Week 1 Chapter 1: The selection of a research design Three types of design: Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Although it is difficult to separate the first two, often a research study tends to be more quantitative than qualitative or vice versa. Mixed methods is somewhere in the middle, a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods. In detail: Qualitative research is about exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem. Quantitative research is a means for testing objective theories, deriving hypotheses from these theories, and examining the relationship among variables. Mixed methods research associates both research design. Often, in qualitative research, the researcher needs to interpret the data (evidence) collected during the research process. The final report may have a flexible structure. With quantitative research, the final report is more or less structured; introduction, literature survey and theory, data description, methods, results and discussion (for future research). These models pretty much cover the available areas to researchers in selecting the type of research design. In each research design, it helps to identify, list and associate the three components of the research design. The first component is the way the research views the problem of interest. This is called under different names, research paradigm, epistemologies (the origin) and ontologies (how you know what you know), etc etc. There are variations in these views, but broadly the book summarizes them under four headings: (a) (post)positivist world view (b) social constructivism, (c) advocacy/participatory (d) pragmatism. A brief summary for each follows: (A) Post-positivist view: The underlying research curiosity is to identify causes probably determining some outcomes. Therefore considerable effort is spent on