Strengths and Limitations of Quantitative and Mixed Methods Education Administration

EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION

Education Administration: Strengths and Limitations of Quantitative and Mixed Method Approaches

The strengths of the quantitative approach include: 

· The use of numbers and statistics make the research appropriate to use as the statistical tests to help in straightforward analysis (Devault, 2020)

· Replication could be easily done based on an experimental design; testing and checking become convenient. 

· Research with the involvement of statistics gives it a valuable image. It can be used in complex evaluations like computer modeling, portfolio review, business decisions based on data assessment, stock assortment, etc. 

The limitations of the quantitative approach can involve: 

· Focusing more on numbers could remove the researcher’s focus from detecting themes and associations. 

· The setting of the research design and model could sometimes be faulty, leading to errors in the entire research process, making the results misleading in the end. 

The strengths of the mixed-methods approach are:

· The use of two methods in a mixed-methods approach would enable the strengths to overcome the weaknesses of another. Also, the findings of one method could be supported by the findings of the second one. 

· The views and opinions are analyzed for a diverse range of participants

· Quantitative and qualitative studies are analyzed individually, which becomes appropriate for cross-validating (Almeida, 2018)

The limitations of the mixed-methods approach are:

· Time and resource utilization is much more than expected for collecting data from two separate studies

· Reconciliation of both types of studies could be challenging, and interpretation of results could be confusing