Mixed Methods Research in a Mixed-Up World of Education

By Keith Morrison and Beng Huat See

Mixed methods research in education and the social sciences is here to stay, and it is no longer in its infancy. In complimenting Bent Flyvbjerg’s ground-breaking volume Making Social Science Matter (2001)*, Sanford Schram (2012)* commented that, in contrast to the limits of natural science’s practices of testing hypotheses and search for lawlike, generalisable relationships and decontextualised abstract principles, ‘the social sciences are better at producing situated knowledge about how to understand and act in contextualized settings’ (p. 17). Here, Schram noted that Flyvberg’s appeal to phronesis was well-placed, for its ability to understand and include ‘contingencies and uncertainties’ (p. 16) in social science research. This is a powerful claim, and one which catches education research very well, as combining understanding and taking action has the potential to bridge the often-found gap between research and practice in education.

Addressing Flyvbjerg and Schram, one of the attractions and demands of research in education is its recognition of the importance of capturing the complex, dynamic, close-grained, immanent and context-rich, variable-dense, person-agentic, and ever-changing worlds of education, where the signal is the noise and the noise is the signal. Further, understanding and researching the world of education frequently requires breadth and depth, contextual holism and the multi-layered embeddedness of a vast range of influences, conditions, causes, realities, and circumstances. These operate from micro to macro levels. Doing justice to these also requires research in education to penetrate the dynamic, complicated world of multiple, emergent, and non-linear causality, linking causes with effects and effects with causes, reaching out to complexity theory.

How, then, can research in education address these stringent, exacting demands? How can it address all these factors fairly? How can real-world research fit real-world matters? How to do justice to the complex world of education? Enter mixed methods research. Mixed methods research, being a broad church in all its configurations, types, and flexibility, can draw on approaches, designs, and data of all kinds in addressing fitness for purpose. This liberates researchers from unnecessary constraints of the silos of paradigm-driven research, as mixed methods research is not a paradigm. Rather, mixed methods is a valuable service tool for conducting research that is guided by the research purposes, objectives, and research questions. The argument for its primacy in education research is compelling, as it is fair to the phenomenon that it is researching, and it has wide applicability, being a method rather than a philosophy, and being a ‘how-to’ tool. It addresses the range of ‘wh’ and ‘how’ questions in education research, addressing circumstances, contexts, conditions, and causes. It brings research to life.

The roots of mixed methods research in education are several, from Weber’s advocacy of verstehen approaches, both objective and subjective, to phenomenology, positivism, post-positivism, critical realism, ideology-critique, and its different versions of pragmatism. Mixed methods research appeals to numeric and non-numeric data, big and small, narrow and wide. It wears the badge of inclusive diversity of designs, instrumentation, sampling, ontologies, epistemologies, data types, data analysis, integration, and interpretation. It is a useful, catch-all term and tool that serves fitness for purpose in conducting education research of all types. In serving all kinds of research in education, and addressing the uniqueness of each research study, mixed methods research recognises that each study has its own tenets of rigour, quality, validity, credibility, reliability, relevance, topicality, and utility, such that fiduciary ethics and trust can be put in the findings of the research.

The openness, flexibility, and adaptability of mixed methods research in education releases researchers from the sometime impoverishment of mono-minded, one-sided research, and opens the door to research and researcher creativity, generative research and action, and fidelity to the rich, diverse world of education and all its fields. Mixed methods research has a strong compatibility with the real-life, mixed-up world of education; it is no surprise that it has come of age.

*Flyvbjerg, B. (2001) Making Social Life Matter. Cambridge University Press.
*Schram, S. (2012). Phronetic social science: An idea whose time has some. In B. Flyvbjerg, T. Landman, & S. Schram (Eds.) Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis (pp. 15-26). Cambridge University Press.

This article was written by Keith Morrison, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Saint Joseph, Macau and Beng Huat See, Professor of Education Research, School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK