Research Design, as Independent of Methods

problems than either approach alone’ (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007, p.5). This is
what I have always argued, but without the need to create a new paradigm (Gorard,
1997a; Gorard with Taylor, 2004). Mixed methods (the ability to use any appropriate
methods) is the only sensible and ethical way to conduct research.

For ethical consideration of projects

A key ethical concern for those conducting or using publicly-funded research ought
to be the quality of the research, and so the robustness of the findings, and the
security of the conclusions drawn. Until recently, very little of the writing on the
ethics of education research has been concerned with quality. The concern has been
largely for the participants in the research process, which is perfectly proper, but this
emphasis may have blinded researchers to their responsibility to those not
participating in the research process. The tax-payers and charity-givers who fund the
research, and the general public who use the resulting public services, for example,
have the right to expect that the research is conducted in such a way that it is possible
for the researcher to test and answer the questions asked The general public, when
this is demonstrated, are shocked to discover that they are funding the work of social
scientists who either believe that everything can be encompassed in numbers, or
much more often who believe that nothing can be achieved using numbers (or that
nothing is true, or that there is no external world, or....).

Generating secure findings for widespread use in public policy should involve a
variety of factors including care and attention, sceptical consideration of plausible
alternatives, independent replication, transparent prior criteria for success and failure,
use of multiple complementary methods, and explicit rigorous testing of tentative
explanations. The q-word paradigms are just a hindrance here, and so are unethical as
originally suggested in (Gorard, 2002a, 2003), with this second principle of research
ethics slowly filtering into professional guidelines (e.g. Social Research Association
2003).

For the development of new researchers

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