When, in your opinion, an aspect of your study, either methodologically or within the financial constraints,
cannot be reliably investigated through the main research approach you have adopted. To gain a deeper,
complete and/or reliable understanding of the subaspects of your study, you may need to use another
method. Investigation by another method will hopefully provide you with more accurate information about
some aspects of your study. For example, suppose you are conducting a study to ascertain the recreational
needs of youth in a community and the community’s attitudes towards the desirability of those
needs. Also suppose you are ascertaining recreational needs by interviewing a random sample of young
people. You do not have enough resources to interview a sample of members of the community and,
therefore, you decide to set up a community forum for the purpose. In this situation you are using two
methods to find out about different aspects of your study that cannot be investigated in the same manner
because of lack of resources. Studies like this will be classified as using a mixed methods approach which,
in this example, is using both quantitative and qualitative methods.