Researching the powerful in education: a re-assessment of the problems

This article re-assesses the methodological difficulties involved in researching the powerful in education. It reviews the major areas and issues that researchers focused on: problems of access, different types of interviewing, interpretation of data generated through interviews and ethical issues. It argues that in most aspects researching powerful people is not very different from researching any other people, and that the main difference is simply that we need to gain data from specified people. The article then discusses the implications of this claim for other forms of research.