Hello there,
For my doctoral thesis, I first interviewed for grounded theory. Then I developed the scale. But I also did metaphor analysis to support my scale. I also developed a hypothetical model as a quantitative study. Can I say that I used exploratory sequential design of mixed method research?
Thanks
Nesrullah - you could frame it like that but it is unconventional to approach a mixed methods study, as one, after you have completed data collection. To maintain rigour, it really should have been structured as a mixed methods study from the beginning. That said - you could 'bolt' your components and data together to form a wider mixed methods study - and apply a 'back-step' process to try and convince the reader/reviewer that it was originally mixed methods. To determine exact approach - refer to the work of Morse and Niesgard (2009).
I agree with Dean. If you did not conceptualize and design your study as mixed methods at the beginning, then it is not advisable to label it as mixed methods. Nevertheless, the design is sequential exploratory mixed methods, if you follow the recent typology by Creswell & Plano-Clark (2018). I personally don't like Morse's differentiation of mixed and multiple methods and her typology of mixed methods designs and the concept of theoretical drive are ambiguous.
It sounds to me like the portion of your study that used Grounded Theory to generate the content for the survey is a standard Exploratory Sequential design. It also seems that you stopped at this point, rather than actually collecting the quantitative data, which is quite common.
Personally, I'm dubious about the term 'mixed methods', but do especially agree with Dean, above.
Many researchers are confused between qualitative and quantitative research.It is very simple.When one is doing a qualitative research,one will do more of an exploratory research where data will be collected with personal interview focus grp or ethnography and the analysed and summarised with a content analysis or what we call the qualitative data analysis with softwares like NVIVO or ATlas i.
When one is doing a descriptive or causal research one uses quantitative research where the survey technique is used and data is analysed with statistical tools.Now when do we mix these techniques.Sometimes we study an influence of various factors on a certain variable say stress,so we first do a qualitative research from samples and thru open ended questions list the major factors.Then we take another sample and test quantitatively if these factors(which came out as a result of the qualitative research) are prevalent in a certain population say Indians.This will be done thru quantitaive techniques by collecting data thru survey and analysing with the help of statistical techniques.
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