Hi all,

I am writing a conference paper on the challenges and opportunities of using Mixed-methods research at a doctoral level and I was wondering if any of you would consider sharing some of your views? I am defining mixed methods as research that combines qualitative and quantitative methods within a single study.



All data will be anonymous, and your screen names will not be used. So if you are using/ have used mixed methods for your PhD please feel free to respond to this thread and share your experiences of the methodological challenges and opportunities,

I look forward to hearing from you J

Hello Jola,

I used both quantitative and qualitative methods for my first experiment. This experiment was extremely useful to set the context for the rest of the PhD. I'm interested in how 3-8-year-old children distinguish between fantasy and reality. The standard task involves sorting real and make believe entities into categories. There is quite a lot of quantitative data in my field on HOW children sort, however there is no previous research that looks at WHY children make the decisions they do. This is why qualitative data was crucial. I used ANOVA with Tukey Kramer post hoc as well as Multiple Regression for my quantitative and Thematic analysis for my qualitative. I didn't face any challenges as such as I had a very strong rationale for using both.

Hope that helps,

PB

Hi PB, thank you so much for the reply.

It would be great if you could you be specific about what using two methods offer you that you couldn't have got from one method in isolation?

Also am I right in assuming that you felt that there were no more challenges faced taking this approach as there would have been using a single method?

Thanks again,

If anyone else has a view please feel free to share :)

Jo

Hey,

Using the two methods I was able to really ask children about their thought processes around the decision-making tasks. The statistical data is restricted as it only tells you a general outcome to the task and not the specifics.

Yes, I felt the two methods worked well together to tell the 'bigger picture' of the research area.

Cheers,

PB