3.2. Research Approach
3.2.1. The Mixed-Methods Research Approach
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its own merits and demerits, and the adoption of a combination of both enables researchers to benefit from the merits and overcome the demerits of each research methodology. They distinguished between the quantitative and qualitative research approach by stating that, the quantitative research approach uses tools; such as experiments and surveys, to collect numerical, accurate, reliable, statistical-based and easy to analyze data. As for the qualitative research approach, it seeks to obtain descriptive-based data by listening to participants’ voices about the world around them and observing a particular phenomenon to yield deep insight into the issues being addressed. They also argued that the quantitative research approach has its demerits in its inability to provide an in-deep description for some investigated issues, while the qualitative research approach is disadvantageous in the way it fails to provide accurate data of statistical nature about the addressed issues.
Substantiating this, Creswell and Plano Clark (2018) contended that pure quantitative research methodologies provide accurate and fixed data about the addressed research problem but they fail with the studies that require incorporating the voices of participants, leading to inadequate results if the examined studies require incorporating participants’ voices. Differently put, the quantitative research approach is used to provide measurable, numerical and accurate data about some research issues from a large number of participants, and thus, it can have the merits of generalizability, deductiveness and objectivity, but it fails to measure the studies that require a thick description and inclusion of participants’ voices towards the surrounding environment.
On the other hand, Glesne (2006, p. 4) described the qualitative research approach by stating that, “qualitative researchers seek to understand and interpret how the various participants in a social setting construct the world around them”. She contended that the best
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way to understand the surrounding environment is to listen to participants’ voices to get a full description of the issues being addressed. According to Seliger and Shohamy (2001, p. 24),
“[q]ualitative research is a useful approach wherever an investigator is concerned with discovering or describing second language acquisition on its natural state or context and where there are no assumptions about what the activity consists of or what its role is in acquisition”.
Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 3) added that the qualitative research approach is used when “attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them”. However, the pure qualitative research methodology is always questioned about its objectivity and generalizability because it draws entirely on researchers’ understanding of what is being said, and participants’ responses may differ from time to time, from context to context or from situation to situation, and then it fails to provide accurate and fixed data about the addressed research problem (Creswell & Creswell 2019).
Based on the above, the researcher integrated both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies into his research in order to capitalize on the benefits and cover the limitations of each research methodology in tackling the stated research problem. In this study, the quantitative research data was collected through the following; placement test, pre-post tests and four automatic tools (Praat, TAALES, TAALED and L2SCA), to obtain numerical data about the effects of TBI on students’ speaking performance in terms of fluency, lexical sophistication, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity. Moreover, the qualitative research data was gleaned through the semi-structured interview tool to obtain a thick description on the significance of TBI by listening to various voices from the current research context.
Regarding the second reason linked to the researcher’s choice of the mixed-methods research approach, several scholars, researchers and practitioners argued that the adoption of
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any research approach depends heavily on the nature of research questions; that is, researchers have to think carefully about the most adequate approaches that can be used to answer research questions (e.g., Creswell & Creswell 2019; Guba & Lincoln 1994; Johnson & Christensen 2019). In the same vein, Creswell and Guetterman (2019) maintained that the interrelationship between the research question and the research approach should be established because it provides a rationale for the use of a specific research approach and shows that researchers are fully aware of the nature of the problem being addressed. Similarly, Teddlie and Tashakkori (2009) sustained that, researchers’ convictions and beliefs towards the type of research approach that best suits their research are critical factors in deciding the research approach of a study. In this respect, the researcher of this study adopted the mixed research approach because he viewed that it is the most appropriate to respond to the two investigated research questions. In other words, he believed that the first question is best addressed quantitatively to collect numerical data about the research problem and the second one is best transacted qualitatively to get a thick description of the nature of the phenomenon being tackled.
Concerning with the third reason related to the researcher’s choice of the mixed-methods research approach, Fraenkel, Wallen and Hyun (2018) averred that the use of mixed-methods research approach in its three different designs: exploratory, explanatory and triangulation, enhances the validity and reliability of research results. Simply put, the congruence of the quantitative and qualitative results adds more strength to research results and refutes the claims of any intrinsic bias ensuring from the adoption of a single research methodology.
It is worth mentioning that the current research followed the explanatory sequential research design which is a type of the mixed-methods research designs as categorized by Fraenkel, Wallen and Hyun (2018). For them, this design is used when the main data of research
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is gathered quantitatively while the qualitative data is collected to back up the quantitative data.
Following from this, it was decided by the researcher to use this design because the main research question that tackles the major part of the research problem (the first research question) was answered quantitatively while the second research question was answered qualitatively to give additional information to the results of the quantitative data. That is to say, as illustrated in Figure (3), the researcher of this study started the implementation stage by collecting and analyzing the quantitative data to answer the first research question, and then he collected, analyzed and used the qualitative data to support the results of the quantitative data.
Figure 3: The Explanatory Sequential Mixed-Methods Research Design