Abstract
Qualitative and quantitative research are often presented as two fundamentally different paradigms through which we study the social world. These paradigms act as lightning conductors to which sets of epistemological assumptions, theoretical approaches and methods are attracted. Each is seen to be incompatible with the other. These paradigmatic claims have a tendency to resurface from time to time, manifesting themselves in the effects of different cultural traditions upon intellectual styles of research. There are pressures to view research in terms of this divide but perhaps more pressures to ignore such a divide. In this paper I examine how qualitative and quantitative approaches are in practice woven into the research process. In doing so I discuss the phasing of the research process and the different considerations which apply in different phases. A distinction is made between the context of enquiry or research design phase and the context of justification where data are analysed and interpreted. Part of the research process that is also considered here and is often ignored in the literature concerns contextualization, an important phase particularly in cross-national research.
