Fields and Subject Reference of VET Research

The connection between working and learning and the interactions between the development of technology, the structural change in work content and forms, and the content and forms of vocational education and training point to vocational work as the linchpin of VET research. Other fields of research have demonstrated their quality as international comparative research in recent years: the international comparative evaluation of the steering and support systems of vocational education and training. Vocational research is considered to be a primary research field constituting VET research. If VET research is to become practical, then it is always about the broad field of didactics of VET with its domain-specific differentiation as well as the development and design of competence-based forms of examination. For VET research, the question arises whether there are good or even compelling reasons for differentiating methods for its specific objects of research or whether it should orient itself toward the unity of methods. Garfinkel has tried to justify the appropriateness of the methods for the “Studies of Work” to the subject matter through a fundamental critique of the inappropriateness of traditional methods of analysis (cf. Garfinkel, Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall, 1967; Ethnomethodological studies of work. Routledge, 1986). In the practice of VET research, the realization of a subject-related differentiation of its research and development methods is a methodological challenge that is difficult to meet, if only because of the diversity of vocational domains.