Over the past 20 years there has been increasing recognition that focusing on either quantitative or qualitative researchtechniques alone leads researchers to miss important parts of a story. Researchers have found that better results are often achieved through combined approaches. In line with this observation, an increase in so-called mixed methods studies and research designs as well as in work providing overviews and systematic accounts of such research has been witnessed in various disciplines and fields of study since the early 1990s (Morse 1991; Creswell 2003 (first ed. 1994); Greene and Caracelli 1997b; Tashakkori and Teddlie 2003; Axinn and Pearce 2006; Bryman 2006; Creswell and Plano Clark 2007; Bergman and Bryman 2008; Teddlie and Tashakkori 2008). Of course, the combination of different methodical approaches is anything but a recent phenomenon in field research – one might think of the Marienthal study (Jahoda, Zeisel, and Lazarsfeld 1933), the Hawthorne studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939), as well as of several studies by the Chicago School. In many areas of research, the combined application of different methods goes back a long time without being explicitly referred to as a mixed methods design. However, the increased interest in and the systematic review of mixed methods designs and the results they yield are indeed new aspects in this development.