Description

Author

Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, England and Department of Educational Leadership and Management/Department of Educational Psychology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa; Dialectical Publishing, LLC, Bloomington, IN, USA)

John H. Hitchcock (Dialectical Publishing, LLC, Bloomington, IN, USA)

Abstract

As editors-in-chief of the International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches (IJMRA), our aim is to publish articles, editorials, and commentaries that advance the fields of both mixed methods research and multiple methods (i.e., multimethod) research. However, recently, we have questioned whether we are inadvertently contributing to an either/or logic that separates these two methodological fields. Therefore, we queried our assumptions using a critical dialectical pluralistic philosophical framework, incorporating mathematical formulae, and adopting a synechistic stance. We were motivated by a both/and logic, driven by a quest for full(er) integration, and inspired by an attempt to articulate some of our ideas via a series of methodological integration formulae. In this editorial, we provide a meta-framework for integrating mixed methods research approaches and multiple methods research approaches within the same study, leading to what we refer to as multi-mixed methods research (i.e., partial integration) and meta-methods research (i.e., full[er] integration). In particular, we discuss how mixed methods research approaches and multiple methods research approaches can be integrated at the following 4 stages of the research process: research conceptualization, research planning, research implementation, and research dissemination. We believe that the conduct of meta-methods, in particular, promotes increased innovation, rigor, and ethicality in a mixed research 2.0 era.