Ravalier PhD Theis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

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interpretations of individuals (Al-Hamdan & Anthony, 2010). These researchers attempt to discover participants'
own realities by appreciating their experiences via the use of detailed descriptions. As is the case with
monomethod positivists, qualitative purists reject the notion and methodologies associated with positivism.
Therefore it is believed that there are a multiple possible realities between people and even within individuals.
They argue that, unlike quantitative researchers who seek to generalise study results to wider populations, these
generalisations are unsuitable without accompanying time and context considerations, and that the individual
cannot be removed from their own knowledge because it is the subjectivity associated with discovering information
which is the only source of reality (Guba, 1990). Various interpretations of situations and phenomena may
therefore result from any qualitative research programme (Creswell, 1994).
Whilst it is useful to distinguish the two ends of the spectrum, e.g. from a historical point of view and to plan
which is most appropriate when designing a research project, the distinction has often been overstated. For
example, participation in unstructured interviews have been useful in the initial stages of projects, and these
findings have been used to generate structured measuring tools for quantitatively-orientated research projects.
Similarly, large-scale structured questionnaires have been followed up with in-depth interviewing of a sub-sample
of respondents in order to gain richer data than are obtainable by self-completion questionnaires (Webb, 1988).
Despite the many claims of incompatibility in qualitative and quantitative methodologies, researchers often
feel reluctant to discount either one or the other method. The worry is that by constraining research, or the
discipline itself, to one set of methods would be unnecessarily restrictive and so a common call is for some sort of
integration of the two methods (Wiggins, 2011). Mixed methods researchers are concerned with combining
qualitative and quantitative research. Therefore these approaches do not fall into either the positivist or