ABSTRACT
A world of crisis can become an issue for social research on different levels. Durkheim's distinction of individual representation as an issue of psychology and collective representations as an issue of sociology includes the poles individual versus society and instability versus stability at the same time. Combining research methods has a long tradition in social research. Creswell, in an editorial for the same journal, has marked the territory mixed methods research and compared it with the discussions of the mixed methods conference in Cambridge 2008. Triangulation also refers to combining different sorts of data on the background of the theoretical perspectives, which are applied to the data. Durham's concept of collective representations was picked up in the 1950s by French social psychologist Serge Moscovici and further spelled out in Moscovici's concept of "social representations". A social problems work perspective includes addressing the variety of problem understandings in the field, which influence and sometimes obstruct ways of dealing with these problems.
