Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods – Richness of Details and Hypothesis Testing at the Same Time

Which research approach, qualitative or quantitative, suits your project better? Despite inherent differences in the methodologies, you may find it possible and beneficial to complement, combine, or mix quantitative analysis with qualitative data and vice versa. In this session, I will compare the benefits and challenges of each setting in answering research questions of my PhD project and will explain the synergies in combination of the methods. First, a pure qualitative method approach that was used in my two initial publications will be presented, and then we discuss how mixed method proved to be helpful in taking the research a step further. Below topics will be covered in the presentation:

1. Grounded theory building: Defining the research questions, data collection process, analysis and narrative writing, and publishing the research
2. Mixture of multiple case research and survey methods: Motivations for and benefits of concurrent  theory development and testing, strategies and challenges in the data collection and analysis processes