This paper reports on a three years' research project looking at teachers’ attitudes towards including children with special educational needs in regular schools in Egypt. The paper focuses on using a mixed-method design to explore this phenomenon. The purpose is not to present findings (except for some pilot results), but to discuss how quantitative and qualitative evidence can be combined in education research to better inform policy-making and practice. An extensive critical review of literature regarding teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education showed that much of that research has used traditional quantitative methodologies to ascertain the extent to which participants accept or reject the general concept of integration/inclusion as related to a range of disabling conditions, without much effort directed at uncovering the factors that may underlie certain attitudes (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002). Such methodologies do not address the complexity of attitudes, inclusion and SEN. It has been argued that attitudes, inclusion and SEN are complex and context-based phenomena and if viewed as such we need research frameworks that can deal with this complexity. To transcend the sterile dichotomy quantitative-qualitative, it has been proposed that mixed-method research designs can illuminate the researched phenomenon more accurately. Therefore, the current study used a mixed-method design that combines both qualitative and quantitative methods (Creswell, 2003). This is based on a premise that combining quantitative and qualitative methods in a single study can help elucidate various aspects of the phenomenon under investigation, providing a more holistic understanding of it, and resulting in better-informed education policies. Obviously, there are different measures of attitudes that can be used but the goal of measurement should not be to come with a single “best” attitude measure, but rather to measure attitudes in all their complexity and all their manifestations. The various techniques for measuring attitudes offer useful handles for empirical study. Quantitative data may produce valuable research evidence for those developing teacher training programs. Additionally, qualitative data may provide rich descriptive accounts of teachers' lived experiences of inclusion which, among other things, would help interpret the quantitative results or even identify new research questions not previously considered. In this paper, I will explain how quantitative and qualitative methods have been used in investigating teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion.

Multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data were employed to strengthen the research design and add depth-and-breadth to the research findings. Data was collected using multiple sources of data, including questionnaires, interviews, and field notes to map the field and to enable triangulation of the data. The questionnaire sample consisted of 285 teachers. In the qualitative strand in-depth interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of twelve teachers in the panel.

The study argued that choosing a data collection method should be based on the complexity of the phenomenon under investigation, purpose of research, research context, and researcher’s skills. This study will provide important feedback for understanding inclusion policy in Egypt and for improving future planning and implementation. Finally, the study will have wider applications in other educational contexts and will add to the international literature on the effects of educational reform on teachers, attitudes measurement and using mixed-methods research designs in educational research in general.