 |
Priority, sequence and the overall design
|
|
|
|
Priority, sequence and the overall design
Priority and sequence can be combined in any number of ways in your mixed methods design. When deciding how to answer the priority and sequence questions, you should consider a number of things: What is your research question(s) and what is it that you are seeking an answer to? What are your research aims and objectives (what are you planning to achieve with your project)? What is the purpose of and justification for the study? What data collection methods are being used and why? Are there any practical constraints on the research, such as limits on time and resources? It is important to be able to justify the decisions that you make. You should have good reasons for having a dominant component or for giving your components equal priority. There should be a
clearly articulated rationale for your decision to adopt a simultaneous or sequential design. Ultimately, the answers to all these questions should come together to create a coherent piece of research that can be robustly defended.
Although there are multitudes of potential mixed method designs, Bryman (2016: 639) outlines four basic designs that will likely cover most circumstances. He calls these the ‘convergent parallel design’, the ‘exploratory sequential design’, the ‘explanatory sequential design’ and the ‘embedded design’ (see Table 5. 3 for details). These four designs (themselves based on Creswell and Plano Clark, 2011) offer a good starting point for most projects and show you how answers to the priority and sequence questions feed into the overall design.
When you are presenting your research, be it in a report or dissertation, the deci- sions you make on priority and sequence, and how they relate to the purpose of the study, should be explicitly discussed and your justifications for the decisions made should be clearly outlined. Box 5. 1 explores the PhD research carried out by Jaime Waters. The PhD research focused on illegal drug use among adults not involved in treatment programmes or the criminal justice system and over the age of 50. The experience of this research suggests the importance of the priority and sequence questions and, inadvertently, how mixed method approaches can offer a degree of flexibility that can be useful when problems arise in the data collection phase. Note how the aims and objectives of the project (in this case, the desire to produce an exploratory study of an under-researched area) fed into the design and informed the answers to the priority and sequence questions.
 |
Name Description Diagram Example
Convergent parallel design
Simultaneous collection of quantitative and qualitative data, typically of equal priority. The resulting analyses are then compared and/or merged to form an integrated whole. Typically associated with triangulation.
|
|
|
Waters (2009)
(see Case Study 1)
Exploratory sequential design
Collection of qualitative data prior to the collection of quantitative data. Associated with the generation of qualitative based hypotheses or hunches that are then tested quantitatively.
Platts- Fowler and Robinson (2015)
TaBle 5. 3 Basic Mixed Methods Designs
 |
|
|
|
