Employing mixed methods in evaluation

These are the course notes for Jennifer Greene's 2007 workshop Employing mixed methods in evaluation presented at American Evaluation Association Summer Evaluation Institute in 2007.

The course objectives were:

1. To provide participants with specific concepts and tools for mixed options work
2. To engage participants in reflective conversation about a “mixed options way of thinking”

Contents

The course notes provide information, activities and references on the following topics:

• Purposes of mixed options inquiry:
• Complementarity - understanding more comprehensively, developing more comprehensive, more complete portrait
• Triangulation - understanding more defensibly, with stronger validity or credibility and less known bias
• Initiation - understanding more insightfully, with new ideas, fresh perspectives, creative concepts and meanings
• Understanding with greater value consciousness and greater diversity of values, perspectives, and positions.
• Frames for mixed options inquiry – different mixed option paradigm stances and what guides practical inquiry decisions
• Key concepts in mixed options design and analysis – when and how to mix options
• Major dimensions of mixed options design: sequential, concurrent and integrated designs
• Analysis challenges and strategies for: data transformation, data comparisons, drawing inferences and conclusions
• Examples of mixed option evaluations are discussed