Mixed Methods Worksheets

Mixed Methods Worksheets are designed to help you plan, organize, and integrate both qualitative and quantitative components of your mixed methods research. Based on Dr. John W. Creswell’s work on mixed methods, these worksheets provide guidance for designing rigorous mixed methods studies.

Mixed Methods Worksheets …

• help you to reflect on the main aspects of your mixed methods study
• allow you to access your qualitative, quantitative, and joint display outputs and results
• support you in integrating findings across qualitative and quantitative methods and developing meta-inferences.

Creating a New Mixed Methods Worksheet

To create a new Mixed Methods Worksheet:

1. Open the QTT workspace via Analysis > QTT: Questions - Themes - Theoriesin MAXQDA’s main menu.
2. Click New Worksheetin the QTT window.
3. On the landing page that appears, click on the Create Worksheetbutton in the Mixed Methods Worksheet tile.

The worksheet will be created and opened with a sidebar panel expanded on the left side, ready for you to enter information about your worksheet.

The Worksheet Sidebar

When you create a new Mixed Methods Worksheet, a sidebar automatically appears on the left side of the worksheet. This sidebar allows you to reflect on key aspects of your mixed methods study and can be collapsed or expanded as needed.

The first field in the sidebar contains the name of the worksheet (in bold). You can adjust it according to your needs to distinguish between different worksheets.

Creswell’s 14 Steps for Mixed Methods Research

The sidebar contains several text fields, allowing you to reflect on and document each point. The text fields are based on the work of Dr. John W. Creswell. The planning and reflection section of your worksheet is structured around 14 foundational “Steps in Designing a Good Mixed Methods Project”:

Planning & Reflecting Your Mixed Methods Study

Considering Creswell’s 14 steps and typical reporting requirements for mixed methods studies, MAXQDA’s Mixed Methods Worksheet contains the following text fields for planning and reflecting on your study:

Draft Title of Mixed Methods Study

Enter your draft title for your study. The title should signal that your study uses mixed methods by including terms like “mixed methods,” or by indicating both quantitative and qualitative elements. The title may be refined during the analysis process as you gain more insights.

Purpose of Study

Here you should name the overall intent of the study. It’s always a good idea to include one of the words “aim,” “goal,” “objective,” “purpose,” or “intent,” in your purpose statement to indicate that this is the “central controlling idea” of your study (Creswell & Creswell, 2023, Chapter 6).

Research Questions (General, Qualitative, Quantitative, Mixed Methods)

Formulate separate questions for each component of your study: a qualitative question (focused on the central phenomenon), a quantitative question (focused on variables and relationships), and a mixed methods question (focused on your integration). You may also want to add a general overall question for your study that is formulated in a broader way and focuses on the phenomenon under study.

Reason for Using Mixed Methods

You can use this field to articulate the specific rationale for your choice to conduct a mixed methods study. It’s good practice, to aim for precision beyond general statements like “broader understanding” and “deeper insights.” Instead, you can specify your justification in more detail, for example:

• Development of a quantitative instrument based on qualitative preliminary studies
• Validation or triangulation of results from both methodological strands
• In-depth explanation of quantitative findings through qualitative analyses
• Exploration of a phenomenon for subsequent quantitative verification
• Generalization of qualitative insights through quantitative methods

Mixed Methods Design

Identify and label your mixed methods design. Creswell and Plano Clark (2018) distinguish between three core and complex designs:

Core Designs:

• Convergent Design – Collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously, then merge or compare the results to gain a more complete and accurate understanding than either dataset alone could provide.
• Explanatory Sequential Design – Start with quantitative data collection and analysis, then use those results to plan a qualitative follow-up phase that explains unexpected or significant quantitative findings.
• Exploratory Sequential Design – Begin with qualitative exploration to understand a phenomenon or context, then use those findings to develop instruments, interventions, or variables that are tested in a subsequent quantitative phase.

Complex Design Example (there are more):

• Mixed Methods Intervention Design – Embed qualitative and quantitative data within a larger intervention or experimental trial, collecting data before (needs assessment), during (process evaluation), and/or after (outcome explanation) the intervention to inform development, implementation, and evaluation.

You can illustrate your design using abbreviations:

• QUAL and QUAN (uppercase for primary/dominant strands)
• qual and quan (lowercase for secondary/supportive strands)
• + for concurrent designs
• → for sequential designs
• ( ) for embedded components within larger processes

Using this notation, a convergent design may be noted as QUAL+QUAN, QUAN+qual, or QUAL+quan – depending on the role of each component.

Qualitative and Quantitative Data Collection and Analysis

Describe both your qualitative and quantitative procedures using rigorous methods appropriate to each approach. For qualitative data, specify your open-ended data sources (e.g., interviews, observations, documents, focus groups), sampling approach (e.g., purposeful, theoretical, convenience), and analysis methods (e.g., coding, theme development, narrative analysis).

For quantitative data, identify your closed-ended data sources (e.g., surveys, experiments, assessments, existing datasets), sampling strategy (e.g., random, stratified, cluster), and analysis methods (e.g., descriptive statistics, inferential tests, multivariate analyses).

Integration Strategies

Specify where and how integration will occur in your study based on your design type. Will you merge results for comparison (convergent), connect quantitative results to qualitative follow-up (explanatory sequential), or build qualitative findings into quantitative instruments (exploratory sequential)? What joint displays, combining qualitative and quantitative data and results, will you create?

John Creswell presented the following three scripts for mixed methods integration statements at the MAXQDA International Conference, 2020, in Berlin, in his keynote address (watch on YouTube):

• Convergent Design: “Integration involved merging the results from the quantitative and qualitative data so that a comparison could be made, and a more complete understanding emerge than what was provided by the quantitative or the qualitative results alone.”
• Explanatory Sequential Design: “Integration involved connecting the results from the initial quantitative phase to help plan and explain the follow up qualitative data collection phase.  This plan would include what questions need to be further probed and what individuals can help best explain the quantitative results.”
• Exploratory Sequential Design: “Integration involved gathering initial qualitative data, analyzing it, and then using the qualitative results to build a new intervention (or measure or instrument) that can be cultural specific that will be tested quantitatively with a large sample.”

Conceptual Framework or Theory Used

Do you have an overarching framework or theory that guides your study and/or helps interpret your findings across your quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods analyses? If so: briefly explain it and indicate where and how it applies within your research process.

Validity Strategies

Describe the specific procedures and strategies you will use to ensure validity in both methodological strands. For quantitative validity, address reliability, internal validity, and external validity (e.g., instrument validation, control of confounding variables, sampling representativeness). For qualitative validity, address credibility, transferability, and dependability (e.g., member checking, thick description, audit trails). For integration validity, specify how you will ensure quality at the point of integration—for example, through comparison of convergent findings, explanation of divergent results, or transparent documentation of integration decisions.

You can continuously revise, refine, and optimize the text fields throughout your research process.

Managing Sections

The tab bar with section names is interactive:

• Click on a tab to switch to that section.
• Drag and drop a section tab with the mouse to adjust the order of sections.
• To remove a section from the worksheet, right-click on the tab name and select the corresponding option.
• To add a removed section back, click the +Add Section button that appears when not all available sections are displayed as tabs. Please note that each section can exist only once per worksheet.

Adding Elements to Your Worksheet

Once your Mixed Methods Worksheet is created, you can begin adding elements such as memos, visualizations, joint displays, and more to each section. For detailed instructions on how to add elements to your worksheet, see Working with Worksheets.

Managing Multiple Worksheets

You can create multiple QTT worksheets in a single project. To switch between worksheets, click My Worksheets in the menu bar of the QTT window. The name of the currently selected worksheet is always visible in the title bar at the top of the QTT window.

To delete a worksheet, click on the Delete Worksheet icon in the menu bar of the QTT window.