Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Mixing methods
incredibly arrogant and presumptive about our ability
to make a context where it is safe to talk about these
things in like five minutes, ten minutes, whatever it
might be, and that maybe we need to think about
people as complicated, that there is no perfect method,
so there will be some for whom the questionnaire is
a much easier thing to do, is a much easier form of
communication in which to tell complicated difficult
things, and there will be other people for whom
spoken communication is easier. And then if we start
talking about women and children with disabilities,
we enter another whole realm again, so I think about
mixed methods as enabling different kinds of telling.
Catherine McDonald—Institutionalised organisations?
Catherine McDonald used a combination of quantitative and
qualitative methods for her PhD study on the application of neoinstitutional
organisational theory to non-profit organisations in
Queensland. She has subsequently reported on methodological
issues in relation to this study (McDonald, 1997, 1999).
The research was conducted in two stages. Stage one involved
a survey of 500 non-profit services, from which twelve services
with either very high or very low organisational commitment were
identified. Catherine then sought to test each of the propositions of
neo-institutional theory in each of these services. She did this
through semi-structured interviews with the CEO and with one
worker directly involved with clients, and through analysis of
public documents on the goals and financial status of each of the
organisations.
We were particularly interested in Catherine’s rationale for using
mixed methods and the way she combined them in this study.
Why mixed methods?
Catherine: The reason that it went to a mixed-method type
approach was [actually] two reasons. One was
because I was looking at a whole field of organisations,
so one approach could never deal with the
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