The Teaching and Learning of Social Research Methods

Developments in Pedagogical Knowledge

Melanie Nind, Daniel Kilburn, Rebekah Luff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138200357
• eBook ISBN: 9781315514512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The importance of the teaching and learning of social research methods is increasingly recognised by research councils and policy bodies as crucial to the drive to increase capacity amongst the research community. The need for greater scholarly engagement with how research methods are taught and learnt is also driven by the realisation that epistemological and methodological developments have not been accompanied by a pedagogical literature or culture. Training initiatives need this pedagogic input if they are to realise the educational aspirations for methodologically skilled and competent researchers, able to apply, adapt and reflect on a range of high-level research methods and approaches. The contributors to this collection have fully engaged with this need to develop and share pedagogical knowledge in relation to the teaching of research methods. Together they span qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods, a range of disciplinary and national contexts, and face-to-face and blended teaching and learning. Through detailed examples, the collection addresses how best teaching practices develop in response to distinctive challenges that will resonate with readers; in so doing it will inspire and inform their own development.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

The problems and prospects in the teaching of mixed methods research

Sharlene Hesse-Biber

Department of Sociology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

There are pedagogical challenges USA students and instructors face within mixed methods classrooms. Instructors of mixed methods are often self-taught, lacking adequate training in both qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. Students are not often trained in both research approaches. These dual training gaps can result in deep pedagogical issues compromising students’ ability to fully understand mixed methods research praxis and leaving teachers feeling ill equipped to address students’ learning concerns. To tackle the myriad of challenges confronted in the mixed methods classroom requires structural changes to the current way graduate training programs in social research methods are organized and taught. Developing a team-based teaching approach to mixed methods research that provides students with instructors who have the requisite qualitative and quantitative knowledge can serve as a pedagogical model that can begin at least to address the current methods and methodological skills gap in the teaching of mixed methods research.

Introduction

Mixed methods research courses in the United States are primarily offered at the graduate and upper-division undergraduate level, and have only emerged over the course of the last five years (Frels, Onwuegbuzie, Leech, & Collins, 2012). A recent study of one hundred schools of education throughout the USA notes that twenty-two percent of graduate programs require their graduate students to enroll in a mixed methods course. In addition, twenty percent of educational programs encourage students to take one mixed methods course as an elective offering (Leech & Goodwin, 2008). At the same time, there is a lack of pedagogical literature on the challenges of teaching students mixed methods (Onwuegbuzie, Frels, Leech, & Collins, 2011).

There is an overall deficit of a pedagogical culture with regard to teaching research methods in general. Wagner, Garner, and Kawulich (2011) conducted a systematic literature review of articles published between 1997 and 2007 concluding that there was little guidance provided to teachers of research methods. Earley’s (2014) extensive review of the literature on this topic notes the paucity of pedagogical research on the problems and prospects regarding student learning of research methods. These studies also point out the lack of interdisciplinary context in the teaching of research methods as a whole.

Most faculty currently teaching mixed methods courses have not themselves taken such a course in their academic career. Creswell, Tashakkori, Jensen, and Shapley (2003, p. 620) refer to these individuals as the ‘first generation of faculty’ who more or less are teaching themselves the ‘how-to’s’ of doing mixed methods research and at the same time trying out the ‘how-to’s’ of teaching these methods to their students. Earley (2007, p. 146) notes that those who are the teaching pioneers of mixed methods courses, ‘… find ourselves in the same situation: we were not officially trained in the mixed-methods research process and have to create these courses without the benefit of prior coursework to guide us.’ In addition, Frels et al. (2012) state that that few studies examine the issues students and instructors face in the contemporary mixed methods classroom thus leaving a pedagogical gap in our understanding of ‘what works’ well in the teaching and student learning in the mixed methods classroom.

Yet there are signals that the pedagogical ground is shifting toward an increased focus on teaching and learning of research methods as a whole. Kilburn, Nind, and Wiles (2014) path-breaking work on the pedagogical state of social science research methods in UK higher education included an in-depth exploration of twenty-four published papers that specifically addressed research methods ‘pedagogical culture.’ In analyzing these papers, the authors note the wealth and range of activities and formal classroom learning that is related to the building of students’ skills in research methods. Their review of the resource rich content in these papers concludes on a more optimistic note and they discerned in their review, three important goals of an effective pedagogical process. The first goal is to make the learning of research visible through engaging students in a series of learning exercises across the research process. The second goal is to have students conduct their own research. The final goal is to have students critically reflect on their own research praxis.

Levine et al.’s (n.d.) work is one of the few studies to address some of the specific challenges students and instructors encounter in the mixed methods classroom. The authors, too, engaged in ‘reflective learning’ in their mixed methods course, which took the form of using students’ weekly mixed methods classroom reflections as the basis of subsequent class discussion and debate. This served to specifically identify and address student-learning issues as they unfolded over the course of the semester. These ‘reflective’ learning discussions served at times to clear up some crucial issues students were encountering. The authors note that they dealt with ‘grey area’ studies where the qualitative component was usually not developed fully. One finding that came out of the analysis of their data was the presence of ‘persistent issues,’ such as how to address student issues with regard to analyzing mixed methods data. This type of reflective pedagogy they present has many of the elements of the effective pedagogical process uncovered by Kilburn et al. (2014).

As mixed methods continues to become a growing field in social research, it is critical for faculty who are teaching, or who are contemplating teaching, mixed methods to understand the methodological and methods challenges students learning about mixed methods confront as they begin to tackle the complexity of mixing and analyzing research findings from two different methods and often from multiple theoretical perspectives.

Toward a mixed methods pedagogy

I recently taught two graduate seminars on mixed methods research inquiry. I decided to teach this course in an iterative manner, somewhat like the ‘reflexive discussions’ that Levine et al. (n.d.) engaged in when they taught their mixed methods course. Right from the beginning I encouraged students to keep a log of their experiences in learning about mixing methods and the concerns and issues they were having in understanding the nuts and bolts of mixing methods. I specifically asked students to clarify for me at the beginning of each class what they perceived as some critical points of confusion about just what mixed methods entails and what they found most difficult.

Most of the graduate students in my mixed methods courses were at a midpoint in their graduate career and many were at the pre-dissertation or dissertation proposal writing stage, with most of their course work completed. They hailed from different professional schools and most were getting an applied professional advanced degree in the healthcare field. The prerequisite for enrollment in my mixed methods course required students to have taken at least one graduate research methods course. As the semester progressed, it became clear to me that students taking my course, for the most part, had education and training in only one type of method – either qualitative or quantitative – that was housed within their discipline.

Student challenges in the learning of mixed methods

Many students came to a mixed methods course not sure of just what it would mean for them to learn a new methods approach and then proceed to engage with both qualitative and quantitative approaches in one research project. It was clear to them that adding a new method would often require them to switch their disciplinary mental model and research practices, and this was not something many of them anticipated, understood, or were prepared for.

It was not surprising that when I asked students in my mixed methods course what they found the most difficult thing about learning mixed methods, they all seem to agree on the following point: mixing paradigms brought confusion. Their own methods training gave them little understanding of how qualitative and quantitative methods were connected to a set of philosophical assumptions about the nature of the social world. The course readings they encountered during the first two weeks of the mixed methods course maintained a tight link between theory and method, with a discussion of the range of different paradigmatic stances toward knowledge building that spanned the qualitative and qualitative divide. Learning about paradigmatic viewpoints raised issues that touched on whether or not paradigms could be mixed within one mixed methods study.

The following are some examples of what students relayed to me when I asked them more specifically about their understanding of what it meant to have a paradigmatic point of view. It is important to note the differences in their responses depending upon whether they came from a predominantly qualitative or quantitative background.

One graduate student with a quantitative background in the field of education said: ‘I didn’t know I had a paradigm!’ Another student in the health sciences noted:

Positivism in my field is so ‘secure’ that is not something I have considered before in terms of what this means for me individually and how this stance has influenced my research endeavors, particularly the development of my dissertation (which is in a quantitative data collection stage currently).

Another student with a strong social justice qualitative background noted the following:

I’d like to focus in this note on one strong bias that I have at the research design phase. I’m biased towards research that injects the voices, opinions, and ideas of marginalized populations into the halls of power. Another bias is to privilege those populations’ viewpoints over those of so-called experts. Often times those marginalized populations are the ones that have suffered the most from a discriminatory governmental policy, a brutal war, etc. They are often also the ones who have the most to gain from a remedy. Moreover, they are often the ones who have the least say over policy decisions moving forward. I suppose I view this bias as a sort of affirmative action. As such, it is an innate bias and one that I try to continue imposing on my research.

Once students began to uncover their own biases, and started to be open to the idea of a range of paradigmatic stances a researcher might take when considering a mixed methods approach, their concerns shifted to issues of paradigm incompatibility. One student expressed the following concern with regard to this issue: ‘Which paradigm are we situated in, how is it possible to exist in both paradigms if they are opposing, can we mix these paradigms and conduct a mixed methods research study, and which set of rules will our study be held to?’

Another source of confusion for students centered on what a mixed methods question was. One student quoted in the Levine et al. study noted:

I’m still struggling to nail down my research question – I know the different quantitative and qualitative components, but I’m trying to find a good way to merge them under a broader objective. Regardless, it was great to work through the different components with my peers.

When asking mixed methods questions, students were curious about just how paradigms fit into the asking of a mixed methods question. Their queries about this took the following form: Can an interpretive paradigm include quantitative methods? Can quantitative paradigms include qualitative methods? One student mentioned that she could not imagine creating a research question that would include both a qualitative and quantitative paradigm.

Another source of confusion for students centered on how they should go about analyzing mixed methods data. They wanted to know how two very different data forms could connect to one another. Students’ knowledge of different analytical methods was sparse. Quantitatively trained students usually had only one statistical analysis and a few had taken one advanced statistical course. Most qualitatively trained students had taken an introductory graduate qualitative course that focused on either field work/ethnography or interviewing. The most common type of analysis they used was grounded theory, but they were hard-pressed to tell me more about the type of grounded theory they employed. They also mentioned that they did not have much hands-on experience using this analytical tool. Students asked me some of the following types of questions: Can quantitative research findings ever be connected to or related to qualitative findings? How? It seems in some studies that qualitative research is always being conducted as secondary to the quantitative – Why? Is not qualitative research sometimes needed in order to even determine quantitative research component and its question? As I listened to the types of methods training students received, it became clear that it was hard for them to tackle deploying one data collection method and analytical tool to their research project. In addition, students mentioned that they had little training in foundational issues and how they entered the research process.

During the course of learning about different paradigmatic approaches in my course, students also began to question their own paradigmatic stance toward mixed methods projects. Students often asked me how their own paradigmatic stance might begin to cloud their own thinking about how to proceed with a mixed methods project, asking questions such as: Is my going into mixed methods research with a firm ideology and failing to move from that ideology, particularly if it is from a positivist paradigm, the best way to conduct mixed methods research project?

Given these sources of confusion, one important first challenge in the teaching of mixed methods involves moving students from either a deductive mode of research inquiry to an inductive one, or vice versa. This type of transition in knowledge building requires a discussion of paradigmatic viewpoints linked to research questions that are then linked to methods selected. I ask my students questions such as the following: What does it mean to ask a deductive question? What does it mean to take an inductive approach? What is an inductive question? How are these two modes of knowledge building linked? I provide students with specific examples and empirical research studies that ask questions using both types of research inquiry. I have found that the use of concrete short case studies to invaluable in the learning process.

As students proceed to transition to other ways of knowing, students often find themselves asking a series of philosophical questions that often start to upend their former ways of thinking about research inquiry. Instructors of mixed methods must have the knowledge and training in both modes of knowledge building in order to transition students to thinking along a theory-question-methods continuum. If not, students may not fully understand or even begin to appreciate the profound links between theory and research design as a whole.

Teaching mixed methods: what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The teaching and learning of social research methods: developments in pedagogical knowledge
• 1. The problems and prospects in the teaching of mixed methods research
• 2. ‘I’m not a quants person’; key strategies in building competence and confidence in staff who teach quantitative research methods’
• 3. Embedding quantitative skills into the social science curriculum: case studies from Manchester
• 4. Teaching social research methods after the critical turn: challenges and benefits of a constructivist pedagogy
• 5. From guided-instruction to facilitation of learning: the development of Five-level QDA as a CAQDAS pedagogy that explicates the practices of expert users
• 6. Learning to manage and share data: jump-starting the research methods curriculum
• 7. Using video and dialogue to generate pedagogic knowledge: teachers, learners and researchers reflecting together on the pedagogy of social research methods
• Index