What are some ways in which researchers can remix multiple qualitative approaches in order to study learning in online spaces?
Introduction
Conducting research in online spaces can be challenging, but rewarding. Online environments often seem like brave new worlds filled with unknown and exciting areas for discovery. By exploring existing qualitative approaches to studying learning in formal and informal online spaces, researchers will be able to better understand the development of multimethod approaches.
Readers can expect to see how examples of online learning, from initial design to data collection to data analysis, are addressed in light of the porous boundaries that loosely separate online and offline worlds (Burnett, 2011; Burnett & Merchant, 2014). This chapter provides an overview of seminal constructs that impact qualitative inquiry—namely mental models, research traditions, and inquiry paradigms—and offers insight into methodological shifts as well as researcher agency and creativity.
Mediated Spaces and Online Learning
For qualitative researchers wanting to understand the everyday, the Internet has therefore become almost unavoidable, but is also often troubling in the extent to which it seems to challenge our starting premises about who we study, where they are, and what they do there. (Hine, 2013, p. 2)
Advances in technology have led to new and shifting landscapes, often presenting researchers with multiple challenges in investigating evolving online spaces and practices. Consequently, researchers may grapple with questions about designing their study to best understand online meaning making (Black, 2008; Gee, 2007; Hine, 2000; Nardi, Ly, & Harris, 2007). This book highlights how scholars have examined learning in digital spaces, and it provides seminal examples and prompts to inform and inspire future research. This book pushes researchers to think through existing approaches and methodologies, and to consider alternative and multiple ways to approach the study of learning in online spaces.
The Internet and online learning are not new. In fact, online social spaces like Usenet and multiuser domains, also known as MUDs, were present in the 1970s. These eventually led to other variations, such as MOOs (a MUD that is object oriented) and MUVEs (multiuser virtual environments) that supported flexible environments and user creativity (Slator et al., 2007). Though research has attempted to define characteristics of online learners (Dabbagh, 2007), examining the features of online spaces will allow researchers to explore more deeply examples of meaning making.
In so doing, this book calls attention to the complicated nature of investigating learning in online spaces. Given that online environments continually and often dramatically change, this book avoids claims about what online learning spaces are. Instead, this book provides understandings of how researchers have collected, generated, and analyzed data, as well as (re)considered the affordances and limitations of their chosen approaches.
Making Pragmatic Choices About Methods
Questions of learning and education often cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and demand complex data collection and analyses. As such, it is possible and frequently useful for researchers in these areas to adopt, develop, and mix methodologies that draw from a variety of traditions. This tradition began with mixed methods scholars who initially sought to escape the “paradigm wars” of earlier generations. (An excellent history can be found in Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998.)
Initially, it was most common to combine qualitative and quantitative measures. One definition of mixed methods describes it as “research in which the investigator collects and analyzes data, integrates the findings, and draws inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study or program of inquiry” (Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007, p. 4). In current research, however, multiple combinations of methods, known as multimethod research, are possible and support the emergence of new descriptions and insights.
When beginning an investigation, researchers must hone their ideas for the study’s focus. For example, rather than collecting all possible data in an online setting for learning, are particular kinds of interactions more interesting? Do online interactions suggest another relevant avenue to pursue? A number of different analyses or data sources might be investigated as ways to examine particular areas of the online spaces, or they could be used to tease out certain kinds of learning processes that become more evident as the researcher enters the space.
As educational research has evolved, the field has become more willing to accept mixed, open-ended, and naturalistic frameworks. In past years, many studies of learning environments were planned as deliberate experiments, and as such, frameworks for data collection and analysis were often seen as immutable contracts in which the researcher promised to study definite research questions in established, specific ways. This particular image of the analytical framework does not work as well in qualitative studies where interpretation and mapping are central activities to a study’s development. For example, many ethnographers first engage in mapping field sites to inform their foci and early interpretations. Such activities are central to a study’s development. Some mixed methods researchers have presented pragmatic frameworks that are particularly useful in new and evolving environments—that is, encouraging fellow researchers to choose philosophical stances, methods, and designs that speak most directly to their research questions (e.g., Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004).
This kind of eclectic “alternative paradigm” (Greene, 2007, p. 82) design is both practical and somewhat controversial, in that some researchers (e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 2000, 2002) believe that initial paradigmatic assumptions are central to the way inquiry unfolds. In other words, if a researcher believes that social aspects of meaning making are central to learning, these ideas deeply influence the resulting settings chosen for study, data collected, and analyses undertaken. Despite this intertwined nature of philosophy and method, advocates for a pragmatic stance, including Burke Johnson and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie (2004), claim that basing research in practical choices makes sense for many studies, and “taking a non-purist, or compatibilist or mixed position, allows researchers to mix and match design components that offer the best chance of answering their specific research questions” (p. 15).
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that foundational mixed methods work typically assumes that researchers will define a single research site and approaches to its study from the beginning of the inquiry and will include the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data sources (Creswell, 2015). Today, many online learning spaces are spread across several resources, websites, and social media. In the remainder of this book, we will theorize such environments as networked field sites to describe this multiplicity. In such environments, it may be difficult accurately to map a line of online inquiry at the inception of study, much less to devise hypotheses or clear directions for data collection. Online researchers often discover new artifacts, ideas, or ways of sharing meaning in the course of their inhabitation—information perhaps unconsidered in the initial study design or analysis plan. In such situations, practicalities may be even more central in completing a successful inquiry. Multiple methods and methodologies may become useful to a researcher’s theorized understanding of a space, and a pragmatic frame allows for this kind of evolution to occur.
Jennifer C. Greene (2007) has noted that these ideas and decisions are complex ones. On one hand, researchers may make nominally pragmatic choices in response to a particular happening. On the other, researchers’ actions are guided by their mental models of and assumptions about their inquiry, regardless of whether they explicitly state or interrogate these beliefs. Extending the ideas of Phillips (1996) and Smith (1997), Greene explained that mental models are borne from many aspects of a researcher’s education, experience, and context, and they can profoundly affect how inquiry is carried out. Reflecting actively on these choices and evolving ideas strengthens the study overall, making it “more generative and defensible” (p. 59). Mental models, in other words, are tools for developing and staying true to a study’s logic of inquiry. Periodically considering and interrogating expectations for how various data sources and analyses will contribute to meaning making in an ongoing way,