Mapping Research Approaches in Financial Sustainability and Financial Resilience Studies

Research on financial sustainability and financial resilience spans corporate, public, microfinance, nonprofit, and household settings, but the methodological profiles of studies that explicitly describe their research approaches have not been compared across these contexts. This descriptive mapping review examines a method-explicit Web of Science corpus. A Topic search conducted on 29 September 2026 identified 872 records; database filters for publication period, document type, subject category, and language produced an analytical corpus of 380 English-language articles and reviews published between 2003 and 2026. Records were screened for relevance and coded from titles, abstracts, and keywords into separate variables for study type, approach, data source, and technique. Within this corpus, quantitative designs accounted for 66.1%, qualitative designs for 16.6%, mixed methods for 5.8%, reviews for 6.1%, and conceptual studies for 5.5%. Secondary archival and panel data were prominent, while quasi-experimental designs and explicit mixed-method integration were uncommon in the searchable metadata. Sensitivity checks confirmed the quantitative majority among relevant records, but qualitative and mixed-methods shares varied with search construction. The review contributes a transparent methodological baseline for this bounded corpus, a research agenda and a decision framework that links research purposes to appropriate designs and validity requirements.

Financial sustainability; financial resilience; research designs; research methods; mixed methods; evidence mapping

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