International Journal of Social Research Methodology

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June 1989 and beyond: Julia Brannen’s

contribution to mixed methods research

Alan Bryman

To cite this article: Alan Bryman (2014) June 1989 and beyond: Julia Brannen’s contribution to
mixed methods research, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 17:2, 121-131,
DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2014.892653

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International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2014
Vol. 17, No. 2, 121–131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2014.892653

June 1989 and beyond: Julia Brannen’s contribution to mixed

methods research
Alan Bryman*

School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

(Received 6 September 2013; accepted 27 September 2013)

Julia Brannen is very much a pioneer of mixed methods research having organ-
ised one of the first conferences on the subject in June 1989. In this paper, I
assess her contribution to the field of mixed methods research. I examine both
her methodological writings on the principles of doing mixed methods research
and some of her research which derives from the approach. Through this exami-
nation of the two strands of her mixed methods work, I tease out the distinctive-
ness of her approach to the field and the contribution she has made. In so doing,
I address quality issues in mixed methods research, something Julia Brannen
touched on in her early writings, how these might be developed, and how they
relate to her work.
Keywords: mixed methods research; quality issues; Julia Brannen; quantitative
research; qualitative research

June 1989 was a highly significant month for mixed methods research and for me
personally. Some months previously Julia had visited me to discuss her interest in
research that combines quantitative and qualitative research and to sound me out
about a training seminar that she was likely to organise. I had not long published a
book that included a chapter examining the different ways in which quantitative and
qualitative research have been combined in various social science disciplines
(Bryman, 1988) and I recollect that it was this that had prompted her visit.
June 1989 was the month of the training seminar which from memory lasted two
days. The seminar was of considerable significance for mixed methods research and
for those who are interested in its path. It must have been one of the first conferences
that focused exclusively on research combining quantitative and qualitative
approaches. Also, the resulting book provided an important focus for researchers
who were beginning to take an interest in the potential of such an approach. This was
very much the time of the so-called ‘paradigm wars’ which seemed to pitch practitio-
ners of the two approaches against each other, so that a seminar that brought some of
the ‘adversaries’ together and which explicitly posited the possibility of compatibility
was something of a landmark event. Moreover, the title of the resulting book Mixing
Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research is of some significance too as it
foreshadowed what would become the preferred term for the combination of quanti-
tative and qualitative research – mixed methods research. When I searched for the
book on 15 August 2013 in Google Scholar, it had received 832 citations.

*Email: ab302@le.ac.uk

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

122 A. Bryman

For me personally, the seminar was of great significance. It was the first time I
had attended a gathering of people with an interest in research methods. Not only
that, they were interested in the possibilities associated with bringing quantitative
and qualitative research approaches together in research projects. At the time, due to
the previously mentioned paradigm wars, the notion of bringing the two research
traditions together was akin in some quarters to the work of the devil because it
transgressed the epistemological positions in which each was deemed to be located.
I have never been convinced by this argument and have always tended to the view
that research methods can serve different epistemological masters; rather, it is the
way in which they are used that influences their epistemological location. To suggest
that a research method is somehow inherently of a particular epistemological persua-
sion is an essentialist argument with which I have felt always uncomfortable and
which can be demonstrated to be misleading if one examines the uses to which
research methods are put (Platt, 1996). In her Introduction to the book, Julia drew
attention to ‘purist and sectarian tendencies’ that needed to be overcome when fac-
ing the harsh research realities that sociologists and others were facing at that time
(1992a, p. xii) and argued in her overview that in practice, the choice and use of
research methods are influenced by several factors and epistemology is just one of
these (1992b, p. 3). However, the key point is that Julia’s bold bringing together
of researchers with an interest in combining quantitative and qualitative research
was a personal turning point for me in bringing a realisation that although the partic-
ipants had different positions on the viability and the prospects of mixed methods
research, I was not alone in having an interest in these issues and a belief in the
potential of what has become known as mixed methods research.

The 1992 ‘overview’

The overview that has just been referred to was significant in drawing attention to a
host of considerations that were thought to be significant at the time. The most strik-
ing section is probably on ways of combining multiple methods in the research pro-
cess. Here, Julia anticipated several themes that would subsequently become core
issues and preoccupations in the mixed methods literature in later years. First, she
identified the relative importance of each of the two approaches within an overall
research project as an important issue when considering the structure of a mixed
methods project. Second, she considered the time ordering of the two approaches –
whether they are consecutively or simultaneously implemented. This was to become
a significant feature (along with the relative importance of quantitative and qualita-
tive research within a project) of the early typologies of forms of mixed methods
research. They were also the main ingredients of a notation system devised by
Morse (1991) that has become a motif of descriptions of mixed methods research
designs. Third, she identified the stage in the research process that the methods
come into play. This anticipates such issues as whether one is preparatory to the
other and whether they have a role in all stages (e.g. whether one method assumes
greater prominence when writing up the findings). Fourth, there is the issue of the
skills that are present in a research team.
Julia then went on to consider three contexts of the issue of relative importance or
‘pre-eminence’ as she put it. First, there is mixed methods research in which the
quantitative research is the pre-eminent approach. She notes that typically, where the
quantitative approach is pre-eminent, the qualitative component is carried out first,
 International Journal of Social Research Methodology 123

often acting as a preparation for the quantitative work but having little status in its
own right. She felt that qualitative research rarely followed on from quantitative
research but nonetheless cited some possible reasons why it might occur, such as
using qualitative research to follow-up findings from survey. Second, there is research
where the qualitative component has greater prominence than the quantitative. Julia
noted some contexts in which this might occur and one of these – using ‘quantitative
work [to] provide a basis for the sampling of cases and comparison groups’ (1992b,
p. 28) for intensive qualitative study – is one of several recurring themes in the mixed
methods studies in which Julia has subsequently been involved. For example, in Bran-
nen (2004), Julia notes that in two of her studies – the ‘young people, health and fam-
ily life study’ (Brannen, Dodd, Oakley, & Storey, 1994) and the ‘children’s concepts
of care study’ (Brannen, Heptinstall, & Bhopal, 2000) – a self-administered question-
naire was conducted in the first phase and this provided a sampling frame for the sec-
ond phase in which semi-structured interviews were conducted in each case with
children. Essentially, the surveys provided among other things the foundations for the
purposive sampling of interviewees. When considering the third context – where the
two components have equal importance – Julia drew on her study of mothers return-
ing to full-time work following the birth of a first child and its impact on both the
mothers and their children (Brannen & Moss, 1991). Here, the decision to include a
qualitative element was made after the research team had been recruited. The main
thrust of the research was to collect quantitative data through a structured interview
survey, but there was a subsequent decision to include a consideration of how women
construed their experiences. In order to accomplish this, open questions were ‘grafted
on’ to the survey interview schedule (Julia 1992b, p. 30).
As this brief exposition implies, it is difficult not to be struck by the way in
which many of the key issues that have preoccupied writers on mixed methods
research over the following 20 years were foreshadowed in that overview. What was
lacking was the language that has become the stock in trade of mixed methods writ-
ers particularly since the turn of the present century. We see something of a struggle
to express key processes in a period just before the codification and labelling of
mixed methods. This can be discerned in an interesting comment:
… in so far as the use of different research methods is underpinned by different sets of
ideas – it is inappropriate to seek to integrate data sets produced by different methods.
Rather the researcher should seek to relate each set of data to the theory underpinning
it and to see in what ways the data sets complement and contradict each other. (1992b,
p. 31)

Nowadays, integration of quantitative and qualitative data-sets is highly valued by

most mixed methods writers and lack of integration is often regarded as a problem
that needs to be addressed (Bryman, 2007a; O’Cathain, Murphy, & Nicholl, 2008).
Far from it being ‘inappropriate’ for data-sets to be integrated, such integration is
increasingly expected. But what we also see happening in this short passage is an
early raising of the question – what constitutes good-quality mixed methods research?
We might not agree with the point about integration, but one of the striking features
about this comment is that it must have been one of the earliest attempts to test the
water for quality issues in mixed methods research. In her later writings, quality issues
make a further appearance but this occurs most explicitly in a discussion paper written
for the National Centre for Research Methods (Brannen, 2005) on which I will draw
in my discussion below.
124 A. Bryman

In Julia’s later writings on the subject, the language of mixed methods is in evi-
dence to a far greater extent. I do not intend to show how her thinking and approach
to mixed methods developed after the 1992 overview. Instead, I intend to take the
issue of quality criteria in mixed methods research as a springboard for making
some personal observations about work in this area and to draw in one of Julia’s bet-
ter-known mixed methods studies as a means of drawing out some key themes.

Quality and mixed methods research

In an overview of the current state of mixed methods, Creswell and Plano Clark
(2011) has noted that many of the ideas and themes associated with the approach
have been around for quite a long time but that the early writers and researchers
who paved the way failed to be explicit about its procedures, designs and possibili-
ties. Perhaps, but at the same time, through a different lens, it could be argued that
the field has become or at least is becoming too elaborate and therefore more limited
in its usefulness for emerging scholars. Creswell (2011, p. 278) has remarked about
the different designs associated with mixed methods that ‘researchers are confronted
by a baffling array of names and types of ways to conduct mixed methods research’.
In order to rectify this state of affairs, he and Plano Clark (Creswell & Plano Clark,
2011) proposed a ‘parsimonious set of designs’. This comment and solution is simi-
lar to Tracy’s (2010) concern about the proliferation of quality criteria for qualitative
research and to a significant extent the lack of agreement about them. In a similar
vein to Creswell and Plano Clark, she sought to provide a ‘parsimonious pedagogi-
cal tool’ (Tracy, 2010, p. 837) that outlined core elements in the consideration of
quality in qualitative research. Discussions of quality criteria for mixed methods
research sometimes show signs of going in a similar direction whereby we end up
with long lists of quality considerations (e.g. Heyvaert, Hannes, Maes, & Onghena,
2013; O’Cathain, 2010; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2008). The push towards such long
lists is almost certainly the product of a desire to be comprehensive in approach,
especially in the face of a lack of consensus on which considerations to focus upon.
A similar solution is sometimes seen in connection with quality considerations in
relation to qualitative research (e.g. Spencer, Ritchie, Lewis, & Dillon, 2003).
Against this backdrop, I want to propose a parsimonious set of quality criteria/
considerations for mixed methods researchers and to show how the six criteria relate
to one of Julia’s later mixed methods studies, an ambitious project that examined
how different groups of care workers became carers for vulnerable children and their
experiences of their work (Brannen, Statham, Mooney, & Brockman, 2007). This
study comprised several elements. On the quantitative side, there was a Postal Sur-
vey of four groups of carers (residential workers, family support workers, foster ca-
rers, and community childminders) and a follow-up Telephone Survey with the
same respondents which allowed a prospective insight into the Postal Survey data.
On the qualitative side, ‘biographical case study interviews’ (2007, p. 27) were con-
ducted with six workers from each of the four samples surveyed in the Postal Sur-
vey. The interviews were relatively unguided and participants were encouraged to
give accounts of their lives after being told that the focus of the research was on
work and family life. When interviewees completed their accounts, they were asked
specific follow-up questions more akin to a semi-structured interview. We see here
two distinctive features of much of Julia’s mixed methods work: using surveys as
among other things an opportunity for generating a sampling frame to allow the
 International Journal of Social Research Methodology 125

purposive sampling of interviewees (see above) and the combination within a single
instrument of different styles of interviewing (i.e. the combination of survey and
qualitative styles of interview in Brannen & Moss, 1991). In addition, semi-
structured interviews were carried out with a sample of managers of the different
groups of care workers.
My goal is to highlight what I think have become central or core desiderata of
qualitative research. At the same time, having outlined and briefly discussed the six
considerations, I will show how Julia’s writings also invite a modicum of scepticism
about the quest for mixed methods quality criteria.

(1) Need for the quantitative and qualitative components of a mixed methods
project to be implemented in a technically competent manner. This consider-
ation is essentially to do with the need for mixed methods researchers (or
mixed methods teams – Brannen & Moss, 2012) to have the skills to adhere
to the quality expectations of both quantitative and qualitative research. In
other words, the various elements of the research process (sampling, instru-
ment design and implementation, data analysis, inference, etc.) must be exe-
cuted proficiently. In the case of the Coming to Care study, we can see that
this was a research team with a constellation of skills that was responsible
for a piece of high-calibre research.
(2) Need for transparency. It is almost always likely to be necessary for
researchers to be clear about how they went about the core steps in the
research process; but in the case of mixed methods research, there is the addi-
tional element that such issues as the phasing of the quantitative and the
qualitative components need to be articulated. O’Cathain, Murphy, and
Nicholl (2008, p. 97) found in relation to their examination of the quality of
mixed methods research in health services research ‘qualitative methods
were often not described in sufficient detail and this occurred more fre-
quently than for the quantitative components’. Given the significance of the
sequencing of the elements of a mixed methods project in many of the early
writings on mixed methods research (e.g. Brannen, 1992b; Morgan, 1998), it
is likely to be important to be clear on this issue, especially as it often has
implications for the nature of the mixed methods design employed (see
below). In addition, there needs to be specificity about how the ensuing data
were handled in relation to each other. As with the first quality consider-
ation, we see in Brannen et al. (2007) a clear articulation of the phasing of
the research and the ways in which the methods of data collection were
implemented and the subsequent data analysed.
(3) Need for mixed methods to be linked to research questions. It is common for
researchers to be advised to choose research methods on the basis of the
research questions that are posed, so why should this issue be explicitly
mentioned in relation to mixed methods? One reason is that it invites
researchers to consider whether they really need to employ both quantitative
and qualitative methods, in light of the additional burden for both researcher
and participants alike. Another reason is that in their research on social pol-
icy researchers in the UK, Bryman, Becker, and Sempik (2008) noted that
there was a feeling among participants that mixed methods research was
sometimes being selected not because of its suitability to the research ques-
tions posed but because a mixed methods approach was seen as more
126 A. Bryman

desirable because of impressions that it was more likely to be funded or for

articles based on it to be viewed as more likely to be accepted in refereed
journals. As a result, it is often suggested that mixed methods researchers
need to demonstrate how their work was guided by their research questions.
In Coming to Care, seven research questions are outlined (Bryman 2007b,
p. 15). It is probably fair to say that the bulk of these were questions that
were amenable to qualitative research (Brannen, 2008, p. 61). Equally, some
research questions were capable of being addressed by both of the main
components of the research (e.g. ‘How do they [care workers] currently
experience their working conditions?’) but one stands out as explicitly asso-
ciated with the Postal Survey and the Telephone Survey (‘Over a year, how
much job change took place among these four groups? Why did they leave
these childcare occupations and why did they stay?’).
(4) Need to be explicit about the nature of mixed methods design employed. Part
of the growth of a language to express the nature of mixed methods projects
has been the articulation by several writers on methodology of the different
forms that such research can take on. As noted previously, there has been a
proliferation of ways of describing such designs which Creswell and Plano
Clark (2011) have sought to rationalise, but increasingly there is an expecta-
tion that researchers specify the format of their research.1 No mixed methods
design type is mentioned in the Coming to Care study. However, at the same
time, a consideration of which of the Creswell and Plano Clark (2011)
designs it might be construed as revealing leads one to be slightly uneasy
about them. The Coming to Care study comes closest to an ‘explanatory
sequential design’ whereby quantitative data collection and analysis is fol-
lowed up with qualitative data collection and analysis leading to an interpre-
tation. The Coming to Care study comes close because the Postal Survey
preceded the biographical interviews and the latter were clearly dependent
on the former because, as previously noted, the survey provided a sampling
frame. However, the Postal Survey did not just serve as a means of provid-
ing insight into the qualitative data and as a springboard for carrying out the
Telephone Survey as it also provided contextual information as well as a
sampling frame. To be fair to the mixed methods designs outlined by
Creswell and Plano Clark (2011), they are meant to be prototypes and as
such serve mainly as guides to the articulation of the different forms that
mixed methods research can assume. Thus, while it is desirable to identify
how a mixed methods study fits with the various types of design identified,
it has to be recognised that at the same time, reality may be more complex
and that it is likely to be necessary to provide considerable detail about the
phasing of the different elements of the research process in each case.
(5) Need for a rationale for the use of mixed methods research. In a similar
manner to the rise of a language for describing possible types of mixed
methods design, there has been a growth in the consideration of the reasons
(‘rationales’) for doing mixed methods research (e.g. Bryman, 2006; Collins
et al., 2012; Onwuegbuzie et al., 2011).2 The presence of a clear rationale is
often proposed as a quality consideration because it gives a sense of what
the researcher was trying to glean from the use of the two types of methods
within a single project. It gives a sense of how the researcher envisaged the
likely relationship between the two components. With the Coming to Care
 International Journal of Social Research Methodology 127

study, three rationales stand out. First, as noted several times above, a mixed
methods approach was legitimated by noting that the surveys ‘provided a
sampling source for the biographical case studies’ (Brannen, 2008, p. 60).
Second, the survey data provided contextual information about the care
workers and their working contexts. Third, we are told that the survey ques-
tions were meant to address different research questions from the data deriv-
ing from the biographical interviews (Brannen et al., 2007, p. 213). In terms
of the rationales developed by Bryman (2006) from his content analysis of
social science articles, the use of mixed methods was rationalised in terms of
‘sampling’, ‘completeness’, and ‘different research questions’, respectively.
(6) Need for integration. Several writers including Bryman (2007a), Niglas
(2004), and O’Cathain et al. (2008) have noted that researchers do not
always bring together the two strands of a mixed methods study. This can
often be discerned when mixed methods research is written up in such a
manner that the findings deriving from the two components are presented in
parallel rather than an attempt being made to consider what additional
insights can be extracted from an exploration of the links between the two
sets of data. It is typically suggested that unless there is some integration,
the potential of mixed methods research will be unrealised and the investiga-
tion will be mixed in name only. Some researchers have begun to make the
issue of integration a core focus of their work (e.g. Woolley, 2009). In the
Coming to Care research, although the bulk of the write-up of the findings
derives from the qualitative data, there are several points where the quantita-
tive and qualitative findings ‘talk to each other’. An example occurs in
Chapter 7 which is concerned with the experiences of care work. There is a
table and discussion examining data from the Postal Survey concerning the
differences between the four groups of care workers in terms of their levels
of satisfaction with various aspects of their work. Data from the biographical
case study interviews are then employed to help explain some of the differ-
ences between care worker groups established through the survey. Further,
the interviews are used to explore some of the ‘factors that influenced
reported levels of satisfaction’ (Brannen et al., 2007, p. 132).

Considering outcomes
The previous section constitutes an attempt to arrive at a shortlist of quality criteria
for mixed methods research and to show how one of Julia’s more recent studies
measures up in terms of those criteria. The only area in which it shows up as not
adhering to a criterion is in relation to the stipulation of the kind of mixed methods
design that underpinned it, though as I also point out, when looking at mixed meth-
ods studies in practice, it can be difficult to relate the mixed methods prototype
designs to what was actually done in a study.
I now want to move on to consider a theme that crops up in Julia’s NCRM
paper. She writes:

the rationales for methodological decisions are often justified in the light of the way
data have been analysed and the questions addressed in writing up the research. These
are not necessarily the same rationales given at the outset of the research when the
research proposals were written. Even in accounts of methodological practice … these
128 A. Bryman

issues are far from transparent and in some cases involve a slippage between the gen-
eral claims researchers may make for their use of mixed methods and their particular
practices. (Brannen, 2005, pp. 24–25)

That may be so and certainly fits with the results of Bryman’s (2006) content analy-
sis of social science articles. He found that there was frequently a mismatch between
the mixed methods rationales given by researchers and their actual uses of it
(referred to in his article as ‘practice’). For one thing, researchers seemed to derive
far more outcomes from their studies than would have been predicted from the ratio-
nales they provided. To take an example, in 29 of the 232 articles coded, triangula-
tion was specified as a rationale but 80 articles employed some degree of
triangulation, where quantitative and qualitative findings were juxtaposed. To take
another example, in 31 articles ‘completeness’ (the idea that a more comprehensive
account can be generated when both quantitative and qualitative research are
employed) was stated as a rationale but an examination of the use of mixed methods
research in the articles showed that 67 employed it this way. Further, it could not be
assumed that because a rationale was specified the researchers necessarily employed
it to that end. For example, of the 29 articles that mentioned triangulation as a ratio-
nale, only 19 used it that way.
Julia’s assertion in the extended quotation above and Bryman’s (2006) content
analysis are of particular significance in relation to a comment she makes in her
NCRM article: ‘… some of the advantages of mixed methods research may not
emerge until the end of the research process’ (Brannen, 2005, p. 9). There is always
the possibility of an element of surprise in mixed methods research because of the
inclusion of a qualitative research component, as the findings deriving from it can
often be unanticipated and even surprising. However, with mixed methods, the jux-
taposition of the two sets of findings may yield possibilities that cannot have been
anticipated at the planning stage of the research. We can see elements of this in the
Coming to Care study. Brannen et al. (2007, p. 213) observe that although the quan-
titative and the qualitative components were designed to answer different research
questions, the ensuing findings sometimes overlapped. Moreover, the survey and the
biographical interview findings sometimes jarred. For example, in the interviews,
care workers frequently mentioned difficulties they encountered stemming from their
work in balancing work and family, whereas the survey evidence provided a some-
what rosier picture of the management of these two facets of their lives. Reflecting
on these findings, Julia writes:

Of course the two sets of evidence may not necessarily be seen to conflict but rather
suggest that while most people present themselves as ‘getting by’ on an everyday
basis, challenges and tensions remain. (Brannen, 2008, p. 61)

We see here an element of triangulation but triangulation with a difference: the goal
is not to treat one set of data as a validity test for the other but to use the contrasting
findings as a springboard for understanding the different contexts in which the ques-
tioning was carried out, or as she and her co-authors put it:

However, the contexts in which the particular data were collected have been taken into
account in their interpretation, in particular the timeframes adopted by informants and
the particular form in which responses were elicited. (Brannen et al., 2007, p. 213)
 International Journal of Social Research Methodology 129

Possibilities such as these are ones that a mixed methods strategy is more likely to
afford researchers than mono-method approaches. It is hardly surprising therefore
that as Julia put it (Brannen, 2005), mixed methods researchers’ claims may differ
from their research practices or that as Bryman (2006) found, researchers derive
more from their combination of quantitative and qualitative research than their ratio-
nales would lead one to anticipate. This may explain why, as Julia put it in the
NCRM article, ‘… some of the advantages of mixed methods research may not
emerge until the end of the research process’ (quoted above).
This capacity of mixed methods researchers to extract additional and possibly
unanticipated ‘yield’ (O’Cathain, Murphy, & Nicholl, 2007) from their endeavours
is interesting in the light of findings from a content analysis of articles in the
field of strategic management. Molina-Azorín (2012) compared mixed and mono-
method articles published in Strategic Management Journal over the period
1980–2006 and compared their citations up to early 2009. He found that the
number of citations of mixed methods articles consistently exceeded the citation
count of mono-method articles. For example, by five and seven years after the
publication year, the average citation count of the mixed methods articles reached
a level that the mono-method articles reached by their 7th and 10th year, respec-
tively. While one might question the use of citations as a measure of impact, the
findings are nonetheless suggestive of the capacity of mixed methods research to
generate findings possessed of the additional yield that possibly derives from their
capacity to surprise.

Conclusion
In this article, I have tried to give a sense of the huge impact that Julia’s work
has had in the field of mixed methods research. It is difficult to think of anyone
who has made a greater contribution in terms of both her methodological writings
and her research. In addition, I have tried to relate a small sample of the themes
that can be discerned in her work to recent discussions about mixed methods.
The editors of this special issue have allowed me a special licence to write in a
personal mode, something that is not normally my style at all. I am sure that this
personal style will have been apparent thus far, so let me add one final personal
reflection. In drawing a distinction between ‘universalistic’ and ‘particularistic’
accounts of the value of mixed methods research, Bryman (2007b) showed that
sometimes mixed methods practitioners view it as nearly always producing supe-
rior research and sometimes they view it as only useful when relevant to the
research questions at hand. I have to say that I have always been predisposed to
the particularistic account, but the set of reflections that brought the previous sec-
tion to an end have led me to wonder whether the universalists have a point.
The argument could not be pushed too far in that there are many kinds of
research questions to which either quantitative or qualitative research are unsuited
but at the same time, I have found myself more sympathetic to the universalistic
argument than I have been in the past. Current and future generations of
researchers will undoubtedly shed light on this issue and in doing so they will
hopefully appreciate the immense intellectual debt they owe Julia Brannen in
having paved the way for mixed methods research.
130 A. Bryman

Notes
1. Creswell and Plano Clark (2011) distinguish the following designs: convergent; explana-
tory; exploratory; embedded; transformative; and multi-phase.
2. For example, Bryman (2006) found the following rationales from his content analysis of
articles: triangulation; offset; completeness; process; different research questions; expla-
nation; unexpected results; instrument development; sampling; credibility; context; illus-
tration; utility; confirm and discover; diversity of views; enhancement; and other/unclear.

Notes on contributors
Alan Bryman is a professor of Organisational and Social Research in the School of Manage-
ment, University of Leicester. His main research interests lie in research methods and the
study of leadership. He is the author of many articles and books, including Social Research
Methods fourth edition (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Business Research Methods third
edition (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has also edited or co-edited several books,
including The SAGE Handbook of Leadership (Sage, 2011).

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