Research Design, as Independent of Methods



Yet postgraduate students and new researchers in the UK are still routinely (mis-
)taught about the incommensurable paradigms, and how they must elect one or other
approach. Subsequently, they may be told that they can mix methods (if that is not a
contradiction), and perhaps even told that a mixed methods approach is a third
paradigm that they can choose (a bit like a fashion accessory). But the damage has
been done by then. These new researchers may now view research evidence as a
dichotomy of numbers and everything that is not numbers, and will reason that even
if they can mix the two the fact of mixing suggests separate ingredients in the first
place. If they are hesitant to work with numbers, they will tend to select the
qualitative paradigm, and so convert their prior weakness in handling an essential
form of evidence into a pretend bulwark and eventually a basis for criticising those
who
do use numbers. Those less hesitant with numbers will tend to find that the
system both forces them to become quantitative (because it is only by opposites that
the paradigms can be protective bulwarks) and positively encourages them as well,
since there is a widespread shortage of social scientists willing and able to work with
numbers in UK education research. For example, I review papers for around 50
journals internationally and I rarely get papers to review in the areas I work in. The
common denominator to what I am sent is numbers. Editors send me papers with
numbers not because I ask for them but because, unlike the majority of people in my
field, I am prepared to look at them. Thus, I become, in their minds, a quantitative
expert even though I am nothing of the sort, and have done as many interviews,
documentary, archival, video and other in-depth analyses as most qualitative experts.

I believe that there is a different way of presenting the logic of research, not
involving this particular unhelpful binary, through consideration of design and the
full cycle of research work. I illustrate such an approach in this chapter, first looking
at the relationship between methods and design and then between methods and the
cycle. The chapter continues with a consideration of the differences between the q-
word approaches. It ends with a consideration of the possible implications, if the
argument thus far has been accepted, for the conduct of research, its ethics, and the
preparation of new researchers. Of course, to my mind, the law of parsimony should
mean that it is not necessary for me to argue in favour of an overall logic to social
science research with no schism and no paradigms (as that term is used here, rather
than as the fluid conversion of questions into puzzles as discussed by Kuhn and



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