Guide 20 – A Joint mixed display checklist

Guide 20

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Guide 20

A Joint mixed display checklist

A handy checklist to help you create a meaningful and informative joint mixed data display

Trigger

Review when you start your mixed data analysis; use when drafting or finalizing your joint mixed data display

Do you have a title that conveys that the main finding, pattern, or insight the joint mixed display is trying to communicate
Is there a clear distinction between the qualitative and quantitative data/findings (like quotation marks, color, numerical units, etc.)?
Do you have a description or caption that explains the joint mixed display further (like where the data came from, the sample size, additional explanation about the main message, etc.)?
Do you clearly communicate the source for qualitative and quantitative data?
Is the display entirely understandable on its own (including the actual display, its title, its caption, etc.)?
Is the display as simplified as possible so as to not overwhelm the viewer?
Is the content congruent (ex: not pairing raw qualitative data with multi-variate quantitative statistics)?
When relevant, does the display showcase a balanced set of data/findings are shown (aka qualitative findings have quantitative results next to them)?
Does the display make it clear the type of integration (merging, building, and/or enriching) that’s fueling the mixed methods study?

GUIDE PARTS

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Tips & Advice

Avoid being complete and descriptive when you use a joint mixed display for planning or analysis. You’ll likely spend too much cleaning up a display that your stakeholders won’t view or understand.
If you can communicate findings or meta-inference without a joint display, consider not creating a high-fidelity joint display to share because it can be more distracting than helpful.
Ask yourself: what’s the relationship between the qualitative and quantitative findings you’re trying to communicate? Are you trying to find agreement, enrichment, or expansion? Once you know the main message, you can remove extraneous columns, rows, and data to communicate that message as simply as possible.
Joint displays are iterative! They can be customized however you need. If you’re running a two-strand mixed design, you can start the display after the first strand and make changes after the second strand.
Sketch out your joint display before creating it. You can work through its structure, the naming of rows & columns, and its descriptive title and captions to identify issues that you can address before creating it in high fidelity.
Try to use visuals within the display as often as you can. For quantitative data/findings, you could use bar graphs, histograms, box-and-whisker plots, or correlation plots. For qualitative data/findings, you could use Venn diagrams, geographical or multi-site maps, word clouds, exemplar images, or quotes.
You can read more in this PDF or this article.