Synthesis and literature review of different mixed methods designs in pedagogical research in physical education

ABSTRACT

Introduction

In recent years, hybrid methodologies have undergone considerable development. For sport pedagogy research, this mixed methods design is helpful because it moves beyond paradigm wars or conflicts between qualitative and quantitative research. However, mixed research in physical education remains rare, whereas the literature is much richer in the sports field.

Purpose

This paper gives a synthesis of the use of hybrid methods in sport pedagogy research both in a literature review and in this special issue entitled ‘Mixed methods in intervention sciences in PSE: a heuristic enrichment or a weakening of frameworks?’.

Methods

For the literature review, we used the EBSCO database using SPORTDiscus. The keywords selected were ‘physical education’ and ‘pedagogy’ crossed with ‘multimethod’ or ‘mixed methods’ or ‘multilevel analysis’ or ‘multisource’ or ‘multimodal’ or ‘combined analysis’. In total, 23 articles were found, and we retained 11 articles corresponding to the selection criteria. We added the six articles of this special issue. Thus, 17 articles were analyzed by identifying: the object of study, the type of data collected, the articulation of approaches, the articulation of methods, the articulation of data and the function of the MMR used.

Findings

The results of this literature review show that the term ‘mixed methods’ covers the largest number of studies. The articles selected are recent with most studies from 2018 onwards. The 17 articles selected present different objects of study (mainly focusing on student perspectives, intervention programmes and physical activity). The articulation of approaches shows that theoretical frameworks are often based on a contextualised approach, mainly in the classroom. Most of the studies presented in this review do not work on the congruence of the theoretical frameworks (most often, the articulation is not specified). However, it is different in the special issue with precision about paradigm emphasis. Articulation of methods is mostly convergent, implementing both quantitative and qualitative methods in a single phase. The quantitative data analyzed are audio and/or visual recording, measure of physical activity (accelerometry), measures of performance or motor skills and surveys. The qualitative data are mainly from interviews (mostly semi-structured interviews in the literature review, and self-confrontation interviews in the special issue). Articulation of data priority is often given to qualitative data. The function of the mixed methods is mainly complementarity.

Discussion and conclusion

This section highlights the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of MMR, questioning its supremacy as a third research paradigm. The conclusion indicates the limitations of this literature review and offers perspectives for future research, advising making the articulation more explicit especially in theoretical concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed methods research
• multimethod
• pedagogy
• physical education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).