Employers feel that disabled persons are not physically fit and competent to do assigned job.

Moreover in highly populated country like India,there is plenty of manpower available.

So naturally they avoid disable one as supply is more than demand.

Hi. In my opinion, research methodology should be decided based on the objective of the study, and not by the level of degree (either master or PhD).

I do not think there is wrong to use mixed method, as long as it can help the resaercher to enhance his/her understanding on the topic under study. This is of particular important during the data collection stage, as both quantitative and qualitative approaches do have thier pros and cons.

In your case, interviews with the employers may help you to understand deeply about the reasons of not recruiting disable people. Through interviews, you may obtain many useful case studies which are not mentioned else where or published by any other articles. However, the results of interviews are stand alone and can not be easily generalized due to some physical constraints, such as the culture of the company, attitude and behaviour of the employers etc.

On the other hand, questionnaire survey can provide you an overall picture of the research question, as well as the common perceptions shared among the employers. The limitation here is that the researcher may miss out some useful in-depth info about the topic.

I would suggest you to conduct the literature review first, as I believe that many researchers have been conducted the similar study previously. Literature review can help you to find out the novelty of your resaerch.

Thank you, I am now leaning towards a quantitative approach to maximise responses and due to short timescale. However, I cannot decide between descriptive or experimental approach. Could someone explain the difference in plain English and suggest what might work best for this particular study?

do quantitative and have a likert scale in one section of your survey which you can write out in a narrative.

Your topic definitely does not sound appropriate (as described in your original post) for an experimental approach. Have you read around the different sorts of designs you might use for your research? I think it's worth stepping back to think about what your core aim is. If you want in-depth understanding of how employers think, what there biases might be, etc., etc., then you might want to use a qualitative approach (e.g. individual or focus group interviews). If you want to be able to generalise claims about why employers might or might not hire people with disabilities, you might want a random sample of employers to survey using (for example) Likert-scale items. Although a Masters dissertation might use mixed methods, in practice this would be a whole lot to take on -- it means you'd need to learn about qualitative and quantitative approaches to research, collect multiple kinds of data, learn to interpret them appropriately...that all takes time, as well as taking up word count, so at this stage, it's only worth it if you REALLY need mixed methods to answer your research questions. It sounds like your supervisor is trying to bound the task for you, and it might be wise to take his advice and keep the task manageable!

Ambitious students make teaching worthwhile. If you have the time and are willing to take it, go with your dream. You will be so much better prepared at the end than students who churn out minimal requirements to get their degree. If you have to pick, take quantitative over qualitative. Be sure you have an advisor who is qualified to guide you through both your topic AND the methods you choose AND who will make the time available that you will need to do a stellar job. You will be in the top of the candidate list for your next position, and when you apply for your Doctoral program, you will be in the top of the candidate list because of the work you do here.

In case it appeared otherwise, my answer was not in any way advocating churning out minimal requirements. Ambition is good, but feasibility is a critical consideration. So is rigour. Yes, you might make yourself stand out by doing an ambitious mixed methods project -- but only if you do good qualitative work, good quantitative work, and good integration. And if it fits a (well-defined) set of research questions. And, as Linda pointed out, if you have a supervisor (or supervisors, if SPI allows co-supervision?) who can support all aspects of that. Otherwise, you'll also stand out by doing a stellar piece of qualitative or quantitative work backed up by a solid review of the literature, clear and transparent methodology, and well-presented findings!

The best will be a mixed approach since there will be both quantitative and qualitative variables to measure in the specific objectives.

Hi,

if you already have the exposure to employers through your job, you will save a lot of time in doing interviews. So if you choose only one method, you may just stick to this. Consider it being a 15,000 words dissertation - your work is supposed to be intensive rather than extensive.

Depending on the overall time you are ready to invest, mixed methods may of course make your paper much more interesting. You can do the interviews in advance; their results (in addition to hypotheses drawn from the existing literature) can inform the questions you pose in the survey.

Or, you conduct the survey first (the questions being based on the existing literature on the topic) and ask interview questions exactly on the puzzles that arise from the data you gather.

I would be careful in combining a survey in some regions with qualitative interviews from another region. You may rather want to conduct both in the same region. Sometimes you can run a survey and then interview a small number of the survey participants, for example those on the "extremes", or chosen by some other typology, in-depht (if people are ready to do that).

Another point you may want to consider is that employers may have an incentive to lie or euphemise both in a survey and in interviews - f.ex. in order to seem politically correct. If there is the possibility, you could compare the result of a quantitative survey (concerning, are you ready to employ handicapped persons) with objective numbers on the labour market situation for handicapped persons in the respective segment of the labour market. Depending on the availlability of data, this may of course be too much work for a MRes thesis; but in any way you will have to justify your approach.

In any of these cases - you must very well define your research question and, subsequently, your hypotheses. Your own praxis experience can provide you very good ideas in this most basic and most important step of your work. Finally, however, these choices must be based on the existing literature on the subject.

If you are sure that you will work with employers, then you must think in the following way: what puzzle that emerges from the literature; or what puzzle about the particular case, i.e. the particular region that you are going to apply the literature to, can employers' answers tell you about?

Starting from this, you will soon understand whether a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed method approach will be best able to answer your research question, test your hypotheses, shed light on your puzzle.

Good luck!

Hello Kristen,

Firstly, if a mixed methods approach is good enough for a doctorates paper then, if you can handle it, by all means go for it! I think that taking the initiative to step up your paper for your Masters degree, shows your willingness to not only work outside the box, but to attack this with all your strengths. Secondly I'm not giving you a hypothesis because number 1 it would be my work and not yours, and number 2 because I believe that because you are willing to take on the mixed method approach, you are CERTAINLY capable of writing your own hypothesis. Go kill it Kristen, I believe that you can!