Mixed methods in collaborative inquiry

Community-campus partnerships for research provide critical avenues for engaged scholarship. Increasingly in such partnerships, campus faculty and community partners work in a collaborative manner to identify issues of mutual concern or interest, design interventions, assess impacts, disseminate research fi ndings, and decide on appropriate courses of action given the research fi ndings. Moreover, a progressively diverse array of methods has been deployed within these research partnerships in order to gain a better understanding of the issues and concerns under study. In recent decades, the literature on collaborative approaches to research and mixed methods has grown by leaps and bounds. In this chapter, we begin by discussing what collaborative research (also known as collaborative inquiry) and mixed methods are and how they are related. We argue that the simultaneous growth of mixed methods and collaborative research is anything but coincidental. Rather, we believe that these two areas have coevolved in response to limits inherent in past approaches to social research and social problem solving. Second, we provide a brief overview of different ways of mixing methods in collaborative research. Finally, we discuss future directions for developing and applying mixed methods in the context of collaborative inquiry.