Research Design, as Independent of Methods

sensory data. Each type of research has a specialist vocabulary, and an underlying
philosophy, purportedly making each type of research a paradigm incommensurable
with the other. Mixed methods approaches are therefore seen as complex, difficult
and innovative because they seek to combine both of the q-word paradigms in the
same study or research programme.

I was not fully aware of these paradigms, and their attendant beliefs, like positivism
and interpretivism, when I started my PhD study as an educational practitioner. In
that early study of school choice, I naturally used a variety of methods and techniques
from simple re-analysis of existing datasets, documents, and archives through
complex modelling of a bespoke survey, to in-depth observations and interviews
(Gorard, 1997a). This seems to me what any novice researcher would do naturally
(unless contaminated by the nonsense peddled in mainstream methods resources).
Doing so seemed to cause me no problems, other than the time and effort involved,
and I felt that my conclusions were drawn logically from an unproblematic synthesis
of the various forms of evidence. It was only once I was underway that I discovered
that methods experts believed what I was doing was wrong, impossible, or at least
revolutionary in some way. In fact, what I did was none of those things. It seemed
quite normal for anyone who genuinely wanted to find out the answer to their
research questions, and from that time I began to try and explain to these experts and
authorities why (Gorard,1997b). In the 12 years since my PhD I have completed
about 60 projects large and small, and had about 600 publications of all types. In
nearly all cases, I have continued to mix the methods known to others as quantitative
and qualitative, both in the ‘new political arithmetic’ style of my PhD and in a variety
of different styles including Bayesian syntheses, complex interventions, and design
studies (e.g., Gorard, Taylor, & Fitz, 2003; Selwyn, Gorard, & Furlong, 2006;

Gorard, et al. 2007). I have also continued to write about methods, including why
quantitative work is misunderstood both by its advocates and by its opponents (e.g.
Gorard, 2006, 2010), how misuse of the term ‘theory’ by advocates of qualitative
research has become a barrier to mixed methods (e.g., Gorard, 2004a, 2004b), the
ethics of mixing methods (e.g., Gorard, 2002a; Gorard with Taylor, 2004), and most
importantly about the underlying universal logic of all research (e.g., Gorard, 2002b,
2002c).

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