Similarities and Differences

The literature on mixed and multi-method research shares many core precepts with the literature on interdisciplinarity:

• An appreciation that communities of scholars are often suspicious of the methods employed by others.

• An appreciation that methods are embedded in broader "perspectives" or "paradigms"

• A broadly similar philosophical approach can be seen in the MMR literature (albeit often with different terminology) to that identified in Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity

Yet there are also some important differences:

• • The MMR literature stresses the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods, and thus downplays the differences among methods of each type

  • The MMR literature downplays some elements of what we have called disciplinary perspective, especially the strong link between theory and method.

See Rick Szostak, “Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Multimethod and Mixed Method Research,” Oxford Handbook of Multimethod and Mixed Method Research (Sharlene Hesse-Bulber and R. Burke Johnson eds.), 2015, Ch.8, pp. 128-43.