The bricoleur with a computer: Piecing together qualitative and quantitative data

The researcher as bricoleur will gather whatever data is at hand, experimen ting and exploring to find answers to the questions he or she has set. With computer in hand and new tools available, the researcher can readily combi ne data types, moving beyond complementarity and simple triangulation. Data may be transferred in either or both directions between NUD.IST (a program to assist the analysis of qualitative data) and a spreadsheet or statistic al package. Thus, analysis and interpretation ave enriched, and new ways of thinking about data are laid open. Such techniques inevitably challenge tr aditional assumptions about particular methods. But perhaps in the final an alysis, all methods, other than those employed in reductionist, hypothesis testing experiments, are essentially interpretive.