The inclusion of an ethnographic approach within the basic framework of a quantitative one is outlined in an attempt to combine their methodologies. Examples from an ethnographic case study of kindergarten aged children in Utuado, Puerto Rico are used to illustrate the issues being discussed, especially research design. The Puerto Rican study combined ethnographic and quantitative approaches to deal with the interface between cultural context, children's activities in that context, and cognitive factors. The basic pattern of most quantitative research is used to structure the discussion of how the Puerto Rican study combined an ethnographic approach and ethnographic data with a quantitative approach. Combining the approaches would mean: (1) a concern for context and an openness to reformulation of the problem and hypotheses; (2) development of measures having local significance; (3) sensitivity to the local meaning of procedure and instruments, and to the way they fit in the cultural context; (4) the opportunity to examine the local meaning and relevance of terms, categories, and phrases, and to identify the participants' definitions of appropriate roles and behavior standards in the research setting; (5) perception of the data collection situation as a social situation; and (6) a variety of data leading to reformulations of questions. The combined results of quantitative and ethnographic data indicate that factors in the immediate contexts of the home and school may have influenced their differential behavior. (AMH)