Responsible Research: Ways of being a researcher

Abstract Being an educational researcher is not an easy option. Educational researchers are practitioners in an engaged social science which makes particular demands on them. These include responsibility to the field of study. In this presidential address it is argued that close‐to‐the‐field research, that can do justice to the meaning making that occurs there, is an important part of the responsibility of the educational research community. Research of this kind, sometimes called interpretative or transformative research, calls for a form of engagement with the field which could be termed responsible agency. Because examinations of individual agency and responsibility must take into account contexts, their values and opportunities, the address also examines how the British Educational Research Association, as a learned society, can sustain the identities of engaged researchers and how their revelations from the field can inform educational policy and the methodologies which shape educational enquiry.