Abstract
In his famous essay, “The Methodology of the Social Sciences” Max Weber indicated that new social and cultural phenomena bring along new academic problems. These new academic problems, however, call for an adjustment of the paradigmatic and methodological apparatus. In this chapter, we point to the methodological challenges arising from new and complex social phenomena in the realm of internationalizing education policy and how they can be addressed by a systematic combination and pooling of different methods with their particular strengths and limitations. Basically, new analytical problems can be dealt with in three different ways. The first and least desirable way is to downsize the phenomenon in question to make it accessible within a given methodological framework. The second is to refine a given methodological framework to make it cover more aspects of the phenomenon in question, thus to increase the validity of the respective type of data. The third is to deepen the overall validity of analysis by a systematic rearrangement of the methodological framework. Such an arrangement should combine both qualitative and quantitative methodological strategies with descriptive and explanative logics of research. A carefully arranged mixed-method approach can not only account more deeply for more facets of the phenomenon in question, but can also connect the methods involved in an appropriate way in order to counterbalance their limits and to pool their strengths.
But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its thinking apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought.
Weber 1949 [1904]: 55
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© 2010 Alexander-Kenneth Nagel, Tonia Bieber, Anja P. Jakobi, Philipp Knodel, Dennis Niemann, and Janna Teltemann
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Nagel, AK., Bieber, T., Jakobi, A.P., Knodel, P., Niemann, D., Teltemann, J. (2010). Measuring Transformation of Education Policy—a Mixed-Method Approach. In: Martens, K., Nagel, AK., Windzio, M., Weymann, A. (eds) Transformation of Education Policy. Transformations of the State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281295_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281295_2
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