Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya, Associate Professor in K-State’s Department of Educational Leadership, has conducted several trainings for university faculty in the use of NVivo. She has used the software to support her research work for a number of years and has published widely. She is a specialist in qualitative research methods. 

She explains, “Qualitative research methods inform research that is aimed to develop in-depth context-based understanding that either describe experiences or phenomenon, or interrogate social structures of inequities that play out through people’s experiences. The data sources for qualitative research are often interviews, observations, documents, pictures, videos, and artifacts that can contribute to deep understanding of experiences and the context in which the experiences are manifested."

“Mixed methods research is a contested type of research that attempts to combine both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer research questions. Strong mixed methods research has a primary theoretical drive that prompts the primary methodology and a supplementary methodology that is critically necessary for the study to be complete. The researcher combines or mixes findings gathered from primary and supplementary forms of inquiry to respond to the research questions. The assumption remains that the research will be incomplete with findings from just the primary methodology and hence (there is) a need to incorporate a supplementary methodology and mix findings from both methodologies.”

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