Small Data and Big Data in the Waves of the Pandemic Building the Boat as we Sailed it

The pandemic hit the research world like a cannonball. ‘Normal’ ways of working and methodological approaches became impossible overnight, but the world desperately needed high-quality research to inform urgent policy decisions. This presentation will describe how one research team mobilised to undertake hypothesis-generating qualitative research (“small data”) to inform a major prospective study of acute COVID symptoms in over 10,000 patients (“big data”). The standard research timelines were upended and governance processes suspended. Nevertheless, some degree of rigour was achieved. In this keynote from the 2021 Research Methods e-Festival, Professor Trisha Greenhalgh reflects on lessons learned from high-stakes research at the interface between health and social care at this time of crisis.