Same-same, but different

A mixed-methods approach to enhance the understanding of spatial social science and the impact of neighborhoods

Abstract

Numerous approaches have emerged to encompass the social phenomenon of place. In the search of the meaning of place, researchers often either seek to outline the uniqueness of a single neighborhood with predominantly qualitative methods or reduce complexity of a higher number of neighborhoods using quantitative methods. They do so by arguing that the uniqueness is infinitely complex and thus irreducible or, as with quantitative methods, that there is enough similarity that the complexity can be reduced by statistical models. We argue that these are not mutually exclusive by outlining an approach to capture the unique and the general.