Faye C. Huie
PhD Portfolio
Vitae Goal Statement Coursework Analytical & Integrated Thinking Research Professional Experiences Dissertation Planning

Reflection: EDRS 797: Mixed Methods Research

The mixed methods course was an interesting course. I learned about both the philosophical nature of mixing methodologies, as well as the different strategies for mixing the approaches. I learned the most in this course by attempting to develop my own mixed methods study. I used the stigma consciousness data that I collected to examine how stigma consciousness (the quantitative piece) was related to educational attributions (the qualitative piece). Trying to blend two different types of data post-hoc was a challenging task. The most difficult process was trying to find emergent themes or patterns in the qualitative data and how those findings were related to the quantitative findings. Specifically, I split the sample up into high and low stigma consciousness and out of those two groups, I attempted to see if the students provided different attributions for achievement. The main finding was that students who were in the high consciousness group provided attributions that were more variable such as internal and controllable attributions such as effort (I studied hard) to external and uncontrollable attributions (I got lucky or I didn’t have time to study). However, students in the low consciousness group provided more homogenous and adaptive attributions such as studying. This trend was apparent after many different trials of splitting the group. In fact, if I did not split up the group quantitatively, there would have been no way to identify the qualitative trends. Overall, I am glad that I took this course and although I still do not feel fully prepared to conduct my own full mixed methods study, I know that I am equipped with the basic skills necessary to further develop my research.

Article Critique
Conceptualization Paper
Tentative Results