Joanna, your description makes no sense at all to me. You did perhaps not realize that the philosophies you are referring to are about how you relate to what you think is *real* and so on. So either you believe that there is one objectively true reality or you believe that there is no objectively true reality or you believe that you do not know whether or not there is one true objective reality. Your comment that you switch between these beliefs *on demand* does ring alarm bells and is unconvincing. So first of all differentiate between research methods and methodology. All methods are applied by you as a human being and your justification of the relevance of those methods and the selection of when and for what purpose they are relevant etc is based on a philosophy. The methods themselves are not applying themselves and so they do not *have* a philosophy. It is the user of method who has some beliefs of how they relate to *reality* and how they reflect over their beliefs. It makes no sense to say that you believe in objective reality and that this objective reality can be engaged with by yourself from an objective point of view - while at the same time suggest - that you do not believe in objective reality and that all understanding of anything as reality is subjective. So either you believe something is, or something is not - or that you do not know if something is. Not all of these at the same time. While human beings can move from one to the other - this they tend to call *revelation* or a thinking revolution. It is not a switch. People with any of these three positions can use mixed method - but people do not *change* belief system (or philosophy of life) back and forth.

I believe mixed-methods is a valuable means to overcome the old "quant" vs. "qual" divide. You would, in my view, be eclectic if you would choose methods arbitrarily. But if you follow the methodological reasoning e.g. of Charles Teddlie and Abbas Tashakkori you have to lay out why you use which method:

http://www.msera.org/Rits_131/Teddlie_Tashakkori_131.pdf

Maybe you could explicate what you mean by post-positivism in the first and constructivism in the second stage. In my view the combining of qualitative and quantitative methods is one major post positivistic step away from mere theory testing with (insufficient) data.

Thank you for your answers.  They are both very helpful.

The article is very informative. 

Kind regards,

Joanna

I don't think you have to buy into philosophy of knowledge assumptions about the nature in order to use a method. My reading of the current state of affairs in Mixed Methods is a consensus around the emphasis on research design rather than paradigms. So, if you have a good justification for how the results from your methods will fit together, than that would be sufficient.

Alternatively, if you do feel like you need a philosophical paradigm, pragmatism departs in major ways from the older notion that you need to rely on concepts such as ontology and epistemology. I have two articles on that subject, the most recent of which is:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265335316_Pragmatism_as_a_Paradigm_for_Social_Research

Article Pragmatism as a Paradigm for Social Research

Hi Joanna,

Follwing on from David above, it might be helpful to look at Dewey's Instrumentalism (a form of pragmatism - there are many!).  In a nutshell, you choose the methods that you think best answer your research question(s).  You are therefore not tied to particualr methods, and choose whatever you think suitable for each project and accompanying questions.  You may even want to answer different questions with different methods, which come from 'competing' paradigms.  This way you do not fall into the 'trap' of having to be positivist or interpretivist.  It's about getting close to a 'reality' of the situation, a version if you like, rather than the 'truth' per se.  As long as you are reflective/reflexive, you should be okay.

I hope this makes sense to you!

I'd be happy to 'discuss' it further if you want to message me - that way we won't impinge on the discussion thread.

Thanks,

David

According to Onwuegbuzie & Johnson (2004), Weaknesses of Mixed Method Design include:

1) Time Consuming & Expensive.

2) Difficult finding a researcher with experience in both qualitative and quantitative research.

3) Researcher has to learn multiple methods and be able to know how to mix each method effectively.

4) Methodological purists believe that a researcher should either pick the qualitative or quantitative paradigm and not both.

5) How to interpret conflicting results & analyzing quantitative data qualitatively still need to be figured out.