After reading both Understanding and Describing Quantitative Data by Cathy Lewin and Assessing the Quality of Mixed Methods Research: Toward a Comprehensive Framework by Alicia O’Cathain, I feel as though I have gained insight into a great deal of tension between the two schools of thought. I quickly bought on to the idea that a mixed method framework makes a great deal of sense; a focus on both data that is tangible as well as a focus on the context that the data arrives from. This argument, however, soon became convoluted in a plethora of terminology between qualitative and quantitative theorists that confused and perplexed me.

Further, to add to the confusion is that all of the terminology used seems to be synonyms for each other. As put forth by O’Cathain – validity, legitimation, credibility, inference quality, quality, rigor, and trustworthiness are all terms that the methodologies have debated. All in all, an overabundance of criteria caused the mixed method approach to be less effective than I would have liked to see. In the end, I believe both the qualitative and quantitative methods of research have a great deal to bring to the table; however, a reasonable set of terms need to be agreed upon to make a mixed method work.