Miched-method research designs in street-level bureaucracy research

Mixed-methods research has often been presented as way to overcome the biggest shortcoming of traditional street-level bureaucracy research: its lack of generalizability without losing important contextual information. Nevertheless, the use of multiple methods is still very limited. After providing an overview of the most commonly used mixed-methods research designs, this chapter addresses the question of why mixed-methods research is not employed more frequently, and how we can overcome (at least some) of the challenge related to street-level bureaucracy research. We demonstrate that these challenges mainly result from the great complexity of mixed-methods designs forcing researchers to make trade-offs. This chapter concludes with a discussion on whether the public administration community is ready for mixed-method research in the first place.