Broken Telephone: The long and Winding Road from Encoding to Decoding in Mixed Methods Research

It is not uncommon for engineering education researchers who value quantitative analyses to conduct large-scale surveys as validation measures for smaller scale qualitative studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine a limitation of this logic. We adopt Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication as a conceptual framework to investigate the mismatch between five engineering career paths we identified through a small, qualitative study and 982 Canadian engineering graduates’ self-identification with those paths on a larger scale national survey. By examining the differences between our encoding of survey items and respondents' self-identified decoding of those items, our paper makes two significant contributions to the engineering education literature, one methodological and one structural. First, our findings raise methodological questions about the widespread use of large-scale surveys as validation measures for small-scale qualitative studies, and second, our critical analysis illustrates internal heterogeneity within senior executive career tracks, enabling us to supplement existing explanations for occupational inequity in the profession.