ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses why contextualizing is important in comparative and international education research and how a reflexive approach to mixed methods research (MMR) designs and methods can be useful to contextualize. It summarizes common MMR designs and considers how designs and methods might be adapted to research complex educational issues within dynamic contexts. Drawing on sociocultural and critical realist perspectives, it discusses educational problems, systems, and actors as relationally emergent, spatially heterogeneous, and temporally constituted within social, political, and economic spheres of society. Example studies are discussed to illustrate how designs and methods can allow for relational, spatial, and temporal analyses. The chapter concludes with two case studies that show how researchers’ reflexivity prompted the adaptation of the design and the methods to better contextualize the knowledge produced.
