RESEARCH SKILLS

Research Skills

Research Skills

Introduction

The paper will be focused over the mixed method researchers issues for narrowing down the topic and keeping a focus over clearly defining an issue and how it has been increasing difficulties for the new researchers. A need exists in the mixed methods literature to go beyond the types of designs available to new researchers and to begin exploring issues and strategies in conducting these designs. This chapter advances potential concerns that need to be anticipated by new researchers in conducting mixed methods research designs. It begins by locating these concerns within two broad categories of designs (i.e. concurrent and sequential designs), identifying potential concerns new researchers might anticipate in using these designs, and citing published mixed methods studies that illustrate not only the issues but also potential strategies, expressed or implied, for addressing them. The methodological problems we explore relate to finding contradictory evidence between quantitative and qualitative data, the integration of data, sampling, introducing bias, participant selection, selection of results to use, and the sequence of implementing data. Understanding these issues and exploring alternative strategies to address them will enhance our understanding of mixed methods procedures and encourage rigorous, thoughtful designs.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify methodological problems and advance potential strategies for planning and conducting mixed methods designs. Our intent is to present a pool of ideas from which new researchers can draw in their efforts to overcome methodological problems and craft rigorous studies. To this end, we start with the issues that we specified previously, issues largely based on conversations with U.S. and international new researchers (Victor 2004 63-70). A useful heuristic for thinking about these methodological problems in designs occurred as we mapped the core ideas for this chapter: to organize the issues and seek out strategies for addressing the issues using designs clustered into concurrent or sequential designs. We therefore organized the issues into distinct themes, related them to either concurrent or sequential designs, and looked extensively in published, empirical mixed methods articles reported in the journal literature, for example that would illustrate the challenges as well as present potential strategies for addressing them. As we reviewed the articles, we were also careful to identify challenges that we had not previously anticipated.

Examples of issues and strategies

Our search of the literature yielded several issues and numerous strategies either implied or expressed by authors. We discuss these issues and strategies for both concurrent and sequential designs, providing examples drawn from the examined studies.

Concurrent Design Issues and Strategies

We begin with a discussion of the concurrent designs and explore how authors of published mixed methods articles addressed contradictory findings, integrated or combined the quantitative and qualitative data, chose participants for the samples and the size of the samples, and limited the potential bias of data collection in their designs.

Sampling

New researchers need to consider the consequences of having different samples and different sample sizes when merging quantitative and qualitative datasets (Capella-Santana 2003 182-190). Different sample sizes are common in mixed methods designs because quantitative and ...