Advancing 1+1=1 Fully Integrated Designs using a Five Formative Figures Approach

For designs aiming to be fully integrated, lacking concrete tools to facilitate connections between methods and inferences stymie efforts toward advancing solutions to the “1+1=1 integration challenge.” Therefore, this article highlights formative joint displays as a mixing strategy to signpost explicit integration points in a mixed methods research design. Specifically, we present a practical moniker of Five Formative Figures to encapsulate a framework for using formative joint displays at each stage of the design. We situate these formative joint displays in fully integrated mixed methods designs, mixing across all phases of the research process. This article draws from a 4-stage, fully integrated study on the organization of and language use in transfer student webpages on institutional websites, highlighting how the methods are applicable beyond the original context. We provide example displays for the planning/research questions, data collection, sampling, analysis, and inference stages of the study. Although the moniker suggests using five joint displays, formative joint displays could be used several times to connect different aspects of the design and to form tightly integrated meta-inferences. This work demonstrates the capacity of formative joint displays to ensure mixing in the design formulation and to connect inferences across strands in a single design.