Last week I was chatting to a colleague about an introductory methods course we were working on. We were talking about the unit on "The Research Question, and how this differs between qualitative and quantitative research. He then made an offhand remark along the lines of, But then, the qualitative-quantitative debate is over anyway. Everyone is doing mixed methods research." I was greatly relieved to find that this debate, which has rumbled on since I was a student, is finally resolved. But since I wasn't really sure how mixed methods had won the final round, I asked him, somewhat naively, just what mixed methods were. He explained that this was when you did a survey after your qualitative study to get some check marks on Likert scales so you could do statistics on it and get a p-value. When I tried to explain to him that conducting a survey was only one of the most basic methods of quantitative research, and indeed, many quantitative researchers do not accept the findings of most surveys, he simply did not understand. This reminded me of the last iteration of "mixed methods" I heard where you designed your survey questionnaire, then conducted a "focus group" in which you handed out your questionnaire and asked people what they thought of it. It will surprise no one that the first version was advocated by a person who is primarily a qualitative researcher, and the second by someone who bears allegiance to quantitative research. The first trivializes quantitative. research; the second trivializes qualitative.
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