EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER 14 The purposes of this article are to position mixed methods research (mixed research is a synonym) as the natural complement to tradi- tional qualitative and quantitative research, to present pragmatism as offering an attractive philosophical partner for mixed methods re- search, and to provide a framework for designing and conducting mixed methods research. In doing this, we briefly review the para- digm “wars” and incompatibility thesis, we show some commonali- ties between quantitative and qualitative research, we explain the tenets of pragmatism, we explain the fundamental principle of mixed research and how to apply it, we provide specific sets of designs for the two major types of mixed methods research (mixed-model de- signs and mixed-method designs), and, finally, we explain mixed meth- ods research as following (recursively) an eight-step process. A key feature of mixed methods research is its methodological pluralism or eclecticism, which frequently results in superior research (com- pared to monomethod research). Mixed methods research will be successful as more investigators study and help advance its concepts and as they regularly practice it. F or more than a century, the advocates of quantitative and qualitative research paradigms have engaged in ardent dis- pute. 1 From these debates, purists have emerged on both sides (cf. Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). 2 Quantitative purists (Ayer, 1959; Maxwell & Delaney, 2004; Popper, 1959; Schrag, 1992) articulate assumptions that are con- sistent with what is commonly called a positivist philosophy. 3, 4 That is, quantitative purists believe that social observations should be treated as entities in much the same way that physical scientists treat physical phenomena. Further, they contend that the observer is separate from the entities that are subject to ob- servation. Quantitative purists maintain that social science inquiry should be objective. That is, time- and context-free gen- eralizations (Nagel, 1986) are desirable and possible, and real causes of social scientific outcomes can be determined reliably and validly. According to this school of thought, educational re- searchers should eliminate their biases, remain emotionally de- tached and uninvolved with the objects of study, and test or empirically justify their stated hypotheses. These researchers have traditionally called for rhetorical neutrality, involving a formal Mixed Methods Research: A Research Paradigm Whose Time Has Come by R. Burke Johnson and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie writing style using the impersonal passive voice and technical ter- minology, in which establishing and describing social laws is the major focus (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998). Qualitative purists (also called constructivists and interpretivists) reject what they call positivism. They argue for the superiority of constructivism, idealism, relativism, humanism, hermeneutics, and, sometimes, postmodernism (Guba & Lincoln, 1989; Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Schwandt, 2000; Smith, 1983, 1984). These purists contend that multiple-constructed realities abound, that time- and context-free generalizations are neither desirable nor possible, that research is value-bound, that it is impossible to dif- ferentiate fully causes and effects, that logic flows from specific to general (e.g., explanations are generated inductively from the data), and that knower and known cannot be separated because the subjective knower is the only source of reality (Guba, 1990). Qualitative purists also are characterized by a dislike of a de- tached and passive style of writing, preferring, instead, detailed, rich, and thick (empathic) description, written directly and some- what informally. Both sets of purists view their paradigms as the ideal for re- search, and, implicitly if not explicitly, they advocate the in- compatibility thesis (Howe, 1988), which posits that qualitative and quantitative research paradigms, including their associated methods, cannot and should not be mixed. The quantitative versus qualitative debate has been so divisive that some gradu- ate students who graduate from educational institutions with an aspiration to gain employment in the world of academia or re- search are left with the impression that they have to pledge alle- giance to one research school of thought or the other. Guba (a leading qualitative purist) clearly represented the purist position when he contended that “accommodation between paradigms is impossible . . . we are led to vastly diverse, disparate, and to- tally antithetical ends” (Guba, 1990, p. 81). A disturbing fea- ture of the paradigm wars has been the relentless focus on the differences between the two orientations. Indeed, the two dom- inant research paradigms have resulted in two research cultures, “one professing the superiority of ‘deep, rich observational data’ and the other the virtues of ‘hard, generalizable’ . . . data” (Sieber, 1973, p. 1335). Our purpose in writing this article is to present mixed meth- ods research as the third research paradigm in educational re- search. 5 We hope the field will move beyond quantitative versus qualitative research arguments because, as recognized by mixed methods research, both quantitative and qualitative research are important and useful. The goal of mixed methods research is not to replace either of these approaches but rather to draw from the Educational Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 7, pp. 14–26