Book Club Event: Mixed Methods

Hosted by: Anne Betzner & Heidi Gegax

Join fellow MNEA members to socialize, share your thoughts, and explore new ideas through a new MNEA book club! Our inaugural book club will discuss an article that is freely available online: Best Practices for Mixed Methods Research in the Health Sciences (36 pages). We will break into groups of about six to eight and look forward to a lively conversation about mixed methods and the strengths and weaknesses of this article.  Please join us as we try out this new type of MNEA event. Each book club event is free to MNEA members and limited to 24 participants.

A one-page discussion guide will be sent to you after signing up. Light refreshments will be provided.

Mixed Methods

Interest and use of mixed methods evaluation is growing.  Diverse stakeholders have diverse information needs, and the important phenomena we evaluate often need multiple kinds of information to fully express their complexity. 

We selected the article Best Practices for Mixed Methods Research in the Health Sciences for this book club.  John Creswell led authorship of this article for the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research.  A working group of 18 members, including leading evaluator Donna Mertens, contributed to the document. 

The document (36 pages) is freely available here:
https://obssr.od.nih.gov/mixed_methods_research/pdf/Best_Practices_for_Mixed_Methods_Research.pdf

This article was selected for the book club because it is practical in nature.  It succinctly summarizes research on mixed methods and was written to help investigators develop mixed methods proposals.  The article provides a straight-forward summary of the nature and design of mixed methods research, resources needed for mixed methods research, guidelines for how to develop mixed methods research with the context of NIH proposals, and guidelines for reviewing mixed methods evaluations for NIH.  While the examples provided are for the health sciences and focus on NIH procedures, the description of mixed methods and discussion of quality standards provide a solid jumping off point for our book club discussion.