Unit 7, Response

This is a response to Oliver Parsons’ post https://create.twu.ca/oplearning/2018/02/13/learning-activity-7-1/

Question: What other fields besides leadership would you like to see more mixed method research done?

I think we can agree that the mixed methods are called for applying to the fields which are of complexity and diversity. The mixed methods design is extremely helpful for us to discover the essence and gain an in-depth understanding of the fields. Considering the complex feature and my personal interest, I would like to see more mixed methods research applied to the field of clinical psychology.

Actually, not only clinical psychology, what I mean is that I am willing to see how clinical psychology could interact with other social science. For example, I would like to see how music would affect the patients with mental disorders and how are the feelings or ideas of the patients and their families. If I were one of the researchers, I would conduct a sequential explanatory research on this topic. First, I would use quantitative methods to examine the relationship between the time of listening to the music and the effect of the patients. Second, I would analyze the results and seek help from the qualitative methods. Maybe I will prepare open-ended questions for several purposively chosen participants to see their feelings or ideas. And I will discuss and combine the results of the quantitative methods and the findings of the qualitative methods. These are just rough thoughts, and all the procedures and details have to be more precise when the real research happens.