The ongoing debates about the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods and the vigorous critique of the quality and utility of educational research led to a wish to contribute to the potential enhancement of research practice by systematically analysing several scorching questions of research methodology.The preliminary study, undertaken at Cambridge University during 1998-1999, focused on the paradigmatic confrontation of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The analysis of various texts on methodological issues and a small-scale empirical investigation suggested that the dichotomous nature of educational research, advocated by certain influential writers and many textbooks, is not characteristic of the actual research practice, nor proved the incompatibility thesis to be an ideal by which educational research could be enhanced. The results of a preliminary study, stating that quantitative and qualitative methodologies are not mutually exclusive and incompatible paradigms, and depending on the nature and the complexity of particular research problem, the design of a study can be either qualitative, quantitative or a combination of both, form the basic assumption for the main study. As the field of combined designs (also called as "mixed methods research") is only in its early development, this study set the aim to enhance and extend the existing systematic knowledge about the ways combined designs can be and are used in research practice, to explore possible justifications for a new kind of practice and to analyse the implications that might have in the context of educational research.The main study integrates theoretical knowledge on and recent developments in the combined use of qualitative and quantitative approaches with the results of an original empirical study. The empirical part of the inquiry adopts a content analytical method with the aim to analyse the actual use of combined designs to filter out common ways quantitative and qualitative approaches are merged within different research projects. A meta-analysis was conducted, focused on methodological aspects of a purposive but relatively representative sample of articles, presenting the results of studies using various combined designs published in English-language academic educational research journals.This paper will be focused on the main results from the empirical part of the aforementioned study. In overall, the analysis indicates that both, multimethod designs, where qualitative and quantitative methods are used within different sub-designs of the same research project, and a mixed designs, where qualitative and quantitative aspects are combined on various methodological levels in the framework of a single research strategy, are used. Using a combined design does not have to mean that both qualitative and quantitative data are collected though very often both qualitative and quantitative ways of data recording and reporting are used while a combined design is employed. The level of integration between qualitative and quantitative aspects remains relatively modest in most cases, especially the integration of different types of data at the stage of analysis. However, at the stage of interpretation, more extensive integration can be observed. Explicit rationale for the use of combined design was given only in a minority of articles, where, in some cases, the authors stated the use of a pure design, usually qualitative, but according to the definitions utilised in the present study, the inquiry was classified as having a combined design. The most typical purpose for a combined design was complementarity followed by expansion. Triangulation, development and initiation were rarely recorded as a purpose for the combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods. The comparative analysis of eight emerged clusters (that is, types of combined designs) indicates the relationship between mixed-method purposes and the chosen type of combined design. Key-words: educational research, teaching research methodology, quantitative and qualitative methods, combined research designs, mixed methods research.