Caribbean Journal of Mixed Methods Research Volume 3
Edited by Dr Loraine D. Cook, Dr Steve Weaver
Editorial Board
Loraine D. Cook
School of Education, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica
Steve Weaver
School of Nursing, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica
Dr Vimala Kamalodeen
Dr Ingrid Hunt-Anderson
Dr Delroy Chevers
Ms Leemoy Weaver
Dr Mariko Hirose
Professor Lloyd Waller
Professor John Creswell
Co-Director of the Michigan Mixed Methods Research and an Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine, University of Michigan
Dr Tomlin Paul
University of Global Health Equity, Butaro Campus, Rwanda
Dr Hamid Ghany
Director, Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (St Augustine Campus)
Dr Canute Thompson
Head, Caribbean Centre for Educational Planning
Professor Aldrie Henry Lee
Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Graduate Studies & Research, UWI (Mona)
Professor Theresa Betancourt
Salem Professor in Global Practice and Director, Research Programme on Children and Adversity
Professor Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie
Senior Research Associate at Cambridge University, Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, and Past President of Mixed Methods International Research Association (MMIRA)
Professor Burke Johnson
Professor, Department of Professional Studies, Mixed Methods Research, Evaluation, Research Methodology
Professor John Hitchcock
Principal Research Associate at Westat, Rockville, Maryland.
Introduction
This volume of CJMMR is dedicated to the memory of Dr Vimala Kamalodeen, Past President of Mixed of Methods International Association – Caribbean Chapter, who passed away on July 5th, 2022. Dr Kamalodeen specialized in Math and Computer Science education at the School of Education, University of the West Indies in Trinidad, St. Augustine. Her doctoral thesis used an eclectic mixed methods design focusing on hybrid data from educational online social networking. Vimala is the founding President of IT Teachers Professional Network (ITTPN) Global, a professional learning network and was engaged in mixed methods research in Game-based learning. Dr Kamalodeen successfully hosted the 3rd regional mixed methods conference in the Caribbean and was very active in the CJMMR. Apart from publishing in the two previous volumes and this current volume, she was a member of the editorial board and a committed associate editor. She has left an indelible mark in the mixed methods research community in the Caribbean. Dr Kamalodeen was not only our colleague, she was our friend, a phenomenal woman and consummate professional.
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Articles
Design-based research (DBR) is an educational research methodology in which researchers work with practitioners (e.g., teachers) and other stakeholders (e.g., parents) to develop and to implement multiple iterations of an intervention in an authentic educational context. Although DBR lends itself to mixed methods research, it has been largely ignored by the mixed methods research community. In this article, after describing what DBR is and situating it historically, we provide results from a systematic review of Scopus-indexed articles since 1960, which yielded only 68 published works wherein the author explicitly declared their study as representing some form of a mixed methods DBR study. For all but 4 of these 68 studies, the level of integration occurred at the low end of the integration continuum, being characterized by mixed methods research designs wherein integration only occurred at the interpretation stage of the DBR process. As a result, we apply critical dialectical pluralism (i.e., CDP; Onwuegbuzie & Frels, 2013; Onwuegbuzie, Abrams, & Forzani, in press), a research philosophy, or meta-paradigm, focused on privileging the voices of marginalized people, to DBR as one way to think about how the mixed methods research community might utilize DBR in ways that provide full(er) integration and, at the same time, promote equity. As such, we hope that the meta-framework that we have presented heretofore motivates both the mixed methods research community and the DBR community to consider using a CDP approach to mixed methods DBR studies while adopting an integrative, integrated, and integral way of thinking.
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The IUPAC unit that measures the fundamental quantity “amount of substance”, the mole, and its related concepts have been repeatedly reported to be a source of confusion for students and educators at all levels. Literature shows that students have grave difficulty in incorporating and transferring their understanding of the mole at both the sub-microscopic and macroscopic levels (Indriyanti and Barke 2017). Myriad variables exacerbate learning and teaching of the mole concept, but one crucial factor that affects it is student attitudes towards chemistry.
The study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to focus on how attitudes towards chemistry affect achievement in mole concept chemistry. It was conducted with preliminary and level one students at the three campuses of the University of the West Indies (UWI). A convenience sample of 471 students participated in the quantitative portion, while thirty-nine students provided feedback via interviews for the qualitative part. The quantitative portion was analysed using a combination of descriptive analyses and parametric tests of significance, while the qualitative data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results indicated that the students involved are performing at an average level in mole concept chemistry, and this achievement is dependent on their attitudes towards chemistry.
Furthermore, negative attitudes towards chemistry, exacerbated by decreased self-efficacy, were vividly expressed as one of the greatest barriers to effective learning and teaching of the mole concept. The participants indicated that the teacher’s disposition is key to either worsening or improving their performance in mole concept chemistry. The findings of this novel research in the Caribbean provide insight that could inform and enhance the instructional strategies of educators in the Caribbean and other regions, which could be a catalyst for positive achievement. Thus, it can provide an avenue for developing more positive student attitudes through self-efficacious teaching strategies, which are essential for fostering increased achievement and positive attitudes towards the mole concept.
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The general objective of this study was to use a mixed methods approach to study the behavioural aspects of medication compliance among older Jamaican adults, diagnosed with hypertension, diabetes and arthritis. This article focusses on the methodological aspects of the research process. Specifically, we explored how the principle of maximum variation was used in tandem with the participant selection variant as a mixed-method integration technique.
Method: A two-strand explanatory sequential mixed-method design was employed. In the first strand, secondary analysis was performed on an existing data set. From the findings, the maximum variation was used to create diverse character categories or dimensions, using demographic variables that have statistically significant associations with the outcome variable. Those characteristic dimensions were then used to inform the selection of participants for the second qualitative strand of the study. Finding: The Principle of Maximum Variation is a good fit for seamless blending of methods when conducting research using mixed methodology. Conclusion: Mixed methodology is often simplified as the use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches in a study. However, by employing the principle of maximum variation as a qualitative method to inform the participant selection variant of the explanatory sequential design, a perfect blend of methods is achieved to exemplify the essence of mixed methodology.
This paper presents a discussion and reflections on using a mixed-method case study research design to explore the remote work experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a team, we used our own experiences and in-depth interviews with six teacher educators in the case context of a university. The themes of the analysis of these interviews were used to build a survey instrument to see to what extent other teacher educators within the boundary of the case had similar or different experiences during the first academic year of COVID-19 (2020/21). Through the discussions and reflections on the purpose of the study, the research experience and the role of case study mixed methods research, the article offers an illustration of conducting mixed-method case study research embedded with an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design. These reflections can be helpful to novice researchers about to embark on a combined case study mixed methods design and provide insights and useful details for the more advanced researcher.
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Interpersonal communication in long-distance romantic relationships (LDRRs) in the English-speaking Caribbean is relatively understudied. This type of romantic relationship is growing globally; however, the rate of acknowledgement, recognition and respect is lagging regionally. This bars LDRRs from ready inclusion in a more diverse social landscape. Studies on LDRR communication have gained some traction (Steele and McConney 2020a, 2020b), but overall, the Anglophone Caribbean is underrepresented in this body of LDRR research.
Because of the lack of understanding surrounding how people in contemporary Caribbean society communicate in LDRRs, to learn more, we need to look at how they communicate. Discussing and understanding the communication dimension in LDRRs can lead to recommendations on how to navigate these relationships. As such, a framework of interpersonal romantic relationships was used to examine how the variables of computer-mediated communication, attachment styles, social media and emotional intelligence may contribute to LDRR communication.
The objective of this study explores the behaviour of the aforementioned variables in an LDRR context, utilizing a mixed-methods approach: a deep dive into the relationships of five resilient couples via qualitative data collection of semistructured individual interviews and journaling exercises. This smaller purposive population sampling was followed by the conceptual phase two – survey development. Quantitative data obtained from the developed questionnaire were sourced from a wider LDRR audience to analyse their attachment styles and emotional intelligence. Phase four interprets the qualitative and quantitative data sets. Attachment Style Theory, Relational Dialectics Theory and Grounded Theory undergird the theoretical framework along with dialectical pluralism (Johnson
2017).
The study sought to answer RQ1: How do social media and computer-mediated communication affect communication patterns in long-distance romantic relationships? RQ2: How does attachment style account for computer-mediated communication choices in these relationships? RQ3: What are the significant effects of emotional intelligence on interpersonal communication patterns in long-distance romantic relationships?
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The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives and livelihoods of people around the world. This study aimed to investigate the mental health and coping response related to the sudden switch to online teaching and learning (OTL) during the pandemic. We also explored the strategies they employed to cope with the online environment’s emotional stress. Participants were recruited from the undergraduate student population of a prominent university in Kingston, Jamaica. In this study, an exploratory sequential mixed methods research design was utilized where findings of the qualitative phase were used to develop a survey instrument for online administration. Focus group discussions (FGDs) with eighty-six students provided qualitative data, and 465 students answered questions on the study topic in the survey.
Findings from the sample survey represented those in the qualitative data. In the FGDs, students expressed feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness about the OTL during the pandemic. In the survey, most students experienced anxiety (87 per cent), some depression symptoms (sadness/crying, 74 per cent), and loneliness (72.1 per cent). In particular, they were generally unaware of the university’s counselling service, which was not dissimilar in the survey findings (54 per cent). There were some statistical associations among mental and emotional outcomes and coping methods between categories: anxiety and missing classes (Φ = 0.264), anxiety and social media (Φ = 0.228), sadness and missing classes (Φ = 0.219) and loneliness and missing classes (Φ = 0.218). The community of practice-learning theory helped to explain these findings.
We concluded that these findings highlighted a need for greater awareness of and access to psycho-social services to assist students in managing their mental health, especially during a pandemic. This study contributes to the mixed methods literature as an example of how quantitative findings can help generalize qualitative results to a study sample.