Methodological Innovations

Misalignment between the different levels of complex societal systems (e.g. socio-technical, socio-ecological) are often a barrier to transitioning these systems toward more sustainable behavior. One way to understand alignment is through the Multilevel Perspective Theory of sustainable transitions in sociotechnical systems (MLP) which posits that when a regime (the current “ways of doing” something) exhibits behavior that negatively impacts its surrounding economic, social and environmental landscape, that landscape will exert pressure on the regime to change. This in turn opens the window of opportunity for niche developments such as novel technology adoption or policy changes. Therefore, understanding the relationships between the landscape, the regime and emerging niches can help align these different levels of perspective to facilitate a successful transition toward more sustainable practices. This paper describes a methodology for mapping complex systems such as agricultural systems based on MLP theory, and incorporates a fourth “user” level (e.g. the farm) into this multilevel framework (MLP+F). The methodology is illustrated with a case study example of North Carolina’s lagoon and sprayfield swine waste management regime. By integrating well-established techniques for data collection and analysis, the case study engages a diverse panel of local experts through a modified Delphi approach to identify the relevant concepts and their cause-effect relationships for the current regime. These concepts and relationships are then categorized and organized into a multilevel, multi-perspective conceptual model using fuzzy cognitive maps. The conceptual model identifies how stakeholder groups align in their perception of the system, and provides a foundation for future qualitative, semi-quantitative, and visual analyses of the system and how it can be changed through alternative scenarios. Although this methodology was initially developed for agricultural applications, it has potential for application to other complex societal issues where understanding stakeholder alignment and the potential for sustainability transitions through change are needed.

In small-scale communities, social-scientists can use photo-rosters to collect social network and dyadic peer-ratings data. In past work, we introduced an R package to automate photo-standardization, survey construction, and data-entry. This R package, however, lacked two key features required for fully-unsupervised data-entry. First, respondent IDs needed to be manually linked to cellphone photographs of the photo-roster before DieTryin could process the data; second, users needed to identify the locations of the photo-roster in each cellphone photograph using a point-and-click interface. To address the first shortcoming, we introduce a new Android application, DieTryinCam, which facilitates annotation of cell-phone photographs with respondent, question, and panel IDs. To address the second shortcoming, we add new functionality to the DieTryin R package, which allows for the precise location of the photograph roster to be automatically identified. Automated data entry in DieTryin now requires no user input beyond a single function call from R.

In this article we present a “methodological assemblage” and technological prototype connecting autoethnography to the practices of self-research in personal science. As an experimental process of personal data gathering, one of the authors used a low-tech device for the active registration of events and their perception, in a case study on disengaging from his smartphone. For the visualization of this data the other author developed a novel treatment of fieldnotes in analytic autoethnography through an open source, interactive notebook. As a proof of concept, we provide a detailed description of the corresponding protocol and prototype, also making available the notebook source code and the quantitative-qualitative open dataset behind its visualization. This highly personalized methodological assemblage represents a technological appropriation that combines self-research and autoethnography—two disciplinary perspectives that share a type of inquiry based on situated knowledge, departing from personal data as empirical basis. Despite recent autoethnographic literature on the phenomenon of self-tracking and the Qualified Self, our contribution addresses a lack of studies in the opposite direction: how the practice of self-research mediated by technology can lead to bridges with digital autoethnography, validating their hybrid combination. After addressing diverse conceptual, ontological and methodological similarities and differences between personal science and autoethnography, we contextualize the case study of digital disengagement and provide a detailed description of the developed self-protocol and the tools used for data gathering.

The present article is a primary introduction to the semi-structured interviewing method SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense.

This paper aims to offer methodological insight into the reflexive use of metaphors that assist in revealing the emotional labour of health care staff to themselves and to the researcher. It focusses on the method utilised for these semi-structured interviews, targeting the engrained and emotive experiences of emotional labour using metaphors. Taking metaphors from the ethnographic observation, ‘to’ the interview setting, proved a stimulating tool for lively discussion and narrative sharing. This approach offered an invaluable and enlightening tool for exploring the nurse’s experiences, it gave them a point of reference to discuss their challenging and personal experiences. It can offer other researchers, and particularly those studying ‘invisible’ labour (by subconscious nature or lack of physicality) a novel approach to data collection. The empirical study underpinning this article set out to explore, in particular, the ‘invisible’ emotional labour undertaken by nurses working within the emergency department (ED) setting. This is a clinical and nursing speciality facing sustained pressure in the English National Health Service (NHS) – a challenging and distinctive environment to nurse. Two EDs were used as the case studies for an in-depth ethnography (one District General Hospital and one University Teaching Hospital and Trauma Centre). As part of this, the 18 semi-structured, formal interviews were completed with ED nursing staff (to explore their experiences of emotional labour) and data was collected over a 6 month period.

Computer- and web-based survey technology has enabled the use of question formats and layouts that would be difficult or even impossible to implement with traditional paper questionnaires. The present article investigates context effects—specifically assimilation versus contrast effects—in connection with four web survey question designs. Three traditional types of matrix questions are experimentally tested against a new two-dimensional question format referred to as ZEF. This new question format allows survey practitioners to present two questions at the same time, the responses to which are entered on the x- and y-axes of a two-dimensional chart. The chart also displays a respondent’s answers to the preceding two-dimensional questions. This approach accentuates the simultaneous application of two dimensions of a question and encourages the comparison of pairwise items across the dimensions. The two-dimensional format generates a higher number of assimilation effects as compared with the three traditional matrix question formats. This suggests that instead of conceptual interconnection of items, context effect formation in ZEF is dominated by the visual proximity of the item scales and the common region of the two-dimensional chart.

Globally, Indigenous scientific frameworks and methods have been damaged and derided by ‘western’ science, a strategy of the colonial project. Contemporary Australia is no exception, with the transmission of the suite of scientific values and practices formed over millennia in and for this place being actively prevented by legislation, government policies and colonial opprobrium. This paper shows how two crucial Indigenous science(s) frameworks, used alongside two Indigenous research methods, can transform hegemonic scientific research and fieldwork priorities and practices. This transformation occurs because of the focus of each framework. The first, centring country, requires decentring the human to bring forth the needs of the web of relationships that is country. The second framework, relational accountability, is about tending to a broad range of relationships, are often kin-based and including the other-than-human, with yindyamarra (or local equivalent). Relational accountability also offers an inbuilt ethic of care superior to institutional ethics protocols. By describing these frameworks and methods and discussing how and when to use them, this paper supports their greater understanding and more widespread use, particularly by Indigenous practitioners, so we may continue to (re)build what colonisation has damaged.

The relational processes of dialogue in biographical storytelling extend beyond manifest tales. Untold stories of unlived experience are also composed with an audience in mind and performed as communicative acts. This paper considers how and why research participants in a Mass Observation Archive study declined to respond to a life-writing task. Drawing on the sociology of nothing, we argue that their patterns of non-response were motivated by subjective intent and constitute meaningful social action. Despite having little or nothing to say about the substantive content of the topic, these participants told us plenty about how they felt about the challenging methodological process. In their accounts, we identified three modes of disengagement: commissive refusal, omissive avoidance and ambivalent resistance. Respectively, these involved consciously dismissing the task with reference to morals and values; surface amenability masking an evasion of deeper engagement; and confused, uncertain vacillation between approach and retreat. We explore the intrapsychic and interpersonal relational dynamics at play in each of these narrative modes and consider the authorial power of saying ‘no’.

The Delphi technique is a unique survey method that involves an iterative process to gain consensus when consensus is challenging to establish. Survey participants typically rate a variety of statements using a specified rating scale. The survey is repeated for several rounds, and at each round statements that do not reach a predefined level of consensus are advanced to the next round while giving the participants information about the responses of other participants for their comparison. The final statements are then ranked in order of the average rating. The statistical methods to analyze Delphi studies are not well described. This study investigates the use of a 1–7 linear rating scale along with parametric summary statistics for assessment of consensus and ranking of statements. A study set of 9297 individual ratings on the 1–7 scale were obtained from previously performed Delphi studies and used to create 490,000 simulated Delphi ratings with various numbers of participants. While the overall distribution of ratings was strongly left skewed the sampling distribution was near normally distributed for studies with five or more participants. The average difference between the standard deviation and interquartile range was −0.26/7. The overall risk of falsely concluding consensus using the standard deviation as a summary statistic was 7.3% when compared to using the interquartile range. The average difference between mean and median was −0.20/7. The risk of falsely ranking the statements by a value of 0.5 or more was near zero for all sample sizes when the mean was compared to the median. This study suggests that the use of the 1–7 linear rating scale in combination with the parametric summary statistics of standard deviation and mean is a valid method to analyze ratings from Delphi studies.

Albeit the measurement of debate quality is not a new endeavour, this paper raises two research questions for which we still have limited knowledge: What are important and reliable indicators of debate quality on social media? How does debate quality relate to individual factors on social media? First, we empirically analysed how two well-established discourse’ quality indices (the DQI and CC index) correlate to each other using a random sample of 1000 tweets selected from the full history of tweets written by Swiss elected politicians between 2011 and 2021. While the sample was automatically coded for CC using LIWC, we manually annotated the tweets according to an adapted version of the DQI for social media texts. Second, we conducted a correspondence analysis to investigate the relations between these dimensions, additional debate quality features, as well as individual political factors. Results show a good correlation between both indices (r up to 0.46), while also highlighting their respective weaknesses. Furthermore, the results highlight the necessity to include alternative dimensions of debate quality (such as emotion and inclusive or exclusive views) to enhance future measurements of debate quality in the realm of social media.

In the Multiple Sorting Task (MST) participants sort entities into their self-defined categories. The descriptions they provide of their categories provide qualitative data. Multi-dimensional scaling of sorting generates quantitative results. Relating the qualitative descriptions to the quantitative output creates integrated mixed methods. As part of the study of conceptions of public space an online MST was developed using Zoom and Miro, supported by Email and Smartphone where necessary. Twenty adult participants performed the MST with 20 pictures of public spaces in Stockholm. Results demonstrate the viability of the novel digital MST. The MST’s benefits, challenges, and applications in its digital form as an integrated mixed-methods are presented.