It is hardly new, but there is increasing attention to integration in mixed methods research. In particular, integration has proved to be an especially difficult issue for what are known as "convergent" designs, where the qualitative and quantitative strands in the project do not come together until relatively late in the analysis phase.

Despite the continual calls for careful integration from the core researchers in the field, it appears that much of what gets published shows a low level of integration at best.

Thank you for highlighting the challenges and observations regarding integration in mixed methods research. It's interesting to note that despite the emphasis on careful integration by core researchers, there still seems to be a low level of integration in much of the published work.

Building upon your insights, I have a question:

What do you think are the main reasons behind the low level of integration observed in published mixed methods research? Are there any specific factors, such as methodological barriers or practical constraints, that contribute to this issue?

Mayada Nageeb Al-Maktary You have asked a very interesting and important question, and I wish I had a good answer. My best guess is that too many researchers simply assume that using more methods makes their research better, and having heard of mixed methods, they use that as a label that will make their research seem like it is highly desirable. Hopefully, a newer generation of more thoroughly trained mixed methods researchers will have a better understanding of what it takes to do high quality work in this field.

David Morgan

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. It's fascinating to consider how researchers might sometimes use mixed methods as a way to enhance the appeal of their research without fully grasping its intricacies. In light of this, what do you suggest could be done to enhance the training and knowledge of mixed methods among researchers, enabling them to produce high-quality work in this field?

I think people who get actual training in mixed methods will do just fine. In my opinion, it is people who are claiming to do mixed methods without proper training who are the problem. I wrote about this in my article:

Article Who Is on the Bandwagon? Core and Periphery in Mixed Methods Research

In it, I analyzed a great many articles and found of that particularly low levels of integration occurred in studies that used the equivalent of "convergent" designs. In that approach the qualitative and quantitative data are collected separately and then integrated during the analysis or discussion. Except that many of the studies that collected the data separately failed to ever bring the results together. Instead, they did little more than collect additional data without ever integrating it.

What this implies for future directions for the field is that we need to pay more attention to the potential weaknesses in convergent designs, and provide more concrete advice about how to accomplish integration in that case (I provide several suggestions in that regard in this article). A good starting point would be to advocate more use of "joint displays" in articles, because they give an explicit account of the procedures that were followed for integration.

David L Morgan

Thank you very much for sharing your insights and experiences on the topic of mixed methods research.