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Education is considered a key vehicle for creating hope among youth. This is important not only for hope's sake, but because increased hope is thought to reduce participation in various forms of violence. But while other goals for education in mitigating participation in violence involve special programming and step-by-step theories, hope is generally presumed to emerge spontaneously via education. We investigated the relationship between education and hope through qualitative cross-national research in Nairobi, Kenya, and Karachi, Pakistan. We argue that although education can be important for fostering hope, the pathways from education to hope are neither simple, linear, nor unproblematic and that there are features of education that contribute to hope and others that detract from it. We present a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between education and hope and delineate key features through which education may cultivate or dash hopes, with important implications for both scholarship and practice.

Access to education for all children around the world is supported by international human rights conventions. Despite this broad endorsement, some international actors wonder whether promoting access to education for girls may conflict with dominant local attitudes, values, or customs. Using stratified survey data and complementary qualitative interview data, this study explores why parents in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, choose to send their boys and girls to school, what prevents them from doing so, and what kinds of normative tensions emerge during this process. First, our data show that placing value on their boys' education is not enough to prompt parents to enroll them in school; parents also must perceive that educating their boys will have future returns, thus prioritizing pragmatic assessments over normative value. However, those who send both boys and girls to school are more likely to prioritize the value of education. Second, our data show that parents who report experiencing or having personal knowledge of a higher number of attacks against education are less likely to send their children to school. Finally, our data show that normative struggles over girls' education take place primarily within the local community and society, rather than between foreign organizations and the local population. Regardless of education level, both men and women cite tenets of Islam as a key motivation for educating both girls and boys. Although some describe education as a human right, they say that Islam is the source of these rights, not Western organizations or institutions. The greater challenge for aid workers, therefore, is pragmatic (to ensure security) rather than normative (to promote beliefs about the appropriateness of education).

The purpose of this article is to explore the effects of community participation in school governance, as an element of development and humanitarian assistance programs, on social capital and civil society building. The first section describes different types of participation in education, its institutional forms, and the paradigms that support it. The second section reviews briefly education in emergencies and the principles it shares with educational development programs. The last section presents the relevant findings from a study of community participation in an emergency education program in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia), and explores some of the implications for civil society and democracy building. (Contains 10 notes.)

In this article, we conduct an integrative and rigorous review of theory and research on education in emergencies programs and interventions as international agencies implement them in areas of armed conflict. We ask several questions. How did this subfield emerge and what are the key conceptual frameworks that shape it today? How do education in emergencies programs affect access, learning, and protection in conflict-affected contexts? To answer these questions, we identify the conceptual frameworks and theoretical advances that have occurred since the inception of the field in the mid-1990s. We review the theories that frame the relationship between education and conflict as well as empirical research that tests assumptions that underpin this relationship. Finally, we assess what we know to date about "what works" in education in emergencies based on intervention research. We find that with regard to access, diminished or inequitable access to education drives conflict; conflict reduces boys' and girls' access to education differently; and decreased distance to primary school increases enrollment and attendance significantly for boys and even more so for girls. With regard to learning, education content likely contributes to or mitigates conflict, although the mechanisms through which it does so remain underspecified; and peace education programs show promise in changing attitudes and behaviors toward members of those perceived as the "other," at least in the short term. Finally, providing children living in emergency and postemergency situations with structured, meaningful, and creative activities in a school setting or in informal learning spaces improves their emotional and behavioral well-being.

Indirect questioning attempts to overcome social desirability bias in survey research. However, to properly analyze the resulting data, it is crucial to understand how it impacts responses. This study analyzes results from a randomized experiment that tests whether direct versus indirect questioning methods lead to different results in a sample of 8,426 youths in Kenya and Pakistan. Through an examination of differential item functioning and regression analyses, we find that question wording leads to differences in how scales should be scored. We conclude that the use of indirect questioning should be undertaken with caution as a method to replace direct questioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Randomized trials have experienced a marked surge in endorsement and popularity in education research in the past decade. This surge reignited paradigm debates and spurred qualitative critics to accuse these experimental designs of eclipsing qualitative research. This article reviews a current iteration of this debate and examines two randomized trials that incorporate mixed methods to analyze (a) how randomized trials stand up to qualitative critics and (b) how qualitative methods can enhance randomized trials. Each study presented employs an experimental design with both quantitative and qualitative methods. I argue that randomized trials can be used to great effect, particularly in conjunction with qualitative methods. Mixed-methods research designs to study program impact can minimize the trade offs experienced by overreliance on one approach. Furthermore, international education researchers bring formidable contextual knowledge to bear on these approaches. Mixed methods that incorporate randomized trials hold promise for international and comparative education research. (Contains 28 footnotes and 2 tables.)