Methodological issues in mathematics education research when exploring issues around participation and engagement

This chapter aims to identify the factors that relate to students’ intended choices with respect to mathematics in schools in England, using a mixed methods longitudinal approach. Throughout we highlight the methodological issues that surfaced in our study. Methodologically, we reach three principal conclusions. First, mathematics-specific measures are better predictors of intended participation in mathematics than more general measures. In particular, the mathematics-specific measure of extrinsic material gain motivation was more tightly related to future mathematics aspirations than any of the other measures used within our models that measure motivation. Second, our work clearly demonstrates that, valuable as construct-based analyses are, researchers ought, at the very least, to complement such analyses by selected analysis at the level of items. Third, while it is hardly unusual to combine quantitative and qualitative work within a single study, our work shows the benefit of the two approaches when they truly inter-digitate. We began with quantitative analyses, then turned to qualitative work and then returned to a new set of quantitative analyses, drawing both on our first sets of quantitative analyses and on our qualitative work. The resulting conclusions are more robust than had we relied on only quantitative or qualitative work