The Role of Iteration in Multi-Method Research

Self-consciously “multi-method ” research seems on the rise in many corners of the discipline. Recent political science dissertations, in particular, seem to draw increasingly on some combination of fieldwork, game theory, statistical analysis, qualitative historical-institutional comparisons, ethnography, and other approaches. Why is multi-method work so attractive? One powerful reason may be that multi-method research appears to offer the possibility of triangulating on a given research problem, allowing scholars to leverage the distinctive but complementary strengths of different research methods to make progress on substantively important topics. Thus analysts strive to move between evidence on aggregate correlations and evidence on mechanisms, to combine broad general theory with fine-grained detail from case studies, to motivate a large-N analysis with a few well-chosen cases, or to marry “data set observations ” to “causal process observations ” drawn from focused qualitative research (Collier, Brady and Seawright 2004). 2 The particular ways in which different methods should or can be combined