Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research represents another stage in the life of the journal. Max Bergman, who served as the journal’s coeditor with Donna Mertens from 2009 to the end of 2011, stepped down from that position. Mertens will continue in her term as coeditor through the end of 2013. She has been joined by Coeditor Dawn Freshwater of Leeds University. In this editorial, Freshwater provides us with a glimpse into her priorities as the new coeditor of the Journal of Mixed Methods Research.
The business of research, like any other business, has to move with and adapt to the changing environment. But, importantly, research is also expected to determine, create, innovate, inform, and indeed underpin and lead those changes. All research methods are developed within a paradigm and as such have epistemological, ontological, axiological, and philosophical foundations, which although it may not always be articulated or transparent, nevertheless exist. For, even to claim that a research method has no philosophical foundation is, ironically, to declare your philosophical stance. Mixed methods research itself has, in recent years, been challenged to address what has been described as a lack of ontological, epistemological, and axiological positions (Lincoln, 2009): a challenge that this journal has, in my view, relished and is purposefully addressing.
Researchers talk of paradigms and how movement is managed, but movements also take place on a daily basis and can go seemingly unnoticed; not all movement happens with a big bang! However, movement that inspires and is built on change does require inspirational and transformational leadership. One such movement is this exciting and innovative journal, which I am excited and privileged to have been invited to manage and lead as coeditor—not simply because it has created, and continues to create, a forum for debate, pushing at the edges and challenging boundaries to create new thresholds, contributing widely to academic discourse around mixed methods research, but also because of the opportunity to work with esteemed and respected colleagues and new and experienced researchers, authors, and practitioners within the field. My experience as an editor of an international impact factored journal located within the health disciplines for more than 8 years, along with my own research career spanning 20 years, has provided me with wide-ranging methodological insights and the good fortune to see the potential impact of research outcomes on population health, clinical practice, academic education, and research protocols.
Reading and engaging with research papers provides us with an opportunity to look up from the page in our busy lives; to take time to reflect, mindfully; to move out from the striated space that leads us to believe that our world is the world, not realizing that there are multiple worlds coexisting. The current global economic and environmental climate raises concerns for the future funding of research and highlights the absolute need to demonstrate impact and outcomes of our research studies and indeed our theoretical and philosophical deliberations that go on to inform research design. Funding that is available is more readily accessible for those who are willing and able to facilitate successful interdisciplinary collaborations and who are also willing to recognize the relative merits and limitations of a variety of approaches to achieve the same ends and appreciate the coexistence of multiple truths. There is room for detectives, who wish to pursue their line of inquiry from an objective viewpoint, and nomads, who prefer to dwell in the lived truth. And, importantly, there is sustained growth in the area of mixed methods research; the nomadic detective thrives!
Impact and quality thresholds are a particular challenge to balance for a journal such as the Journal of Mixed Methods Research, which itself has achieved a significant coup in the world of impact factors. Love them or hate them, impact factors are viewed as a measure of quality and esteem, and this will inevitably lead to an increase in the number of submissions to the journal, although not necessarily an increase in the quality of papers, or indeed diversity and global reach. It is fairly common knowledge that international submissions vary across all journals; however, journal editors also have a responsibility to consider how we share information across cultural, contextual, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. We often take for granted instant and immediate easy access to the written word, and this in a language that we can comprehend. Not all of our colleagues have access to electronic resources and are able to translate research and research findings into marginalized contexts and languages that enable them to use the wealth of available information that we readily share. Contemporary journals, and editors, then, play a political role in managing movement and leading change on a broader knowledge transfer agenda. An agenda that I feel strongly committed too and one that I believe in, mixed methods research has significant and wide-reaching potential to influence.
On a pragmatic note, I have spoken with Donna Mertens regarding the possible increase in the number of themed and focused issues through commissioned papers and invited editorials to ensure that the journal takes account of political, economic, and global knowledge transfer drivers. The Journal of Mixed Methods Research is a powerful journal, one that gives voice to a powerful discourse that is constructed and perpetuated through the publication of the journal itself. In this sense, it also has the potential to empower. Publishing itself is a political event. Publishing research affords interested parties the opportunity to transform, as Mertens (2011) has suggested, mixed methods research as a paradigm. In this sense, we are both invented by and invent the space that mixed methods research inhabits, which is a key space within which transformation can reside. As coeditor of this journal, I am looking forward to the possibilities of managing movement and leading change and using the position of power that comes with being an editor of an international impact factored journal mindfully and deliberatively. I welcome the opportunity to work across geographical and disciplinary boundaries and with a range of methodological, philosophical, and epistemological concepts and ideas.