Book Review: Creswell, J., & Plano Clark, V. (2007). Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Researchers are advocating that a necessary condition of scholarly research is congruence between philosophical positions and research approaches. Phenomenology and postpositivism, traditionally, may appear to be situated in scientific inquiry as polar opposites and mutually exclusive paradigms. This article (a) describes the reflections of a nurse researcher and clarifies her philosophical assumptions; (b) delineates the postpositive paradigm and the interpretive paradigm, which traditionally includes phenomenology; (c) discusses phenomenology as a philosophy, an approach, and a research method; and (d) demonstrates the consistency between postpositivism and phenomenology. Nurse researchers must be aware of their philosophical assumptions and appraise the philosophical underpinnings of the methodologies, but this process should not restrict and limit their exploration of possibilities and the creativity in their efforts to address the growing challenges that await nursing science research.

Although mixed- and multiple-method research designs are currently gaining momentum and popularity, it is essential that researchers undertake a critical analysis of the process of mixing "mainstream" research designs with newer methods before commencing. In ethnography, not only are there multiple approaches to data collection, but each approach also spans the competing paradigms, thus making the term mainstream ambiguous because these mainstream techniques are reasonably different from one another. When critically appraising the combination of ethnography and autoethnography, researchers must evaluate paradigmatic philosophies and methods of inquiry for commensurability and delineate the advantages and disadvantages of combining methods as they relate to each paradigm. The author's goal in this article is to demarcate the methodologies of both ethnography and autoethnography and then to identify the (dis)advantages that might arise from undertaking multiple-method and/or mixed-method research that uses these approaches concurrently.