Creswell (2012) pointed out that philosophical assumptions, mental models, interpretive frameworks, and approaches to methods are woven tightly together. In other words, researchers’ own understandings, beliefs, and biases are difficult to separate from the tools that they use and craft in order to engage in inquiry, even when the intention is to be as objective as possible.
Methodological approaches to conducting a study should not be chosen arbitrarily. The design of the research questions are determined by the defined research purpose, the research questions, and the worldview, or paradigm, that a researcher brings to a study. A study’s design, and its corresponding research questions, will be strengthened by researchers’ regular reflections on their own assumptions and mental models.
Various researchers (Creswell, 2013; Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998) have identified major research paradigms that shape a study’s design, including positivism, postpositivism, critical theories, constructivism, and pragmatism. While other paradigms and philosophical stances exist, these broad categories shown in Table 1.1 highlight major defining ideas that frame researchers’ inquiry. In short, using the concept of a “paradigm” to refer to a set of shared beliefs among researchers can be traced to Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Morgan (2007) has noted that this term has been taken up by social sciences researchers in several ways that are not always easy to distinguish from each other: “Paradigm” can define something as broad as a researcher’s worldview— an epistemic stance that reflects beliefs about knowledge, beliefs that are shared across members of a field—or something as narrow as a model for research. Morgan explained that “these four versions of the paradigm concept are not mutually exclusive. Nor is one of them right and the others wrong. Instead the question is which version is most appropriate for any given purpose” (p. 54). Despite the noted range in definition, the word paradigm is most often used to describe an epistemic belief about knowledge, as in Table 1.1.
A positivist paradigm—a stance that was common through World War II—suggests that it is possible to use scientific methods to identify true, verifiable, value-free statements about the world. However, a postpositivist paradigm places some critical limits on that truth, acknowledging that “truth” and “reality” are by nature imperfect constructions because observations and findings are never free of human theory and intervention.
Table 1.1
A constructivist paradigm might note that facts and truths are constructed by scientists and social scientists within human contexts, and so are unlikely to be verifiable by all observers, while a critical theorist paradigm would seek to understand the value systems that affect how such findings might be perceived among different groups of people or historical periods. (For more detail on these definitions, see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998.)
While approaches to research are rarely directly associated with methods, typically quantitative experimental methods have been associated with positivist and postpositivist paradigms, and qualitative and naturalistic methods with constructivist and critical paradigms. When viewed in this way, it begins to become clear why mixed methods research has been such a significant and controversial evolution in methodology: How is it possible to combine techniques that have different views about the nature of knowledge itself?
Several approaches to mixing paradigms and methods exist, but Greene (2007) favors a “dialectical” stance (pp. 59–60), wherein the multiple knowledge paradigms, methods, and mental models about what those methods help researchers learn or accomplish are brought deliberately into conversation with each other. In this way, researchers can gain insight into more complex findings and perspectives that may be possible only when these contradictory stances are interrogated together.
Still other researchers favor a pragmatic stance toward mixing methods, in which the focus is placed not on broad epistemic or ontological claims, but on how particular methods will help researchers to inquire more successfully into particular settings or research questions. This position is derived from the work of American theorists such as Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, who sought to develop a philosophy of how actions, ideas, and methods reflect human experience and advance democratic ideals.
Taking up this position, Morgan (2007) questioned the usefulness of paradigmatic assumptions: “Although paradigms as epistemological stances do draw attention to the deeper assumptions that researchers make, they tell us little about more substantive decisions such as what to study and how to do so” (p. 52). In other words, thinking about such questions as the nature of truth and knowledge may pull researchers away from more immediate questions, such as their reflections on the design of their inquiry.
Additionally, Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004) explicitly championed pragmatism as a paradigm for mixed methods. They did so to help scholars find a middle position between a “purist” stance (where mixing methods or paradigms is not defensible) and an “a-paradigmatic” stance (where methods are chosen without regard to broader philosophical concerns). Instead, pragmatism helps research designers to choose philosophical stances, methods, and procedures that speak most directly to their research questions. As Greene (2007) explained, “To approach mixed methods inquiry pragmatically does not mean to ignore or set to one side philosophical assumptions and stances when making practical methods decisions. For that is the a-paradigmatic stance. Rather, a pragmatic paradigm signals attention to transactions and interactions; to the consequential, contextual, and dynamic nature of character of knowledge; to knowledge as action; to the intertwinement of values with inquiry, and so forth” (p. 85).
We call attention to the pragmatic research paradigm to emphasize the connection between research methods and context. In other words, researchers may need to select multiple methods to gain a rich understanding of learning at a particular time and place, particularly in online spaces where learning often happens across many times and places. Although we emphasize this approach, we do not intend to privilege it; rather, we believe that there are multiple valid perspectives in and across research of learning in online spaces, and that it is important for researchers not to feel confined or constrained by one paradigm.
Pragmatic Research and Remix: Considering Multimethod Approaches
Given that pragmatic research connects research design and contexts, researchers have opportunities to take creative and agentive approaches to data collection and analysis. In this section, we introduce the concept of remix as it has been understood in literacy research. Then, we apply the remix framework pragmatically to mixed approaches to suggest that researchers can find the most appropriate and effective methods for their study when they can customize their approach.
Drawing on Creswell’s (2015) concept of multimethod research, this section introduces how researchers might draw on multiple forms of qualitative data from networked field sites. Creswell (2015) indicated that researchers should not conflate mixed methods research with multimethod research. As he explained in A Concise Introduction to Mixed Methods Research, “When multiple forms of qualitative data are collected, the term is multimethod research, not mixed methods research” (p. 3, emphasis in original). Using multiple aspects of various traditions and data sources can lead to methodologically rich inquiries of online learning.
Remix
The concept of remix existed long before the age of the Internet and new media. One can look back to the Star Trek fandom magazines for a brief glimpse into the spaces of remix in popular culture. Star Trek fanzines were