Making Convincing Choices: Scoping, Configuring and Implementing

This chapter explores the choices a researcher makes to convincingly scope, configure, and implement their activities around the ‘Data Triangle’. These enacting choices follow from and are more focusedResearch frame, categoriesfocused than choices related to contextualisationContextualisation, patterns of guiding assumptions, and framing, and provide concrete pathways for the researcher to traverse in order to gather and analyse the data they need, from the sources they intend to or need to connect with. Here is where the landscape of methodological choicesLandscape of methodological choices gets shaped, configured, pruned, and detailed (in short, ‘brought to life’) to produce the ‘Data Triangle’ the researcher navigates. We examine the issue of trade-offs, namely the adaptive decisions a researcher must sometimes make during their journey in anticipation of future situations or events (feedforwardSystems conceptsfeedforward) or in response to emergent, perhaps unexpected, situations or events (feedbackSystems conceptsfeedback). With respect to configuring research activities, we utilise the concept of a ‘Method Unit’ (MUMethod Unit (MU), which synergistically combines one data gathering strategy, one form of data, and one type of data source) as the fundamental building block. MUs provide the most flexible way of implementing pluralist systemic thinkingPluralist systemic thinking. Following on from research configuration, we discuss implementation considerations underpinning each component of each MUMethod Unit (MU) that must be addressed.