Difficulties with Mixing Methods

It would be misleading to imply that there are no drawbacks to using a mixed- methods approach that includes participant observation. Given that time and resources are always limited, one obvious problem is that spreading resources over several modes of investigation tends to lead to less depth in the results from each method, compared to what would be obtained if the same amount of time were devoted to a single approach or a set of related approaches. Another problem is that the results from different methods may be difficult to relate to one another. Together, these problems mean that the use of mixed methods is likely to raise at least as many questions as it answers. Yet this need not be a great drawback if one is engaged in exploratory research, where the questions raised can be tackled by other researchers—or oneself in the future—using more intensively applied methods. A more awkward problem, it seems to me, is the difficulty in reconciling the dual roles of participant and quantitative observer in the eyes of the other participants in the research process, and indeed in one‘s own eyes. There were several situations where this became particularly difficult, and one is explored here.

Sean was a fairly dominant boy—not quite as dominant as Conor, according to the analysis presented in Section 0, but he tended to assume quite a leading role among the boys of Preschool A whenever Conor happened to be absent (as was the case for the first few days of my research). Sean was one of the first children to approach me, and certainly the first to initiate a conversation with me. Indeed, during my initial week of participant observation I spent quite some time with him, as most

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of the other children were quite shy of me during this period and seemed reluctant to come near me. He was particularly fond of jigsaws, and we enjoyed solving them together and playing around with them.

Given this initial closeness, Sean may have found it harder than other children to cope with my transition (for part of the school day) to a structured observer. He certainly proved to be more persistent than his peers in trying to get my attention while I was taking notes, often asking if I could help him do a jigsaw. This was not a problem during event sampling or point sampling, since each event or point sample took less than a minute to record and I could easily hold him off until I had finished. The biggest problems came during the focal follows, since each initial focal follow session lasted for half an hour, and during this time I was constantly engaged in note-taking on the focal child‘s behaviour. A few minutes from the end of one such session, Sean approached me and asked, ―Can I write in your book?‖ I held him off until the end of the session, and then—perhaps feeling a little guilty about not giving him quality attention—I showed him how to write his name and allowed him to draw a few doodles. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake, since it set a dangerous precedent: for the next few days, Sean would frequently ask if he could write in my book. He seemed particularly fascinated by the four-colour pen which I used for colour-coding my notes. Matters came to a head when I was carrying out a focal follow of Sean himself, which had to be abandoned after he started interacting with me too closely for me to take notes on him effectively. At one point he managed to wrest control of the pen from me altogether, which seriously undermined my authority in the eyes of the other children. Some of them started to ask if they could write in my book as well, and the situation was becoming quite unmanageable, until the teacher, witnessing my frustration, suggested simply telling the children that they

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were not allowed to write in my book. I did this—backed up by the teacher—and the problem disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. I did still receive occasional requests to write in my book after that incident, but the difference was that they were no longer persisted with once I refused them.

Of course, this sort of problem might have occurred even if I had been conducting purely quantitative observation. But by initially setting myself up in the more interactive role of a participant observer, I probably made it more likely to occur. The key point is that if I had been conducting purely qualitative observations, I would not have minded the children writing in my book. This would have been quite a good way to build rapport with the children, and even to collect data on their styles of interacting with adults. During structured observation, on the other hand, they could not be allowed to write in my book, as this would have constituted a kind of tampering with the measurement device. This was not an insoluble problem, since I was trying to behave like a classroom assistant, and classroom assistants have items of personal property in the classroom—such as their handbags—which are clearly out of bounds for their pupils. All I had to do was to put my notebook and pen in that category. My mistake lay in originally allowing Sean to treat my equipment as if I were doing qualitative research, without thinking that he would not realize when I had moved into structured observation mode. It might be thought, then, that one solution for this sort of problem, when conducting mixed-methods research, would be to plan for the qualitative element of the research with the quantitative element already in mind. I am not sure if this is a good solution, however, because in the long term it was good for my understanding of children‘s worlds to experience this problem directly, and to have to remedy it on the fly. Nor is the irony lost on me that, while researching children‘s understanding of social norms, I had not only to create a

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new norm (―You‘re not allowed to write in my book‖), but also, once or twice, to appeal to the higher authority of the teacher in putting a stop to behaviour that I didn‘t like—just as children do when they tattle on their peers.