Using Mixed Methods

Frameworks for an Integrated Methodology

David Plowright

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781848601086, 9781848601079
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Using Mixed Methods offers an innovative approach to social and educational research. The author sets out the case for research from an holistic perspective, integrating different methods, different data and overall research strategies.

This book shows how to use an integrated methodology that meets the needs of the postgraduate researcher who wants to challenge the traditional paradigmatic view of research.

The author explores:

- The FraIM and its application to social and educational research

- The contexts of research

- Different methods of data collection

- Types of data and their natural integration within the research process

This book is for final year undergraduate and postgraduate students on social science and education courses.

David Plowright is a lecturer in the Centre for Educational Studies at the University of Hull.

1

From mixed methods to an integrated methodology

This chapter will:

• provide an introduction to the Frameworks for an Integrated Methodology (FraIM)
• explain how to carry out small-scale social and educational research using an integrated methodology
• briefly describe the structure of the book.

Introduction

This book is about undertaking small-scale social and educational research. You will find it helpful if you are a post-graduate student or a third year undergraduate student who is required to carry out and report on a research project for your programme of study.

You will no doubt have read, or be currently reading, a number of other research methodology textbooks. You may be surprised at the confusing ideas you will have encountered in your reading. This is to be expected, since there is a lot of confusion associated with carrying out research! It wasn’t always like this.

Many years ago (too many to remember exactly!) when I had just started a degree in psychology, I remember sitting in a formal lecture and being told by the tutor that ‘as psychologists, we don’t talk to the sociologists down the road’. We all laughed, although I’m not too sure that we fully understood the true import of the statement that we thought was meant as a joke. But we soon discovered that it wasn’t a joke. The lecturer was deadly serious. Why? Because our BSc psychology course was located firmly in the science faculty and the BA sociology degree was in the arts faculty. Sociologists, we were told, were not scientists nor were their subject and methods of study based on a scientific paradigm that valued systematically manipulated, observable behaviour and careful, objective counting and measuring.

That early pronouncement has always stayed with me. It was my first experience of confronting what is still an ongoing debate in the social and behavioural sciences. It is the question of how we come to an understanding of the world in which we live and whether or not that understanding can be reliable and trustworthy.

For those fifty or so students (in those days undergraduate groups were not very large) sat on hard stone benches in that draughty lecture hall (and students were more tolerant of poor quality facilities) the arguments were simple. On the one hand was experimental or scientific behaviourism, while on the other was … well, there was no other hand. Scientific method ruled, OK. Personal views and opinions counted for nothing, mainly because they could not be counted. As putative scientists, albeit behavioural scientists, we were expected to deal in facts. In the opening paragraph of Dickens’s Hard Times, the character of Gradgrind firmly and unequivocally announces:

Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir! (Dickens, 2003: 74)

In this book, I have tried to steer a new course through the often treacherous waters that are home to many different facts but also many different ideas, views, perspectives, feelings and opinions.

Research methodology is not an easy subject to understand. Carrying out research is always fraught with difficulties. To help you, there are many different books from many different authors. They aim to explain the often complex issues associated with undertaking social and educational research. This present book adds to this list, but you may already be wondering whether or not we need another publication on research weighing down your bookshelf.

The answer is a firm ‘yes’, because this book takes a different approach, a different perspective to framing the research process and the underpinning principles that enable us to understand the decisions we make and the actions we take when carrying out research. This seems rather a bold claim. Perhaps you will eventually decide it is too bold a claim.

What you will find in this book is a synthesis of different ideas that you may well have come across already. There is nothing new in that, of course. What is new, however, is the way these different ideas are brought together under a new and innovative approach to conceptualising and thinking about research methodology. This new approach I have called the FraIM, which stands for: Frameworks for an Integrated Methodology.

Rejecting a traditional dichotomy

The FraIM rejects the traditional dichotomy between ‘qualitative methods’ and ‘quantitative methods’. This, again in itself is not new. The practice of ‘mixed methods’ has been with us for some time now. In 2007 a new journal, the Journal of Mixed Methods Research, was launched. It challenged the still prevalent idea that different approaches to conceptualising and undertaking research cannot be used together. Various other publications, including for example, the Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioral Research (Tashakkori and Teddlie, 2003) and Creswell and Plano Clark’s (2007) Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research, have promoted the use of combining different approaches to undertaking research.

This book builds on those ideas and accepts, in principle, their appropriateness for carrying out the kind of research that the vast majority of students will be undertaking for their courses. More importantly, however, the ideas in this book go beyond a mainstream mixed methods approach to research. It does this by taking a fresh look at the way we think about social and educational research. It rejects completely and emphatically the use of the terms and distinction between ‘qualitative methods’ and ‘quantitative methods’. It even eschews the terms ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ for more useful and appropriate descriptions of the research process. You’ll find that these words – the Q words – are not used again in this book, unless they appear in titles of publications to which I refer.

However, it is not just the words that are of significance here. It is the underlying concepts and meanings, expressed through those words, that channel our thoughts, actions and understanding. These are what the book is about and indeed the overall purpose is to invite you to think afresh about research.

Of course, you may not like the ideas you read about. You may find them too different or they may not fit your thinking about how research should be conceptualised or explained. I can only say: don’t be too hasty in rejecting an invitation to take a fresh approach to your research.

So, what is the book about and why is the approach it introduces so different?

Frameworks

This book argues that we can use a series of ‘frameworks’ to structure our thinking about research. A framework can best be described as a basic structure that underlies a system, concept or text (Soanes and Stevenson, 2005). In a framework, there is no ‘content’, only structure. This means that a framework represents processes and activities in an abstract and generalised way. It can be seen as a model that describes the process of designing, planning and carrying out research. You’re the one who supplies the ‘content’. This is the focus of your scholarly interests and the methodological decisions you make and specific actions you take in your research.

Above all, the frameworks are aimed at supporting the integration of different elements of the research process to ensure the effective and successful study of social and educational phenomena. Integration here means to combine and structure the different elements of the process into a unified, coherent whole. Perhaps most important of all, it gives equal consideration to each element without privileging one element over any other.

The way this works will be explained in the rest of the book. You’ll find that not everything about research is included. There is not the space to do this. This means that there will be some issues that are not covered. Others may be touched on only briefly. Some might be looked at in a fair amount of detail. The important thing to remember is that this book is an introductory text to using the FraIM. It lays out the groundwork, offers ideas about what an integrated methodology is and it provides an opportunity to apply those ideas to your own research.

The structure of the book

Chapter 2 introduces the FraIM and explains how you can use it as the basis of your research. It provides a brief outline of both the basic FraIM and the main, extended FraIM. The latter is an expansion of the former and provides a more detailed and comprehensive structure within which to work

Chapters 3 and 4 are about case selection. You’ll discover that there are two stages in choosing the cases, or sources of data, for your research. The first is referred to as data source management and the second as integrated sampling. You may find the approach to data source management a little different from what you are familiar with.

Chapter 5 provides an introduction to methods of data collection and is an overview of the characteristics of the three methods that are part of the main FraIM. This is followed by chapters on each of the different methods. Chapter 6 focuses on observation, Chapter 7 on asking questions, and Chapters 8 and 9 on artefact analysis. You’ll find some new and interesting ideas in these chapters, especially those concerned with integrating the different methods.

Chapter 10 is about data integration and challenges the current view about types of data used in research and the idea of data reduction.

Chapter 11 argues that the most appropriate approach to conceptualising the validity of research is to think in terms of the warrantability of research. This is not a new idea but is one that tends not to be referred to in most introductory texts. It is seen, however, as being appropriate for use with the FraIM.

The next two chapters are about ethicality in research. Chapter 12 concentrates on issues about participant-centred research and Chapter 13 looks at wider concerns associated with carrying out research based on the FraIM.

Chapter 14 tackles, perhaps all too briefly, the philosophical perspective – holistic integrationism – to which the FraIM refers. It is worth pointing out, even at this early stage, that you will be encouraged to reject the view that philosophy determines the methodology used in research. As an alternative, you’ll be asked to consider that it is actually the other way round: methodology determines the philosophy we employ to help us understand and conceptualise the research process.

At the end of each chapter you’ll find a section entitled ‘associated reading’, where a number of publications will be listed. However, because the FraIM is such a new idea you’ll find that the reading is not explicitly or directly linked with the approach that is taken in this book. Inevitably, the publications will still take a traditional view about research or be firmly located within mainstream mixed methods research. However, please bear in mind that whatever you read, whoever you talk to, you are the one who is carrying out the research. It is your research and no matter how much advice or guidance you receive, you are the one who will make the decisions about what to do and about what actions to take. Most important of all, you will need to explain and justify the decisions you make. The chapters in this book aim to enable you to successfully achieve this.

Finally, this book was written in order to make a contribution to an interesting and fascinating process that will lead you to a clearer understanding of the principles, processes and procedures involved in research based on an integrated methodology.

Associated reading

• Bergman, M.M. (ed.) (2008) Advances in Mixed Methods Research. London: SAGE.
• Creswell, J.W. and Plano Clark, V.L. (2007) Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. London: SAGE.
• Gorard, S. and Taylor, C. (2004) Combining Methods in Educational and Social Research. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
• Plano Clark, V.L. and Creswell, J. (2008) The Mixed Methods Reader. London: SAGE.
• Tashakkori, A. and Teddlie, C. (eds) (2003) Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioral Research. London: SAGE.
• Teddlie, C. and Tashakkori, A. (2009) Foundations of Mixed Methods Research: Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Approa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• 1 From mixed methods to an integrated methodology
• 2 The FraIM: Frameworks for an Integrated Methodology
• 3 Case selection: data source management
• 4 Case selection: integrated sampling
• 5 Data collection: an overview
• 6 Observation
• 7 Asking questions
• 8 Analysing artefacts I
• 9 Analysing artefacts II
• 10 Data integration
• 11 Warrantable research: using the FraIM as a guide
• 12 Ethical issues in participant-centred research
• 13 Wider ethical issues and the FraIM
• 14 Holistic integrationism: philosophising research
• 15 A few final words
• References
• Name index
• Subject index