Methods

Actor constellation role plays

By Alexandra Frangenheim.

alexandra-frangenheim
Alexandra Frangenheim (biography)

How can transdisciplinary researchers gain a better understanding of systemic and multi-causal problems, including recognising different thought styles, appreciating the complexity of intervening, and anticipating points of conflict?

Actor constellation is a role play for identifying the relevance of various actors involved in specific problems. It is useful for problem framing when a research team is formed, for example to plan empirical inquiries or to identify relevant actors for addressing research questions. It also enables researchers from different disciplines and practitioners to uncover hidden dynamics and possible systemic solutions to the problem of interest, and to unlock the potential of shifting perspectives to ultimately develop new narratives.

When research participants represent relevant actors in a role play, their implicit assumptions about relationships, structures, interaction and actors’ knowledge are made explicit.

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Open Systems Theory: Producing successful strategic plans

By Merrelyn Emery.

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Merrelyn Emery (biography)

How can we produce strategic plans that people actually want to implement? How can the process create a sense of belonging and allow members of communities and organizations to take control over their own affairs?

Fred Emery and I tackled these questions while producing Open System Theory.

Open Systems Theory: The framework

Open Systems Theory has two basic concepts:

1. The world consists of systems with permeable boundaries, ie., systems which are open to their environments. This gives us co-evolution, the mutual determination of system and environment.

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A tool for developing shared awareness of team member research interests and expertise

By Melanie Bauer, Joshua Roney and Stephen M. Fiore.

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1. Melanie Bauer (biography)
2. Joshua Roney (biography)
3. Stephen M. Fiore (biography)

How can team members who have been working together for a while check assumptions, ensuring they are aware of each other’s breadth of expertise and research interests?

We have developed the “Linking-Relinking” tool to facilitate such a process. This tool supports science teams through development of a transactive memory system, which is a form of shared cognition having to do with “who knows what” on a team. Studies continually show that teams that develop an accurate transactive memory system are better able to coordinate their knowledge when working on challenging problems. The Linking-Relinking Tool can support transactive memory system development by helping members determine how accurate their knowledge is of their teammates and calibrate appropriately.

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What roles do you play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects?

By Hanna Salomon, Benjamin Hofmann and Sabine Hoffmann.

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1. Hanna Salomon (biography)
2. Benjamin Hofmann (biography)
3. Sabine Hoffmann (biography)

What roles do researchers typically play in inter- and transdisciplinary projects? How can they be made transparent in order to reflect on them?

Inter- and transdisciplinary projects typically require different roles and the researchers involved may play one or more of them. There is a plethora of literature describing various ideal-typical roles and we used the literature on researchers’ roles in sustainability science to develop a reflection tool on researcher roles in inter- and transdisciplinary projects.

A Role Reflection Tool

The reflection tool consists of a role survey for individual researchers, a spider web graph for immediate role visualization on the individual and project team level, and a set of questions for individual and project team reflections.

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Photovoice as a participatory research method

By Jule Marie Huber, Claudia Bieling, María García-Martín, Tobias Plieninger and Mario Torralba

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1. Jule Marie Huber; 2. Claudia Bieling; 3. María García-Martín; 4. Tobias Plieninger; 5. Mario Torralba (biographies)

How can research effectively engage vulnerable and marginalised groups on issues that affect their lives? How can local knowledge, opinions, and experiences be captured in a way that identifies their concerns and priorities?

Photovoice is a research method that uses photographs taken by participants to encourage dialogue within the community. It was developed to empower marginalised groups and promote community action, and is also more widely useful as a participatory method. It has been used for issues in public health, immigration, homelessness, disability, youth and sustainability.

In this i2Insights contribution we describe a 7-step procedure for using photovoice, noting that considerable flexibility is possible.

Step 1: Development of a research design

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Team development is an essential team science competency

By Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano, L. Michelle Bennett and Yianna Vovides

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1. Gaetano R. Lotrecchiano (biography)
2. L. Michelle Bennett (biography)
3. Yianna Vovides (biography)

How does a team develop purposefully from an assembly of individuals with a shared research interest to an integrated and interdependent team? What process can they put in place to explore and discover not just their own but each other’s motivations, needs, and values? What needs to be put in place to collaboratively establish a team culture, norms, and processes from which they can agree to operate?

Here we describe the Reflective-Reflexive Design Method that addresses intra- and inter-personal dynamics for team development. Two assumptions underpin it:

  1. reflection and reflexivity are necessary dynamics for teaming success, and
  2. interventions that build successful teams take advantage of both dynamics in context and as intersection points.

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Decision support interventions

By Etiënne Rouwette and Alberto Franco

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1. Etiënne Rouwette (biography)
2. Alberto Franco (biography)

What are interventions to support team decision making? And how can interventions enable team decision making to become a rigorous, transparent and defensible process?

Interventions are procedures designed to improve a decision making process. Within the content of team decision making, an intervention is comprised of designed facilitated activities carried out in order to help a team achieve its goals. Team goals include generating a better and shared understanding of a situation of interest or concern, producing a recommendation on how to respond to the situation, or simply deciding what to do next regarding the situation.

Because team members are likely to have different views and goals regarding the situation, facilitation is central to an intervention. Specifically, facilitated activities are designed to encourage the active participation of team members in discussions, so that a mutual understanding within the team can be achieved. In addition, these activities also play a critical role in fostering the development of integrative solutions that create a sense of shared responsibility for their implementation.

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Living labs are learning labs: Creating and mapping conditions for social learning in transdisciplinary research

By Marina Knickel and Guido Caniglia

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1. Marina Knickel (biography)
2. Guido Caniglia (biography)

What is required for social learning in living labs? How can social learning be mapped in living labs?

Living labs are conceived as spaces for social learning across difference in real-world situations through transdisciplinary research with diverse actors. We argue that the following conditions, often intertwined and building on each other, are required to set up living labs as learning spaces:

1. Epistemic: Learning to foster knowledge pluralism

We suggest supporting research and practice partners in developing a capacity for knowledge pluralism as the ability to appreciate and work with multiple kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing. Knowledge pluralism could be fostered by learning to recognise differences in knowledge, perspectives and socio-cultural identities as strengths and by strategically valorising them.

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Participatory video

By Pamela Richardson

pamela-richardson
Pamela Richardson (biography)

What is participatory video? How can it enhance participatory research? What’s required to make participatory video work well?

Participatory video involves the co-production of videos in a group setting and can be used for community development, research and advocacy. The focus here is on research and, as a tool for communication and reflection, participatory video can support many different steps along a research journey, including:

  • co-creation of video-based funding proposals or the development of group plans,
  • project documentation and reflection,
  • participatory monitoring and evaluation,
  • dissemination of “best practices” or communication of results and lessons learned.

In these ways, video-making by participants can support both internal and external communication processes within a research project.

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Generating evidence using the Delphi method

By Dmitry Khodyakov

dmitry-khodyakov
Dmitry Khodyakov (biography)

What is Delphi? How has the Delphi method stood up over time? How can the best of Delphi be adapted to new circumstances and problems?

The Delphi method is a group-based process for eliciting and aggregating opinion on a topic with a goal of exploring the existence of consensus among a diverse group of handpicked experts. The Delphi method was developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to obtain a reliable expert consensus, which is often used as a substitute for empirical evidence when it does not exist.

The four key characteristics of the Delphi method are:

  1. anonymity, 
  2. iterative data collection,
  3. participant feedback, and
  4. statistical determination of group response.

As a result, Delphi has become best practice for quantifying the results of group elicitation processes.

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Making the Nominal Group Technique more accessible

By Jason Olsen

jason-olsen
Jason Olsen (biography)

Looking to gain real insights from those with lived experience about a specific topic? Interested in a low-cost method that fosters equal participation and discussion over participant domination in a research focus group? Want to know about modifications to make pan-disability (ie., working with participants with different impairments) research focus groups more inclusive?

The Nominal Group Technique developed by Ven and Delbecq (1972) has been used for more than 50 years. Key to its success is the posing of a single unambiguous and unbiased question about a problem that can generate a wide range of answers. The process structures the meeting to enable critical dimensions of the question to be identified, ranked and rated in a way that:

  • limits the influence of the researcher leading the project, as well as the influence of attendees,
  • allows participants to clarify the question’s dimensions and gaps,
  • increases the likelihood of equal participation for all group members,
  • affords equal influence to different, and potentially conflicting, values and ideas.

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Keyword quiz: an icebreaker method for interdisciplinary teams

By Sebastian Rogga and Anton Parisi

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1. Sebastian Rogga (biography)
2. Anton Parisi (biography)

How can members of interdisciplinary teams quickly gain a better understanding of each other’s thematic preferences and skills in a way that is also engaging and fun?

We have developed a “keyword quiz” icebreaker method to facilitate exchange between members of interdisciplinary teams, especially between people who are not complete strangers to each other but are collaborating in a project context for the first time.

In brief, the idea is to communicate each member’s scientific profile based on keywords from publications that the team members have published and that they have selected based on specific categories.

The keywords of a publication are presented visually to the whole group and the team members then guess, in the form of a quiz, which team member published the associated publication.

After the author has been revealed, they share the reasons for choosing the publication.

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