Research Design, as Independent of Methods

neighbourhood, or talk to people about it. All rational actors putting a substantial
personal investment in their own house would naturally and without any
consideration of paradigms, epistemology, identity or mixed methods, use all and any
convenient data to help make up their mind. We will believe that the house is real
even though external to us, and that it remains the same even when we approach it
from different ends of the street. Thus, we would not start with ‘isms’. We would not
refuse to visit the house, or talk to the neighbours about it, because we were
‘quantitative’ researchers and did not believe that observation or narratives were
valid or reliable enough for our purposes. We would not refuse to consider the
interest rate for the loan, or the size of the monthly repayments, because we were
‘qualitative’ researchers and did not believe that numbers could do justice to the
social world. And we would naturally, even unconsciously, synthesise the various
forms of data to reach a verdict. I do not mean to say that such real-life decisions are
easy, but that the difficulties do not stem from paradigms and epistemology, but from
weighing up factors like cost, convenience, luxury, safety etc. People would use the
same naturally mixed approach when making arrangements for the safety of their
children or loved ones, and for any information-based task about which they really
cared. For important matters, we behave sensibly, eclectically, critically, sceptically,
but always with that final leap of faith because research, however carefully
conducted, does not provide the action - it only informs the action. We collect all and
any evidence available to us as time and resources allow, and then synthesise it
naturally, without consideration of mixing methods as such.

Thus, I can envisage only two situations in which a social science researcher would
not similarly use ‘mixed methods’ in their work. Perhaps they do not care about the
results, and are simply pretending to do research (and wasting peoples’ time and
money in the process). This may be a common phenomenon in reality. Or their
research question is peculiarly specific, entailing only one method. However, the
existence of this second situation, analogous to using only one tool from a larger
toolbox, is not any kind of argument for separate paradigms of the two q-words and
mixed methods. Mixed methods, in the sense of having a variety of tools in the
toolbox and using them as appropriate, is the only sensible way to approach research.
Thus, a central premise of mixed methods is that ‘the use of quantitative and
qualitative approaches in combination provides a better understanding of research

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