I'm a new user of this forum. I'd appreciate your help please. I'm doing a mixed methods research in a school setting. I'm using questionnaires, interviews, document review and analysis, and observations. Now I'm in the stage of presenting the data. I'm planning to present data under research questions.This is being very hard for me and my questions are the following:
1- should I present the data fo questionnaires first and then other instrument or it doesn't make any difference?
2- How do I present data driven from interviews. Do I write quotes knowing that this is going to be a lot of data? I have many many responses.
Please help me. My professor isn't that helpful

Hey Canonly1. I'm in clinical psychology, doing both quantitative (mainly questionnaire data) and qualitative work (interview data). When you say 'presenting' the data, do you mean presenting it at a conference, or presenting it in writing, i.e. in your thesis? I don't think there is a set format for the order in which you need to present things (I had a similar conversation with my sup last week), but there might be an order that seems more logical to you, or there might be an order which makes it easier to present. With the interviews, it depends how you have analysed them. I used interpretative phenomenological analysis, which involves deriving themes from the data and then presenting each theme with supporting quotes. You can choose how many quotes you feel that you need to support the data, or to make as many interesting points as you want to. I'm not sure whether this answers your questions, but if you could be more specific we might be able to help more! Best, KB

Thank you keenbean for your answer.I really appreciate it as I'm in a very confused situation and I need someone professional to help me. Actually my research is about instructional supervision. I did a questionnaire for both teachers and supervisors, I did interviews with both teachers and supervisors and I also did observations and document review. Now in the chapter of presenting the data. I don't know how to start. I am planning to write each research question and under it to present data from questionnaires, data from interviews, data from observations, and data from documents that would answer each research question. Can I do this? But how do I write the data of the observations and interviews? Do you have any resource or document that I can read and would help me in this issue? Also do I have to have data from the 4 instruments to present under each research question. If my first research question is: how is the process of instructional supervision being conducted in one school, then do I have to write how teachers described this process and how teachers described it also and find items i nthe questioniare that would answer this question and present them also. Also do I have to comment and find data in the interviews that crosses data about each item in the questionnaire and present it.
Thank you in advance,

Hi Canonly1. I think that with mixed methods research, it can be difficult to know how to present the results of the data analysis. Why did you use mixed methods? Complementarity? Development? Expansion? Triangulation? Did you use a model from one of the existing typologies? If I know this, I might be able to help give you some ideas on how to present the data. Roughly, I can say that you want to present the data in an integrated format, so weave the quan and qual data together to tell the story of your research. The decision to use the research questions to group your findings together is a good idea, provided that you research philosophy is appropriate. Take a dialectical or multiple paradigm stance and you decision will be harder to defend. Pragmatism would be appropriate her because it's praxis over theoria; the research questions drive the methods that are used.

Hi Walmiskipeas. I really liked this forum. It's answering some of my confusions. From the language you're using, you seem very knoweldgeable about research. Actually, my decision about using different instruments was meant for triangulation. My advisor is very demanding yet very little helping so I have to make it my way. Please can you answer the other questions that I presented in my previous post. what do you mean by weaving qualitative and quantitave data. can you give me an example. Do you have any reference that would give me samples and examples of presentation of observational and interview data. Do you have a sample of thesis where data was presented under research question so I know how it is done?

Hi Canonly1, in my Master's thesis, I too sometimes found my supervisor unavailable when writing up so I followed a textbook (How to write a Master's thesis). The text book said write up under research questions-which I began to do but when my supervisor found out, she made me rewrite it all to do precisely what Walminski said earlier 'tell the story of your research'.

So my results (using qualititative methodology-not mixed methods) were not written up in response to the questions. They were written up to reflect the emergent themes and trends that came out of all my data). By the time I came to discussion, I was discussing the research questions in a far more integrated and complex way that included emergent themes and the overall thesis proposition. To be honest now, it would be hard to put this into a text book-step by step- approach because the process becomes so holistic in the writing and rewriting although by the end, you have certainly addressed the research questions and the conclusion and/or final summary reflects this.

But my thinking is also, just get a start by writing up what you think should be written up and under which heading. Once you've submitted to your sup, they will certainly start correcting it and telling you how it needs to be reshaped. Don't be worried about being wrong...hope this makes sense and some of it is helpful at least.
(snowman)

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if I told you how I think you should present your data then I'd be effectively doing you research for you and I have enough of my own. You've used triangulation, so you'll be corrobating your quantitative findings with your qualitative findings. Remember the fundamental rule of mixed methods, which is to combine methods with complementary strengths and non-overlapping weaknesses. By weaving together, I mean don't keep the qualitative data and quantitative data separate where possible - you aim for integration. Otherwise, it'll look like you've just don't separate qualitative and quantitative studies. What you could do is use joint displays, so tables combining the qualitative and quantitative findings together for each of your research questions. You could qualitise the quantitative data (and vice versa) and show how the findings actually agree with and strengthen one another.
Most importantly, don't worry. The problems you're having are actually amongst the six major issues in mixed methods research and there's not much out there in the way of guidance. I can recommend some books: Teddlie and Tashakkori (2003), Creswell and Plano-Clark (2007/2010), Greene (2007), and Shannon and Andrew (2009). You're doing education-based research. The guy who's papers you might want to seek out are Onweugbuzie's. He's one of the Seven Horsemen of mixed methods. Have a stab at looking for papers by Johnson, and Pat Bazely has some free papers, which will help you, fishing about on the internet.

Thank you walminskipeas... and pjlu. I appreciate your help. One more question please: Is it necessary when I present the data under each reserach question to have data from the 4 methods (qustionnnaires, interviews, observation, and document review). Actually, I noticed that it's very hard to collect data for each research question from the 4 instruments.
Thanks again,

Hi Canonly1, look I'm really not an expert. Ive completed a Master's thesis and only just today heard that one of my examiner's reports is in (and that it is good-and that is all Ive heard after three months! and I'm still waiting on the other examiner's report!). Plus my thesis is qualitative only. But I would think not- you can't force the data or instruments to fit the questions-you have to use the data to inform your findings.

So if the some of the data instruments don't really fit a particular question but do inform another question-then you would use the findings from the instrument to inform the question it suits but you would have to discuss this fully in both your methods chapter and possibly in your discussion chapter, I would imagine. The discussion chapter is where you tie all of this in together-results chapter is mainly results- method chapter outlines why you are doing what you are doing and the theory behind your method. Results chapter is descriptive rather than analytical. But as I think others would agree-each thesis is unique-so while there are rules as to chapters and a sort of lock-step process to follow-each final thesis has its own story. I think if you checked out some the literature recommended, focusing on methodology, you would get some more definitive advice. That's the great thing about research-the reading never stops.;-)

Thank you pjlu. I will look at the recommended readings in our university library though it's a little poor in such resources. I have one more question and sorry for being too demanding. How do I present my observation data knowing that I didn't do any checklists or the like. I took field notes. It was an anecdotal report for each situation. I want to present this data also under research questions: how do you recommned I do it?any idea?
Big thanks,