Abstract
The developmental trajectory of multiple method research is a somewhat curious one. Combining methods is at least as old as Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian wars, in which the speeches constituting a quarter of the History offer insight into the Greek political mind, the motives of contemporaries, and the arguments they used, so that, blended with the descriptive chronicle, the work balances detailed documentation of events with insights into what they meant to those involved. However, the modern origin of methodological combination is commonly dated to Campbell's ‘multi-trait, multi-method matrix’ in psychology (Campbell and Fiske, 1959), which rendered the concept in highly formal terms. Methodological combination was to be systematic and carefully orchestrated. Approaches following Campbell's inspiration were based on ‘triangulation’, an objective aiming to test and prove relationships. The goal was causal explanation with predictive adequacy and the mechanism was ‘convergent validation’.