Review: V Plano Clark & J Creswell (Eds) Mixed methods reader
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mixed methods has been described as the third major methodological movement, one that is perhaps just reaching "adolescence." Plano Clark and Creswell’s The Mixed Methods Reader is timely, as there is a hugely increasing wave of interest in mixed methodologies, but the authors have also, perhaps, struggled to find appropriate readings for some areas of practice from a literature that is still developing and evolving. The Reader complements an overview text on mixed methods published a year earlier by the same authors (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007), although in my opinion, the Reader provides a more useful overview of mixed methods than does the text. It is designed for graduate students and practicing researchers. In the first page of the general introduction, the authors note that mixed methods has a broad appeal both internationally and across disciplines with the consequence that the literature is spread across a wide range of publication outlets. Their goal, then, was to bring together a selection of readings that covered the major areas of discussion in the field. The authors claim to have reflected international, and disciplinary diversity in their selections, yet, in the 14 methodological selections, just one comes from the United Kingdom and one from Canada—the remainder are from the United States, and primarily from authors working in education or educational psychology. The nine example studies are also dominated by American authors. The book is presented in two sections: Part 1 provides a methodological overview, with 14 chapters, whereas Part 2 presents nine "exemplar" studies. The overall design of the book is excellent and it has been meticulously prepared (a characteristic of all John Creswell’s books). Each reading is prefaced by an editors’ introduction; stimulating discussion questions are provided for each methodological reading and for the set of research studies, and related references that extend the topic are also provided for each methodological reading. Readings are presented in their original form, including variations in styles of presentation and referencing (and original rather than current author locations).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".