The Practice of Multi-Method Research: Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Can interviews or a focus group improve the causal inferences drawn from experiments? Can quantitative text analysis help develop workflows as a qualitative scholar? Can we learn from a single case in a way that helps us with a statistical model? There is much to learn from the careful use of all these methodological combinations. The Practice of Multi-Method Research is aimed at practical researchers: from undergraduates preparing for an honors thesis, to graduate students designing a dissertation, through to seasoned scholars considering a new approach for their next set of studies. It offers a hands-on, practical guide to combining research across various methodological traditions: qualitative, machine learning, and quantitative approaches to concepts and measurement, adding quantitative and data-science components to process-tracing designs and to qualitative case studies in general, how qualitative research can strengthen regression-type designs, and how to mix qualitative elements with experiments. .

J. Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University where she studies representation, democratic crisis, and multi-method research design. Seawright has written about party-system collapse and democratic crisis in Peru and Venezuela; about the participatory agendas of wealthy people and of billionaires in the US; and about case selection and other topics in multi-method research design. Seawright won the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award of the APSA's Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section in 2018, and is the author of Multi-Method Social Science: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Tools (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Kendra L. Koivu was Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico where she studied organized crime, narcotics trafficking, early twentieth century Eurasian politics, statebuilding, political economy, fs/QCA, counterfactual analysis, case selection procedures, and mixed methods research. The award for best paper from the APSA's Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section is named in her memory.