Mixed methods have been claimed to be a third paradigm (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie,
2004), but this seems to add to the confusion by apparently confirming the validity of
the first two, instead of simply blowing them all away by not mentioning any of them
in the development of new researchers. World views do not logically entail or
privilege the use of specific methods (Guba, 1990), but may only be thought to be so
due to a common confusion between the logic of designing a study and the method of
collecting data (according to de Vaus, 2001; Geurts & Roosendaal, 2001). 'The
researcher's fidelity to principles of inquiry is more important than allegiance to
procedural mechanics... Research should be judged by the quality and soundness of
its conception, implementation and description, not by the genre within which it is
conducted' (Paul & Marfo, 2001, pp. 543-545). In real-life, methods can be separated
from the epistemology from which they emerge, so that qualitative work is not tied to
a constructivist paradigm, and so on (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). The paradigm
argument for the q-word approaches is a red herring, and unnecessarily complex to
boot (as evidenced in some of the other chapters in part one of this collection).
Not just an issue of scale
Some authorities suggest that a clear difference between the q-word approaches is
their scale (e.g., Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007), with qualitative data collection
necessarily involving small numbers of cases, whereas quantitative relies on very
large samples in order to increase power and reduce the standard error. This is
misleading for two reasons. First, it is not an accurate description of what happens in
practice. Both Gorard & Rees (2002) and Selwyn, Gorard & Furlong (2006)
interviewed 1,100 adults in their own homes, for example, and treated the data
gathered as individual life histories. This is larger-scale than many surveys. On the
other hand, Smith & Gorard (2005) conducted a field trial in one school with only 26
students in the treatment group, yielding both attainment scores and contextual data.
The number of cases is not necessarily related to methods of data collection or to
either of the q-words. Second, issues such as sampling error and power only relate to
a tiny minority of studies where a true and complete random sample is used or where
a population is randomly allocated to treatment groups. In the much more common
situations of working with incomplete samples with measurement error or dropout,
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