Discussion
Although the number of mixed studies is increasing day by day, these studies remain weak in terms of quality (Fa‘bregues & Molina-Azorı´n, 2017). To enrich mixed research qualitatively, it is important to determine the philosophy that fully reflects the nature of the mixed research method and to create the study based on this philosophy (Creswell & Plano-Clark, 2011).
There are many meta-synthesis studies examining mixed studies in the related literature (Alise & Teddlie, 2010; Coates, 2021; Fàbregues & Molina-Azorín, 2017; Taşçıoğlu et al., 2022). Among the studies, only Coates (2021) examined mixed studies from a philosophical point of view. Coates (2021) emphasizes that since philosophical arguments form the basis of the research, the philosophy that is the basis of the research should be mentioned in detail in the study. Based on this idea, Coates (2021) concluded that philosophical assumptions were mentioned in only 81 of the 1,026 mixed studies.
We concluded that many of the mixed studies do not accurately reflect the characteristics of pragmatism. The current research has concluded that researchers have difficulties in determining the research question and keywords specific to the mixed method reflecting the pragmatic philosophy, revealing the reasons for choosing the mixed method, and creating the conceptual framework based on pragmatism. When we look at the parts where researchers are less successful in reflecting the characteristics of pragmatism, it is noteworthy that these parts are the only parts that contain the pragmatic philosophy-based nature of mixed methods research. In these parts, we concluded that the researchers accepted the mixed research method as the sum of the qualitative and quantitative tradition, and therefore did not seek a different third way to reflect the nature of the mixed method. Therefore, the present study will raise the awareness of researchers to reflect on the nature of pragmatism.
We have determined that the studies reflect the characteristics of pragmatism at a good level in terms of the abstract, conceptual framework, and reasoning. The possible reason for this situation is that these parts are not only about the nature of pragmatism but also the nature of scientific research in general. We thought that researchers who are familiar with qualitative and quantitative research methods and generally have scientific research experience do not have any difficulty in reflecting the pragmatic philosophy in these parts. In addition, pragmatism is a broad-based philosophical approach that can be used not only in mixed research but also in qualitative and quantitative research.