There is an old, tired argument about whether numbers or stories are the more serious form of evidence. The honest answer is that each one misleads you without the other, and the most rigorous thing you can do is refuse to accept either on its own.
Numbers tell you what and how much: the scope of a problem, the size of a pattern, whether something moved. Stories tell you why and what it means: the mechanism behind the pattern, the experience the number compresses into a single digit. A satisfaction score of 3.2 out of 5 is not a finding; it is a question. Until someone tells you why, you have no idea whether to celebrate or worry. And a moving quote is not a finding either, until you know whether it speaks for many people or one.
Rigour is not choosing numbers over stories; it is refusing to trust either without the other.
Mixed methods simply means using each to check the other. Let the quantitative show you the shape and the scale; let the qualitative tell you what it means and where the survey missed. When they agree, your confidence is earned. When they disagree, you have found the most interesting thing in the whole study, the place where the official numbers and the lived reality part ways.
In community and Indigenous contexts this is not a methodological nicety; it is often where the truth lives. The relational, qualitative knowledge frequently carries what a standardized instrument cannot capture, and an evaluation that listens only to the survey will confidently measure the wrong thing.