ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Leadership in Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1666931
This article is part of the Research TopicEducational Leadership and Sustainable DevelopmentView all 19 articles
Paradigm of Dialectical Pluralism for In-depth Understanding: Insights from Investigating Ethical Leadership in Schools by Convergent Mixed Methods Research
Provisionally accepted
- 1Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal
- 2Kathmandu University School of Education, Patan, Nepal
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This article shows how the paradigm of dialectical pluralism can be applied for a deeper understanding of a research issue by abstracting insights from post-positivist and constructivist paradigms and bringing their interaction for additional meaning-making. As an example, a mixed methods study on ethical leadership is presented. In the study, the qualitative and quantitative strands had similar findings that ethical leadership was rooted in schools in the form of care, justice, and critique. However, contradictions were observed to their extent, which were answered by dialoguing between the strands, and the process of dialogue generated additional meaning. This article contributes to the mixed methods research in education by presenting evidence that dialectical pluralism provides additional meaning in the process of integrating the strands.
Keywords: research paradigm, Paradigms of Mixed Methods Research, Dialectical Pluralism, Ethical Leadership, ethics of care, Ethics of justice, Convergent Parallel Mixed Methods Research, Technical and Vocation Education and Training (TVET) Schools
Received: 16 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bhattarai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Prakash C. Bhattarai, prakash@kusoed.edu.np
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