Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This project drew its inspiration from what was felt to be a growth in the number of investigations combining qualitative and quantitative research. Enthusiasm for and use of multi-strategy research was running ahead of what was known about how it is employed in practice and what its benefits might be. Thus, it was felt at the start of the project that the time was ripe for an examination of multi-strategy research in practice. The project's objectives were to: provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of the field with regard to the integration of qualitative and quantitative research; proffer recommendations with regard to good practice for the integration of qualitative and quantitative research; identify areas or contexts in which the integration of qualitative and quantitative research is not obviously beneficial; explore an area where qualitative and quantitative research co-exist as separate strategies or traditions and analyse the prospects for linking the two sets of findings; explore some of the discursive practices involved in the representation of research which integrates the two approaches.

Main Topics:

The dataset derives from a content analysis of case studies of the integration of qualitative and quantitative research across the social sciences. Whilst it is recognized that journal articles do not by any means encapsulate all possible contexts in which projects reporting multi-strategy research might be found, they are a major form of reporting findings and have the advantage that in the vast majority of cases, the peer review process provides some kind of quality control mechanism. Therefore, to construct the dataset, a content analysis of published journal articles combining qualitative and quantitative research in the following areas was conducted: sociology, social psychology, human, social and cultural geography, management and organisational behaviour, and media and cultural studies. Analysis was restricted to a ten year period, 1994-2003, and a total of 232 articles analysed. The articles were coded according to year of publication, research designs and methods used, whether qualitative/quantitative component was dominant or both methods had equal status, rationales employed for combining both types of method, actual uses of qualitative and quantitative research, country in which the research was conducted and first named author.

No sampling (total universe)

Content analysis