Editor's Overview: Research methodologies for coaching and mentoring

Mel Leedham’s paper, entitled ‘The Coaching Scorecard’, presents a mixed-methods study that helps shed light on the issue of evaluation. The study includes a small case study carried out with purchasers of coaching within a large UK corporation and the results are then compared with a much larger number of questionnaire responses from coaching clients from a range of organisations. The advantages of a mixed-methods approach are evident in the study, providing a greater level of reliability than evidence from a case study alone. Peter Jackson’s paper provides a very nice example of the use of coding to interrogate interview data and attempts to provide an answer to how we might describe coaching. After explaining the deficiencies of current coaching definitions, Jackson presents a full account of the iterative coding and analysis process that he carried out during his research in order to arrive at a typology of coaching that could eventually be used to inform future research and evaluation. The compound analysis he describes becomes a research method in itself. Ilona Boniwell’s work on time perspectives synthesises results from a number of studies, again illustrating the robustness of using mixed methods approaches. Borkan (2004) has expounded the virtue of mixed methods studies, confirming that they provide an opportunity for synthesis and provide additional perspectives and insights