Joint Research Design: Combining Multiple Techniques
Joint Research Design with Several Techniques: Background
The presence of the concurrent use of various techniques of data collection or production must be taken into account.
- Booth’s studies in the life and work of people in London, generated from reports of school visits, participant observation, and analysis of census and other records.
- The study of Middletown by Lynd presents a research model and how the commitment to research results in political compromise. Families were counted and classified; questionnaires and interviews were applied; and statistics from secondary sources (censuses of strikes, associations, newspaper circulation, etc.) were analyzed.
- The Unemployed of Marienthal, a community study conducted near Vienna, used an amazing variety and articulation of different methods and techniques, including interviews, essays, gymnastics classes, and dressmaking.
- Lazarsfeld and his colleagues collected and analyzed secondary quantitative data (census, elections, police reports), made stops of passersby in the street, examined the lending library, and conducted surveys on various sectors of the population. A central goal of this study was the articulation of quantitative relevance to qualitative improvement, addressing the problem of unemployment, starting from the limitations and capabilities of each methodological perspective.
- In Stouffer’s American Soldier, we see the advent of Likert and Guttman scales and the application of experimental design in the study of social phenomena. All approaches that can be described as qualitative in this work have a subsidiary role to the survey and self-administered questionnaires.
- Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality, a classic study, arises out of a psychoanalytic social tradition of Central Europe and the empirical and methodological American tradition of using questionnaires, tests, and joint scales. The research itself was designed to include in-depth interviews and tests.
The Complexity of Joint Social Objects
Consider the social phenomenon of immigrant families from the same origin settling in specific areas of a given locality. Initially, one might focus on objectives aimed at determining the volume of the phenomenon. A social worker might question the number of families that have settled, the structure of these families, the characteristics of the dwellings they inhabit, education levels, occupations, etc. However, these objectives fall short with a minimum planning horizon. It would be necessary to expand on the families’ motivations and life plans. If the pragmatic horizon is the integration of this new group of citizens, it will be necessary to include cultural objectives of both the immigrant population and those who previously resided in the host town or area.
The multiplication of objectives of different characteristics in the same social phenomenon should not be regarded as extraordinary. What is proposed here is a reflection on the reasons and forms of articulation in the methodological design of different types of social research techniques on the same project. This joint approach can be reasoned by:
- Articulation in Complementation: The use of these or other techniques can be done simultaneously, recognizing that their results are complementary. The joint is understood as a game where the motion or application of one approach takes into account the position/result of the other approach(es). It should not be considered weak, reducing the combined use to simple techniques, as some type of joint is expected in the final report’s conclusions by the researcher.
- Chained Joint: A process of approaching the object of research that requires several steps, so that the outcome of each step constitutes a starting point for the next.