Used ethnography and experience-sampling methods to study the relations between home activities and school achievement in a sample of low-income Latino immigrant families and their 10-11 year-old children at risk for low school achievement. Both ethnography and experience-sampling methods (ESMs) are effective for assessing children’s home activities. The authors combined them to examine home activities that were school-like, complementary to school, or unrelated to school.

Practical guide to study design with good attention to taxonomy of research approaches by purpose and sampling issues.

Discusses issues of design, sampling, and analysis in mixed methods research. Offers a model for conceptualizing a fully integrated design. Proposes and illustrates strategies for managing and dynamically integrating the qual and quant data to allow for efficient and multi-directional analysis. It is increasingly desirable to use multiple methods in research, but questions arise as to how best to design and analyze the data generated by mixed methods projects.

How the salience of research findings can be enhanced by combining survey and ethnographic methods to draw insight from anomalous cases. Using examples from a research project examining the influence of religion on childbearing preferences in Nepal, the author illustrates how survey data can facilitate the selection of ethnographic informants and how semistructured interviews with these deviant cases leads to improved theory, measures, and methods.

Presents a two-dimensional model (time orientation—concurrent vs. sequential and the relationship between the qualitative and quantitative samples—identical, nested, multilevel, and parallel) for classifying mixed methods studies sampling designs. Presents and discusses findings from the distribution of 121 studies into the model and the relative appropriateness of the employed strategy.

A concise description of key steps in the mixed research process. The authors further map this process onto issues/controversies in the use of mixed methods research and the challenges mixed methods researchers face.

!NEEDS BETTER SUMMARY! Compares observer to cultural member view of roles in care-taking

Offers a validation framework to guide thinking about validation in mixed methods work. An orientation from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives is used to set the foundation for discussing and thinking about validation issues. To justify the use of this framework, the authors discuss traditional terminology and vailidity criteria for quantitative and qualitative research, as well as present recently recently published validity terminology for mixed methods research.

Written a long-time authority on focus group, presents a brief history of focus group application up to, and including, information on the variety of current uses across many disciplines. Great section on the uses of focus groups in combination with other methods with a full compare/contrast discussion. Finally, goes into the specifics on ‘how to’ plan and conduct effective group data collection.

Encourages a focus on the research question as a guide to deciding on methods to apply in a particular study and comfort in cross the boundaries between pure interpretations of particular paradigmatic characteristics. Describes the nature and limitation of various mono-methods. Suggests that incorporating a pragmatic approach with a variety of appropriate methods helps gain a broader and more comprehensive perspective on the research question.