Quantitative research in research on the education and learning of adults

This chapter starts from the observation that there is a limited presence of quantitative research published in leading adult education journals such as Adult Education Quarterly, Studies in Continuing Education and International Journal of Lifelong Learning. This observation was also discussed by Fejes and Nylander (2015, see also Chap. 7). As an adult education scholar mainly working with large quantitative datasets, I aim to provide more insight on what quantitative methods have to offer to the field. I will do this through a brief discussion of the role of methodologies and methods in empirical research, but also by engaging with examples of quantitative research available in the scholarly literature, including a range of existing quantitative scales, and how these can be taken forward in new research as tools to generate the construction of new knowledge. I will first explore potential reasons why the presence of quantitative research in the leading generic adult education journals is so limited