Are methods considered "overloaded" if they return different types?

Maybe another way to do this is to have one method that returns a basic Object that could then be cast to the appropriate type after it is returned.

>Hi
>
>I need to pass a parameter to a method, this parameter will dictate the return type (there are 3 overloaded methods in total).
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>Is there a way of passing the class as a parameter or something similar, without instantiating it? Each of the 3 methods would therefore take in a different type of parameter.
>
>Hope that makes sense.
>
>Thanks
>Kev