Critical Exploration Of Mixed Methods

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Critical Exploration Of Mixed Methods
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
According to Morse (2016), mixed methods research is a research methodology that is used
for conducting research that requires gathering analyzing and interpreting of both Qualitative
data and Quantitative data. The quantitative data are primarily acquired from research
experiments and research surveys. All the qualitative data are generally acquired from the
different focus group and interviews in a research.
Most researchers use mixed research methods in order to study various difficult research data
like the difficult and critical educational data which are used in the various research projects.
As mentioned by Molina-Azorin (2016), Researches involving educational organizations and
educational data are generally very difficult. To emulate, during the cross sectional research
studies, majority of the student are likely to be present within a classroom in a school at a
particular point at time and that can be said be strictly hierarchical structure where there are
the top management which includes the principles, then the teachers and then the students.
The students may be staying at different places or neighborhood but at school they all come
together and interact with one another. This is known as the cross-classified structure. In a
similar way while gathering and analyzing the various longitudinal data, similar techniques,
which includes the different reading achievements and test scores that were collected of a
same student over the period of years at different school grade or level. This can be
considered as nested among the students as they all being marked under same test in the same
subject and the same school. The change of classrooms of students may lead to a “non-
strictly hierarchical, but cross-classified structure, with repeated measures now nested within
both students and classrooms, while students and classrooms are crossed with each other”
(Ponce & Pagán-Maldonado 2015), since different classrooms means different teacher and
heads but different sections but similar test patterns. A proper educational research may not

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be achieved by a researcher without properly taking into account the various the different
“complex data structures”. According to Ponce & Pagán-Maldonado (2015), Without taking
or considering all these factors during the research, a educational researcher may have a
“biased parameter estimates and standard errors”. In addition, the researcher may also have
missed the chance to discover the different important occurrence from the educational data.
The main aim and purpose of the paper is to use the mixed research methods in order to
collect analysis and determine the different complex educational data for the research
purposes. The structure includes introduction, Philosophical foundation of mixed methods,
scope of mixed methods and their advantage and limitations along with a small summary.
Philosophical foundation of mixed methods
Literature review
Philosophical foundation of the mixed research method, as argued by the various authors is
that the qualitative and quantitative method of research is not compatible at all because of the
difference that lies in the worldview (Walliman 2017). Most of the time, the researcher deals
with the problem by taking the support of “pragmatism”. “Pragmatism” can be stated as the
in the physiological terms as “an approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the
success of their practical application”. As per Walliman (2017), “pragmatism can be stated as
the “physiological stance rather than the particular philosophical assumptions started from,
of primary importance are the research questions asked, and the use of multiple methods of
data collection to inform the problems under study.” Nevertheless, many authors still argues
that “pragmatism” should not be seen considered as the “Physiological foundation” for the
“Mixed Research method” rather than the “Physiological Support” (Walliman 2017).