Meeting the challenges of ‘voice’ in writing up the results of mixed methods social inquiry

Different inquiry traditions have different rhetorical styles that guide our writing and reporting of results. Notably, postpositivist traditions privilege third-person accounts of what was learned, while constructivist traditions privilege the researcher’s authored narrative. When traditions are mixed, with what style should the results be written up and reported? This workshop will engage these challenges. The workshop leader will present selected ideas for writing up mixed methods results, to include arts-based approaches of narrative, poetry, and drama, as well as dialogic frameworks for conversations across different kinds of data and findings. Participants will contribute their own ideas to the writing-up challenges, using examples from their own research or the relevant literature. We will respectfully critique all of these ideas, toward a possible set of “writing it up” guidelines for the field. This workshop assumes an intermediate or expert level of expertise in mixing methods.

Jennifer C. Greene is a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Greene’s work focuses on the intersection of social science methodology and social policy and aspires to be both methodologically innovative and socially responsible. Greene’s methodological research has concentrated on advancing qualitative and mixed methods approaches to social inquiry.