Includes bibliographical references and index.

This case study combines the discipline-ascribed postpositivist- and positivist-labelled methodological approaches of poststructuralist deconstruction with structural equation modelling, respectively, using the principles of epistemethodological pluralism (EMP) within a PhD thesis that sought to explain public attitudes to Irelands policy of neutrality. Most understandings of mixed methods imply the use of approaches that share a set of concepts, with shared assumptions of ontological and epistemological premises, for example, combining quantitative and qualitative research, whereby the latter is used to support the findings of the former. EMP seeks to combine epistemologically diverse methodologies with contrasting research philosophy assumptions in a non-hierarchical manner to critically and transformationally disassemble or disrupt orthodox concepts in the literature and then rearticulate them in further emancipatory research. The project context was an absence of studies of public opinion on neutrality and a political reluctance to approach the subject due to pressure from the European Union (EU) to abandon neutrality in favour of a common defence, resulting in academic and government discourses that excluded public support for Irish neutrality and its constructivist underpinnings. Although the research design used a quantitative approach, it was necessary to carry out a poststructuralist deconstruction of concepts of neutrality in the academic literature and in government policy to identify the independent variables of the public opinion structural equation models. This case details the thought processes that led to this unorthodox combination of mixed epistemethodologies as well as the nuts and bolts of how the deconstruction and structural equation models were carried out.

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