Searching for qualitatively driven mixed methods research: a citation analysis

Recent work in mixed methods research has called for more emphasis on qualitatively driven mixed methods. We examined the prevalence of qualitatively driven mixed methods through the 20-year history of a key article, “Practical Strategies for Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods” (Morgan in Qual Health Res 8:362–376, 1998). We focused on this article because it has become a widely recognized resource in mixed methods research, and because it gave equal attention to both quantitatively and qualitatively driven mixed methods research. To investigate the development of the mixed methods field since this early article, we analyzed the content of over 200 empirical studies from a variety of disciplines that cited this target article, in order to determine both the extent of qualitatively driven mixed methods research designs and the changes over time in the use of these research designs. A systematic coding of the research designs used in the citing studies showed that the majority of these citations were from studies that used quantitatively rather than qualitatively driven mixed methods, and that this pattern was the same for citing articles between an earlier and later period in time. We conclude by considering some of the reasons why qualitatively driven studies remain relatively rare within the field of mixed methods.