Draws on a content analysis of methods and design from 232 articles using combined methods. Examine and discusses the rationales provide for employing mixed-methods and whether they correspond to actual practice.

The spatial humanities constitute a rapidly developing research field that has the potential to create a step-change in the ways in which the humanities deal with geography and geographical information. As yet, however, research in the spatial humanities is only just beginning to deliver the applied contributions to knowledge that will prove its significance. Demonstrating the potential of innovations in technical fields is, almost always, a lengthy process, as it takes time to create the required datasets and to design and implement appropriate techniques for engaging with the information those datasets contain. Beyond this, there is the need to define appropriate research questions and to set parameters for interpreting findings, both of which can involve prolonged discussion and debate. The spatial humanities are still in early phases of this process. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to showcase a set of exemplary studies and research projects that not only demonstrate the field’s potential to contribute to knowledge across a range of humanities disciplines, but also to suggest pathways for future research. Our ambition is both to demonstrate how the application of exploratory techniques in the spatial humanities offers new insights about the geographies embedded in a diverse range of texts (including letters, works of literature, and official reports) and, at the same time, to encourage other scholars to integrate these techniques in their research.

Research was initiated in 2008 with the objective of developing social indicators for well-being of fishing communities. Initial steps included development and testing indicators for the concepts of dependence, gentrification, vulnerability, and resiliency in relation to nine fishing communities on the Texas Gulf Coast. Procedurally, a mixed methods design was employed, using quantitative analyses of large secondary data sets to rank coastal communities based on socioeconomic measures, and independently employing qualitative approaches to provide rankings of the nine communities. The two qualitative approaches, an informed expert description of the communities, and cognitive-based interviews in the same communities each produced rankings almost identical with each other and with the quantitative rankings. Three types of analyses yielded similar results, indicating that cognitive ethnography can be a valuable tool in the description of community resilience, vulnerability, and well-being.

Community is an ambiguous concept, and the meanings of community as a subject of study have received a great deal of attention across various disciplines. This paper discusses how children's diverse meanings of community shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and physical environments of their everyday lives. To explore these meanings I combine principles of child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization into a research methodology. I demonstrate that this integration displays the transformative nature of qualitative analysis and visualization to support interpretive analysis of various forms of qualitative and spatial data together, and offers us a hybrid methodological framework for gaining insights into the diverse meanings of community held by the children. The main case study is drawn from a multi-year research collaboration called the Children's Urban Geography (ChUG), in which I participated along with children who lived in a relatively poor but emerging multi-cultural Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, NY.

Discusses mixed methods sampling techniques in creative and effective ways.

The experiences of settlement in a new country (e.g., securing housing and employment, language barriers) pose numerous challenges for recent immigrants that can impede their health and well-being. Lack of social support upon arrival and during settlement may help to explain why immigrant mental health status declines over time. While most urban centers in Canada offer some settlement services, little is known about how the availability of social supports, and the health statuses of recent immigrants, varies by city size. The objective of this mixed-methods study was to examine the relationship between self-perceived mental health (SPMH), social support availability, and urban center size, for recent immigrants to Canada. The quantitative component involved analysis of 2009–2010 Canadian Community Health Survey data, selecting for only recent immigrants and for those living in either large or small urban centers. The qualitative component involved in-depth interviews with managers of settlement service organizations located in three large and three small urban centers in Canada. The quantitative analysis revealed that social support availability is positively associated with higher SPMH status, and is higher in small urban centers. In support of these findings, our interviews revealed that settlement service organizations operating in small urban centers offer more intensive social supports; interviewees attributed this difference to personal relationships in small cities, and the ease with which they can connect to other agencies to provide clients with necessary supports. Logistic regression analysis revealed, however, that recent immigrants in small urban centers are twice as likely to report low SPMH compared to those living in large urban centers. Thus, while the scope and nature of settlements services appears to vary by city size in Canada, more research is needed to understand what effect settlement services have on the health status of recent immigrants to Canada, especially in smaller urban centers.

A review of 31 empirical and 18 substantive papers by qualitative social geographers mainly using in-depth interviews reveals little explicit reference to the principle(s) adopted to enhance ‘rigour’ and to ensure meaningful inference. Given the modest explicit discussion of evaluative criteria in these papers, a scheme from evaluation research itself is critically reviewed. A set of evaluation questions derived from this review and their application to an empirical piece of qualitative work frame an argument for a general set of criteria rather than rigid rules for assessing qualitative work. Such criteria can serve as anchor points for qualitative evaluation.

A mixed method approach was adopted to study the experiences of lone fathers, using a classic triangulation approach of interview and questionnaire data. This study utilised an empirical realist framework of scientific inquiry, with the ‘soft’ individual interview data seen as an adjunct to the ‘hard’ aggregate quantitative methods. A review of this study found that the interviews worked well as a pilot study in a classic mixed methods framework. The questionnaires provided a range of information about the characteristics of this group of lone fathers, but it was the interviews which provided astonishing depth on the causes of marital breakdown and post-marital conflict, and on the discourses and other structures which sustain social processes. In this study, the interview techniques could have been used differently, in a different framework of analysis (that of critical rather than empirical realism) without the support of other mixed methods.

The use of qualitative data analysis software has been increasing in recent years. A number of qualitative researchers have raised questions concerning the effect of such software in the research process. Fears have been expressed that the use of the computer for qualitative analysis may interfere with the relationship between the researcher and the research process itself by distancing the researcher from both the data and the respondent. Others have suggested that the use of a quantitative tool, the computer, would lead to data dredging, quantification of results, and loss of the "art" of qualitative analysis. In this study of 12 qualitative researchers, including both faculty members and graduate students, we have found that these fears are exaggerated. Users of qualitative data analysis software in most cases use the computer as an organizational, time-saving tool and take special care to maintain close relationships with both the data and the respondents. It is an open question, however, whether or not the amount of time and effort saved by the computer enhance research creativity. The research findings are mixed in this area. At issue is the distinction between creativity and productivity when computer methods are used. Computer packages targeted at qualitative and mixed methods research data are readily available and the methodology sections of research articles indicate that they are being utilised by some health researchers. The purpose of this article is to draw together concerns which have been expressed by researchers and critics and to place these within the perspective of 'framing' (MacLachlan & Reid, 1994). Here, the focus becomes the frame that these computer programs impose on qualitative data. Inevitably, all data sets are disturbed by the techniques of collection and the conceptual and theoretical frames imposed, but computer framing not only distorts physically but also imposes an often minimally acknowledged frame constructed by the metaphors and implicit ideology of the program. This frame is in opposition to most of the recent changes in qualitative data interpretation, which have emphasized context, thick description and exposure of the minimally disturbed voices of participants.

How do you decide whether to use a qualitative or a quantitative approach for the design of a research study? How do you write up the results of a study for a scholarly journal article or dissertation? This book addresses these issues by providing a guide to major design decisions, such as deciding a paradigm, stating a purpose for the study, identifying the research questions and hypotheses, using theory, and defining and stating the significance of the study. Research Design is aimed at upper division to graduate level research methods courses that are taught to prepare students to plan and write up independent research studies. In the past two decades, research approaches have multiplied to a point at which investigators or inquirers have many choices. For those designing a proposal or plan, I recommend that a general framework be adopted to provide guidance about all facets of the study, from assessing the general philosophical ideas behind the inquiry to the detailed data collection and analysis procedures. Using an extant framework also allows researchers to lodge their plans in ideas well grounded in the literature and recognized by audiences (e.g., faculty committees) that read and support proposals for research. What frameworks exist for designing a proposal? Although different types and terms abound In the literature, I will focus on three: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches. 'The first has been available to the social and human scientist for years, the second has emerged primarily during the last three or four decades, and the last is new and still developing in form and substance. This chapter introduces the reader to the three approaches to research. I suggest that to understand them, the proposal developer needs to consider three framework elements: philosophical assumptions about what constitutes knowledge claims; general procedures of research called strategies of inquhy and detailed procedures of data collection, analysis, and writing. called methods. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches frame each of these elements differently, and these defiances are identified and discussed in this chapter. 'Then typical scenarios that combine the three elements are advanced, followed by the reasons why one would choose one approach over another in designing a study. 'This discussion will not be a philosophical treatise on the nature of knowledge, but it will provide a practical grounding in some of the philosophical ideas behind research.