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Review: An overview of mixed methods research – revisited

In presenting this overview of mixed methods research, the authors of the reviewed study promise to navigate the reader through some of the real world complexities and ‘hot topics’ currently trending with and within health care research. Mixed methods research (MMR) itself has been somewhat of a ‘hot topic’ in the recent past, with many researchers, practitioners and authors working tirelessly to expose some of the anomalies, fractures and schisms within the MMR discourse – which remains a vexed and contested space. At a recent international MMR conference seasoned proponents of MMR once again interrupted the discourse, deconstructing and reconstructing aspects of the existing knowledge base (Freshwater and Cahill, 2016a, 2016b). Questions regarding the true commitment to a plurality of approaches (Sandelowski, 2016) were debated along with how MMR is being conceptualised, valued and enacted across disciplinary boundaries, and the relative impact on the everyday practices of those (professional) disciplines (Hesse-Biber and Johnson, 2016). Such debates naturally take us back to the philosophy of social science, epistemology and ontology, and importantly, how paradigms are generated – not to mention the inherent relationality of discourse development to paradigms (Freshwater and Cahill, 2012a). As the authors of the reviewed study point out, there has been, and remains, a tendency for the discourse around MMR to emphasise the complexity of data integration and to provide extensive critical comment on the competitive space of paradigm wars. For many readers and researchers, this debate is not only perceived as necessary and dynamic, but also as enjoyable. However, as the paper points out, it is also important to provide early career researchers, researcher/practitioners and professionals with a pragmatic, translatable and real worldview of the application of MMR in professional healthcare practice contexts. This is not the first such paper to attempt this, but its aim is laudable and clear. It does raise an interesting tangential point for consideration: that of what gets published and why. Drawing on combined experience as co-editor, associate editor, reviewer and author of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research (JMMR), I have myself, along with my co-authors (see Freshwater, 2007; Freshwater and Cahill, 2012a, 2012b), carefully considered the vexed and contested space that is the MMR discourse, a recent point of reference being the journey