Hello, this is my first posting on here and wondered if someone could help. I am currently completing my Msc in education studies and am stuggling with my methodology (or lack of it). I am looking to give out two questionnaires to students and from these i intend to carry out 6 semi-structured interviews with teacher. Initially I was thinking that I would adopt a social constructivist approach, but then wondered if the pragmatic approach would be better due to quant and qual data collection/methods? Am struggling mainly with the idea that, if I chose pragmatism as my epistemological stance what would my methodology be as i have quant and qual data?

Any responses would be greatly appreciated before I get started on this research.

A lot of literature on mixed methods -One link to look at, which will point you to others is
http://psychsoma.co.za/qualitative_inquiry_growt/2010/09/pragmatic-approach-in-mixed-methodology.html

Also this issue came up recently on the forum via these threads

http://www.postgraduateforum.com/threadViewer.aspx?TID=17517 and

http://www.postgraduateforum.com/threadViewer.aspx?TID=17583 - there's quite a lot of posts on these so work your way through them and see if things any clearer.

I'm wholly qualitative myself :-)

haha yes read any of my threads on mixed methods - I think I'm a pragmatist now and I have qualitative interviews, I analyse them qualitatively and quantitatively and I have a quantitative questionnaire.

A very helpful ( and authoratative for citation weight!!!! makes supervisors happy!) is the Sage Handbook on Qualitative Research. It has some helpful tables/charts about paradigms and which various methods fall within them. I would give you a page number but I have loaned out the book to a friend doing a PhD, and so hopefully someone else can guide you to those pages. It makes sense of paradigms and methods in very short order :)

ooh thanks - Sage also seem to do handbooks of qualitative research for different subjects (e.g. psychology) and then various disciplines within these. I'm not liking how google books removes the very pages I need to read though :-s