The three common approaches to conducting research are quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The researcher anticipates the type of data needed to respond to the research question.
The quantitative approach to gathering information focuses on describing a phenomenon across a larger number of participants thereby providing the possibility of summarizing characteristics across groups or relationships.
Qualitative research relies on unstructured and non-numerical data. The data include field notes written by the researcher during the course of his or her observation, interviews and questionnaires, focus groups, participant-observation, audio or video recordings carried out by the researcher in natural settings, documents of various kinds (publicly available or personal, paper-based or electronic records that are already available or elicited by the researcher), and even material artifacts. The use of these data is informed by various methodological or philosophical assumptions, as part of various methods, such as ethnography (of various kinds), discourse analysis (of various kinds), interpretative phenomenological analysis and other phenomenological methods.[1] Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, social work, and educational research.
Multimethodology or multimethod research includes the use of more than one method of data collection or research in a research study or set of related studies. Mixed methods research is more specific in that it includes the mixing of qualitative and quantitative data, methods, methodologies, and/or paradigms in a research study or set of related studies. One could argue that mixed methods research is a special case of multimethod research. Another applicable, but less often used label, for multi or mixed research is methodological pluralism. All of these approaches to professional and academic research emphasize that monomethod research can be improved through the use of multiple data sources, methods, research methodologies, perspectives, standpoints, and paradigms.