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For a few decades now, mixed (qualitative and quantitative) and multimethod research (methods of the same tradition) has become fashionable. Beyond a period of developing design terminologies and discussing epistemological backgrounds, the community is now paying more and more attention to practical issues and a greater variety of methodological combinations. Arguably, there are different ways of „mixing” different research methods in mixed methods or multimethod research. The mixing can occur at different stages of the research process like sampling, data collection, data analysis, and interpretation. This implies that different approaches and data can be integrated at various levels or stages and strategies or data can stem from the same (multimethod) or different (mixed methods) research traditions.
One of the most important problems of mixed methods and multimethod research is how to integrate different approaches and their results to generate “meta-inferences” (Teddlie/Tashakkori 2009: 300). Some solutions for dealing with this “integration challenge“ (Freshwater/Fetters 2015; Bryman 2007) are broadly discussed in handbooks (Cresswell/Plano Clark 2011; Tashakkori/Teddlie 2010), but in practical research applications specific difficulties arise which are not covered by existing methods literature.
In this session, we invite presentations on different research designs in mixed and multimethod research and their purposes. We encourage a critical reflection on strengths, weaknesses, and practical problems of the “mixing” and the solution thereof. Presentations that combine survey research or survey data with qualitative methods are specifically welcome. Furthermore, they can focus on various types of sampling, data collection methods, data, and analytical strategies, e.g. verbal and visual data, big data, surveys, experiments, ethnography, qualitative and/or quantitative observations, network or discourse analysis, text mining, content analysis and so on.
We aim to stipulate a discussion on types of research designs and combinations of different data types in a thoughtful and innovative way. We encourage critical and reflective presentations of research practices in mixed and multimethod research (instead of mere presentations of what has been done or two loosely linked studies) to advance understanding and practice of mixed and multimethod research.