Research Methods: Mixed Methods

Mixed methods research is a field of inquiry that uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer research questions within a single study. The application of mixed methods research in social sciences can be traced at least to the beginning of the 20th century. The research is considered “mixed” because it uses quantitative and qualitative approaches in one or several of the following ways: it combines different types of research questions, data collection procedures, data, analytical approaches, or conclusions. One of the main advantages of mixed methods research is its ability to unite exploratory and confirmation research—in other words, it allows generating and testing a theory in the same study.

For over half a century, mixed methods research was considered legitimate in social sciences. However, during the 1970s to 1990s, the so-called paradigm wars broke out as a result of the ascendance of constructivism and the emergence of two distinct research subcultures associated with quantitative and qualitative paradigms. The wars were based on the incompatibility thesis, which posits that the assumptions of qualitative and quantitative paradigms are incompatible because they stem from different epis-temological, ontological, and axiological views about the nature and purpose of research.

As a result of the paradigm wars, three major schools of thought emerged, namely purists, situationalists, and pragmatists. Purists and pragmatists lie on the opposite ends of the spectrum of views, with situationalists being somewhere in the middle. Purists fully support the incompatibility thesis and believe that quantitative and qualitative methods cannot and should not be mixed. They often picture qualitative and quantitative researchers as being in competition with each other. Situationalists also advocate mono-method studies, but they view qualitative and quantitative methods as complementary, arguing that both methods have value and some research questions lead to the use of qualitative methods while others are better suited to quantitative exploration. Pragmatists consider the attempts to contrast qualitative and quantitative methods as a false dichotomy. Neither do they agree that qualitative research always uses inductive reasoning and quantitative necessarily follows the hypothetic-deductive route.

Pragmatists are in favor of integrating mixed methods within a single study—they argue that both quantitative and qualitative methods have their strengths and weaknesses. The integration can take various forms such as contrasting, comparing, combining, or building one type of conclusion on the other. One of the main manifestations of pragmatism is the notion that research questions should be the central issue in any investigation and should drive the choice of methods. Methods are viewed as tools for the answering of research questions and not vice versa.

Pragmatists point out that researchers involved in the paradigm wars have tended to overemphasize the differences between the qualitative and quantitative approaches while failing to sufficiently take into account the similarities between them. For example, data reduction is important in both quantitative and qualitative studies; most researchers attempt to eliminate various biases and other sources of invalidity; theory plays an important part in both paradigms.

Some scholars argue that at the fundamental level, all research is ultimately qualitative because it depends [Page 1363]on judgment, and meaning comes from the interpretation of the data, whether qualitative or quantitative, rather than depend on the type of data. Pragmatic researchers advocate deemphasizing the terms quantitative and qualitative research and suggest that research should instead be subdivided into exploratory and confirmatory methods. This would allow using different methods under the same framework.

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