This chapter discusses mixing qualitative and quantitative methods as both a tradition in psychological anthropology and an essential strategy to produce important findings. Mixed-methods designs are research question-driven strategies, which contrast with those strategies that begin with a preferred data collection approach and then formulate a question to suit the chosen methodology. Mixed-methods strategies are used to study beliefs and behaviors in context across levels of analysis to represent the world dynamically and holistically. Despite the popularity of qualitative ethnographic methods in anthropology for the past five decades, psychological anthropologists have persisted in using mixed methods. There are four critical reasons for the continuing use of mixed methods. Mixed methods allow greater explanatory depth, mixed-methods research can become more inclusive, mixed methods allow for surprising insights, and mixed methods allow for productive collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. The final section of the chapter reviews recent well-funded and successful research projects that successfully use mixed methods across a wide range of research topics.

This chapter explains how the researchers talked to young people with cognitive disability, their families, and practitioners. The researchers included people with disability on the research team. The researchers wanted to know what was happening for young people with cognitive disability. They wanted to know about the world in which young people with cognitive disability lived. There was much to be learnt about working well with people with disability in research. It’s important that people with cognitive disability have a voice in the research that is about them.