This paper is a further attempt to address some methodological questions of educational inquiry and especially some problems concerning the integrated use of quantitative and qualitative approaches in educational research. Relying on the results presented on previous ECER conferences in Lahti and Edinburgh I have planned an empirical study focusing on the research articles published in academic journals and aiming to analyze the implications that different ways of combined use of quantitative and qualitative approaches have for educational research and its' results, as well as to make suggestions for more beneficial and valid use of multimethod and mixed designs. In this paper I will present some preliminary results of that study.Theoretically my study departs from the debates among educational researchers about the usefulness and the relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches, which have been present at least since mid 19th century. However, during last decades there has been fundamental disagreement in many aspects concerning research methodology and the principles, which should underlie educational research. Some authors like Guba and Lincoln have suggested that quantitative and qualitative methods belong to distinct mutually exclusive paradigms and are therefore incommensurable. On the other hand there are many authors who deny such tight connection between different philosophical underpinnings and quantitative/qualitative research methods. Some of these researchers have looked for the possibilities how these approaches could be beneficially integrated.However, as Martyn Hammersley has so convincingly argued, the shift from paradigmatic difference to complementary methods is not as unproblematic and desirable as it may appear. Hence, facing the tendency that at least in research practice quantitative and qualitative methodologies seem often not to be taken as incommensurable paradigms and that they are combined in various levels of inquiry, we have to notice that new important methodological questions arise. There is a considerable amount of work done for clarifying the issues concerning different aspects of combining divergent methodologies. Still, most of the literature, which classifies under the broad area of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, are arguments why this integration is possible and needed. Thus, although some aspects of combined use of quantitative and qualitative approaches have been studied in more detail, there is a need for further research to clarify the implications of various mixed designs to the results of the research, as well as to study how the validity of such studies can be / has been guaranteed. If multimethod designs have been accepted for some time and have got more attention in the methodological literature, the area of mixed designs remains largely unstudied. Described aims and background determine mainly exploratory nature for the empirical part of my study. Although this study can be seen as dealing with rather practical matters, it inevitably has deep philosophical underpinnings, and therefore I consider it suitable for the network of philosophy of education. However, if it will not suit with any overall themes this network organizes on the conference, I would appreciate, if you could consider the suitability of my paper for the presentation in the postgraduate network.