Same-same, but different: A mixed-methods approach to enhance the understanding of spatial social science and the impact of neighborhoods.

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 number of neighborhoods using quantitative methods. They do so by arguing either that the local uniqueness is infinitely complex and thus irreducible or, that the complexity of local cases can be reduced to a few, significant variables by statistical models. This division leads to a fragmented series of local case studies on the one hand and a series of abstracted statistical patterns on the other. We argue that these approaches are not mutually exclusive but interdependent. The partial regularities we encounter statistically can be used as a gateway to understand the complex and contingent structures which cause those regularities. This implies to follow up the statistical analyses with case studies which embed the structural relations in concrete spatial settings. Thus, we argue for an integrated approach.