Education, practice, research and policy are all facets of the nursing profession; however they often exist in silos, operating independently of each other. The nursing profession has grappled with the theory practice gap for decades (Greenway et al., 2019).Knowledge developed and learned in the ivory tower of university nursing programs globally does not always translate to real-life problems at the bedside (Leach & Tucker, 2018). Frontline nurses find it difficult to connect published research findings to benefits in practice (Rahmayanti et al., 2020), and it has been argued that research initiatives need to be more tightly aligned to what is happening at

As mixed methods research approaches become increasingly more common, it is imperative they are conducted in a thoughtful and rigorous manner to yield useful results. While researchers have begun to explore the use of various qualitative research methodologies in mixed methods research, there is a gap in literature discussing the philosophical congruence of using interpretive description in mixed method studies, and how to ensure rigor while integrating interpretive description results. Our purpose in writing this article is to discuss the issues of fit, purpose, process, context, and design when using interpretive description in mixed methods research approaches by drawing on examples from the literature. Further, we explore the contributions that interpretive description can make in a mixed methods inquiry. This article offers a first step in using a purposeful approach to mixed methods interpretive description studies to increase transparency and rigor in this relatively new methodology. K E Y W O R D S interpretive description, mixed-methods, philosophy, research methods, rigor 2 | MIXED METHODS RESEARCH 2.1 | Historical overview Mixed methods research became highly visible and recognized as an emerging approach to research design in the 1980s (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). In 1989, Greene et al. defined mixed methods studies as "those that include at least one quantitative method (designed to collect numbers) and one qualitative method (designed to collect Nursing Inquiry.