Polio & Friedman Ch 5 Mixed Methods

1) What are the advantages and disadvantages of mixed methods research? What concerns do the authors point out? What attracts you or not about Mixed Methods? How could you use Mixed Methods to investigate your own topics of interest?
2) What are some possible topics that interest you for you final project? What tentative research questions do you have? What research approach(es) could help you answer them? See assignment in Appendix


Up-and-coming MMR has various advantages and disadvantages. I think the greatest advantage of this is that it pulls from both quant and qual methods, taking some of the good qualities of each. However, the whole underlying ideal of combining these two could be viewed as a disadvantage as some say the two methods pull from theoretical grounds that can’t be reconciled. I disagree with this viewpoint; having both quant and qual aspects that point to a single conclusion strengthens a study and helps the researcher from becoming either too attached or too distant. The authors’ concerns seem to hover mostly around the fact that this method isn’t yet very established as a separate field. Therefore it can be difficult to tell if something truly is MMR, if it’s a legitimate MMR study, or how to hold it to specific standards. I’m not entirely sure that it needs to be a separate entity with its own standards, however. Using quant and qual standards with logic as to how the two components connect seems to make sense to me.

When brainstorming a potential research focus for my final project a couple of different ideas come to mind, mostly centering around feedback. One thought is to look at local feedback versus global feedback-- not so much which is given more, but if students are more likely to implement global feedback when local feedback isn’t given in excess. Research questions would be something like “Are students more likely to implement global feedback when no local feedback is given?” and “Do students who implement more global feedback write better papers overall?” This could be performed using a type of post-survey after writing, however the whole idea seems fairly straightforward. I’m not sure if the answer is too obvious. This would be a great study to implement MMR techniques in, however, as I could perform interviews and gauge students’ specific thoughts on the feedback and how it changed their writing. 

I also think it would be interesting to combine feedback and thinking aloud, but I’m not exactly sure what this would look like. The research question could just be “Do students who think aloud while interpreting feedback implement it more?”, but then it’s essentially just a study on thinking aloud processes and the idea of implementing global feedback is difficult to quantify. Thinking aloud seems like it would be a great way to get a look into students’ attitudes about feedback, but I’m not sure how to develop a study or research question to that point. Do researchers ever listen to thinking aloud data, coding and analyzing it? This would be an interesting way to implement MMR techniques as it would involve turning qual data into quant data and then analyzing and could certainly have some additional interviews added to clarify.