Empirical Mixed-Method Study for the Analysis of the Plurilingual Education Policy Implementation

In this empirical section, Sect. 5.1 introduces the foundation of the research project. This includes a short contextualization of this study within the framework of an interdisciplinarity research proposal (Sect. 5.1.1). This is followed by a presentation and illustration of the leading questions, the methodical approaches, and the research design of this project (Sect. 5.1.2). In order to guarantee the correspondence between the methodologies and findings, detailed descriptions of the quantitative and qualitative research methodologies of this mixed-method study are presented within the framework of each sub-study. These refer to an empirical analysis based on a policy document analysis of documents related to the plurilingual education policy (Sect. 5.2), expert interviews with policy-level experts and stakeholders (Sect. 5.3); and a quantitative survey with early childhood practitioners as practice-level agents (Sect. 5.4). Each sub-study is organized into an overview of the research interest, which includes a brief discussion of the guided research questions for each analysis, a description of the methodology, and an analysis of the empirical data as the core of each of these chapters. At the end of each sub-study, the empirical results are synthesized as preliminary results of this research project. Finally, Sect. 5.5 presents the results of the mixed-method study in the form of a triangulation of the findings in the three sub-studies, in order to demonstrate how the different results answer the different research (sub-)questions under study.