neighbourhoods and labels sparse points as noise. Unlike k-means, DBSC…
- Data Annotation (Data labeling, AI labeling)
- The process of attaching labels, transcriptions, bounding boxes, or other structured metadata to raw data so that it can be used to train, evaluate, or benchmark machine-learning models. Annotation is…
- Data Mining (Knowledge Discovery, KDD, Knowledge Discovery in Databases)
- Data mining is the computational process of discovering patterns, rules, and relationships in large datasets, drawing on techniques from statistics, machine learning, and database systems. Common task…
- Dataset Collection (Data Collection Protocol)
- The process of gathering, curating, and documenting data used to train, evaluate, or benchmark machine learning systems. In accessibility contexts, dataset collection decisions — who contributes, what…
- Decision Tree (Classification Tree, Regression Tree, C4.5, CART)
- A decision tree is a supervised machine-learning model that represents a classification or regression decision as a tree of yes/no tests on input features, with predictions at the leaves. Well-known a…
- Decolonial Learning (Decolonial Design Practice)
- A preparatory and ongoing phase in community-based research in which researchers — typically affiliated with Global North institutions or corporations — work to understand the historical, political, a…
- Delphi Method (Delphi Technique, Delphi Interview)
- A structured research technique originally developed by the RAND Corporation for forecasting, in which a panel of experts participates in multiple rounds of questioning to reach consensus on a topic. …
- Deployment Study (Field Deployment, In-the-Wild Study)
- A research method where technology is placed in users' real-world environments for an extended period to observe natural usage patterns, adoption behaviors, and long-term experiences. Unlike controlle…
- Design Fiction (Speculative Fiction, Diegetic Prototype)
- A design research practice that creates fictional but plausible artifacts, scenarios, or narratives set in imagined futures to provoke discussion, surface assumptions, and explore the social and ethic…
- Dual-Positioned Researcher (Dual Positioning, Insider-Outsider Researcher)
- A researcher who holds both the role of investigator and the lived experience of the condition or community being studied — for example, a person with OCD studying OCD, or a Deaf researcher studying D…