Conceptual framework

In this section, we discuss the concept of crisis as we apply it in the paper, linking in concepts of uncertainty, and introducing ideas about maturity and sustainability of research responses. Fitzgibbon (2022, p. 31) writes of crisis:

The crisis – or as Koppe (2022, p. 46) sees it ‘point change, or series of events, that disrupt the social world, introducing a period of uncertainty’ – calls everything into question, including the immediate issue of what should we do. Crises demand urgent response and rushed decisions based on incomplete knowledge, they also demand learning for the future. Crises ripple out so that the original crisis prompts other crises and, for researchers as for others, personal and professional crises demand swift thinking, reflection and multiple decisions on questions without single answers. Crises ‘tend to crack open an uncertain future, exposing us to emotionally laden transitionality’ (Green et al., 2022, p. 83).

Much of the literature on methodological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic refers not just to crisis but to the challenge of uncertainty (e.g. Jairath et al., 2021), or even profound uncertainty (Wood, 2020), as if this was an inevitable and unwelcome consequence of crisis. While inevitable, uncertainty may be framed more positively as having potential benefit once interruption becomes seen as productive. Yet uncertainty can also lead to high levels of concern (Stilgoe, 2007) and demand a public sense that the (social) scientists are in control (Mellor, 2010). While the precarity associated with uncertainty may differ according to context (Rahman et al., 2021), Sedysheva (2021, p. 83) illustrates how uncertainty with research plans could contribute to ‘deep personal crisis’. Uncertainty leads to anxiety and perceived loss of control and therefore to measures to regain control (Barnes, 2020) or manage/avoid further risk (Rahman et al., 2021) to bring some measure of certainty or ability to be adaptive (Buddefeld et al., 2021). This desire to manage local uncertainty in the face of global uncertainty (Star, 1985) relates to the concept that uncertainty is the socially constructed product of the inadequacy and irrelevance of current knowledge (Star, 1985; Stilgoe, 2007). The concept of uncertainty tends to be linked to similar concepts as in ‘VUCA’ – ‘Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity [which is] is a litmus test for recognising unpredictable external environments’ (Fletcher & Griffiths, 2020, p. 1). Commenting on the magnification of VUCA in the pandemic, Fletcher and Griffiths (2020) see the challenge as being able to re-imagine and learn lessons in light of it. Like seeking control in crisis, they urge us to ‘be prepared, embed an agility into the organisation, become digitally enabled’ (p. 3) so that we are better prepared for any future crisis. While uncertainty may be transformative – the urge is to take the uncertainty out of uncertainty! In that this might mean addressing fragility and enhancing flexibility by improving digital maturity (Fletcher & Griffiths, 2020), this brings us nicely to the concepts of maturity and sustainability.

The maturity question, How far have we come? – or Where are we on a continuum of progression towards where we need to be? – is a crucial one for many organisations made all the more pertinent by crisis and uncertainty; it is complemented by the bigger sustainability question, Can/should we keep going like this? While the concept of sustainability is usually applied to issues of the climate, environment, planning and so forth, critical to it is the idea that the development under question ‘seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future’ (Brundtland, 1987, p. 39). Sustainability necessitates balancing multiple priorities (economic, environmental and social) (Smythe, 2014). Scholars of sustainability often seek to understand what plays a pivotal role in achieving sustainability, asking questions about who benefits and who suffers. In our terms, research and research methods need to be able to withstand crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, and we need to understand what any necessary adaptations and adjustments mean for the future.

Methods

Our study was given ethical approval by the University of Southampton Faculty of Social Sciences Ethics Committee. It was designed to interconnect research community engagement and review of the emerging evidence in three iterative phases:

• Phase 1 (August 2020–February 2021) comprised eight knowledge exchange workshops on Zoom with 58 diverse researchers in total, analysis of the emergent grey literature presenting methodological responses to the COVID-19 crisis and rapid evidence review of work published in 2020 that could answer the question: How have social research methods been successfully adapted or designed for use within pandemic conditions? The emphasis was on finding out fast and providing immediate support by sharing developments in a systematic fashion.

• Phase 2 (March–September 2021) was a continuation comprising an additional three Zoom knowledge exchange workshops with 29 researchers and instigating review of the 2021 literature.

• Phase 3 (September 2021–June 2022) engaged a selected group of ten researchers in three in-depth Zoom workshops to share how they were grappling with research amidst unprecedented uncertainty.

In this paper, we use the rapid evidence review data while acknowledging that analysis of the workshop fieldnotes, transcripts and generated artefacts also shaped the findings. The reviews were conducted by two researchers from the study team adapting the Knowledge to Action framework of Khangura et al. (2012). Six bibliographic databases were searched: Scopus; Web of science; PsycINFO; Coronavirus Research database; ERIC; and Social Science Premium Collection. The search combined terms related to applying, developing or adapting research methods with terms related to social conditions and public health mandates accompanying Covid-19: (‘research method*’ OR methodolog* OR qualitative OR quantitative OR fieldwork OR survey* OR interview* OR ‘focus group*’ OR observation* OR *ethnog) AND (Covid* OR coronavirus OR pandemic OR lockdown OR ‘social distan*’ OR ‘face cover*’ OR face mask*). Additional hand-searching supplemented the systematic search.

Studies were identified that met ALL of the following criteria:

Making research happen: methods that helped make sense of the situation

The data illustrate the conditions that interfered with social researchers’ ability to research during the pandemic: mandates to stay at home, closures, cancellations of events (see, e.g. Fritz et al., 2020; Vicente et al., 2020); need for physical distance; and restrictions on travel (see, e.g. Leemann et al., 2020; Lovo, 2020). These, together with alarming rates of death and severe illness, were associated with increasing levels of anxiety and stress (Fell et al., 2020; Markham et al., 2021; Moraes Silva & Mont’alverne, 2020), bereavement and grief, disorientation, time pressures (Gummer et al., 2020; Huber & Helm, 2020), and rapidly changing priorities (Markham et al., 2021; Scherpenzeel et al., 2020; Sovacool et al., 2020). Added to this was the dynamism and uncertainty as ‘rules’ for interacting were changing and the exacerbation of inequalities with the pandemic, particularly affecting people with disabilities (Partlow, 2020), with lower incomes (Liegghio & Caragata, 2020) and from rural communities (Ndhlovu, 2020).

Importantly, researchers saw opportunities amidst the chaos and tried new things. Some methods were a good fit for the conditions; our own use of knowledge exchange workshops which had a metaphor-based biographical element, for instance, showed how dialogic methods support emotional wellbeing, cognitive processing and practical management of challenges, making them particularly welcome (see Coverdale et al., 2023). Other expressive and creative methods were well suited to these needs including letter writing (Maycock, 2021); diary writing (Gwenzi et al., 2020; M. Jones et al., 2020; Scott et al., 2021); digital storytelling (Malachowska et al., 2021); self-recording using mobile probes (Goldstein et al., 2020); using photographs and drawing (Isaacs et al., 2021) and other arts-based methods (Green et al., 2022). Rather than needing major adjustment for COVID-19 conditions, these methods supported expression in whatever modes participants had available to them to communicate their embodied experience. Perhaps most suited to the pandemic context was autoethnography, showcased in one major research initiative and special issue (Markham et al., 2021). Autoethnographic writing supported people, particularly academics, in sense-making in the pandemic (Chemi, 2020; Lee, 2020; Sarkar, 2020), meeting emotional needs (Martel et al., 2021) and flourishing.

Making research happen: finding ways to adapt

Researchers also managed to continue research by adapting their research practices with minor to fundamental changes, substituting or combining methods in new ways. Surveys were widely adapted by changing modes from in-person interview to online, postal or telephone. Some mode changes represented significant innovation, such as the growth of CATI-mobile phone surveys in India (Nagpal et al., 2021) or novel combinations such as in-depth telephone interviews (with vulnerable people and community leaders) preceding online surveys of the general population (Moraes Silva & Mont’alverne, 2020). The ability to pivot and be flexible has been critical. Strategies included modifying or reducing questions (Sastry et al., 2020), making content-related adjustments (Will et al., 2020) to suit the new mode, or supporting the cost of mobile phone use for research (Agarwal, 2021; Khalil et al., 2021).

Qualitative researchers also used remote methods, sharing reflections on pivoting from in person to online individual interviews (e.g. Cuevas-Parra, 2020; Ellis & Rawicki, 2020; Ndhlovu, 2020), group interviews (Dodds & Hess, 2021; Verma & Bizas, 2020) and focus groups (Howlett, 2021; Jones et al., 2020) or to telephone interviews (Jones et al., 2020; Snow, 2020). Use of online and telephone interviews and focus groups was found to change, rather than weaken, research relationships (see, e.g. Snow, 2020). The limitations have become well known, including lack of digital access (Melis et al., 2021), technical challenges for some groups (Ellis & Rawicki, 2020), and reduced feedback and interaction (Walker et al., 2021) or comfort and empathy (Webber-Ritchey et al., 2021). Others, however, report benefits: flexibility and convenience for participants (Alanazi et al., 2021; Khalil et al., 2021; Tarrant et al., 2021), alternative modes being creative and sustaining (Gratton et al., 2020), generating rich, deep data (Cuevas-Parra, 2020), with less talking over each other in focus groups (Halliday et al., 2021). Phone interviews sometimes created safe and relaxed spaces to voice opinions and discuss sensitive topics/challenging life experiences (Khalil et al., 2021; Renosa et al., 2021; Serekoane et al., 2021). Interviewers have incorporated cultural probes sent ahead by post (Couceiro, 2020) and built relationships from a distance supported by community leaders and local stakeholders (Melis et al., 2021).

Making research valid and trustworthy

The pandemic has impacted not just how social researchers conduct their research, but how they work to ensure its validity and trustworthiness. This was a dominant concern for survey researchers in 2020 when the pandemic was impacting survey recruitment and necessitating mode changes part-way through studies (Burton et al., 2020; Sakshaug et al., 2020; Walker et al., 2021). This raised key questions about the implications of mode effects for consistency, representativeness, internal validity and comparability of survey data (Chatha & Bretz, 2020). In response, researchers used the same interviewers across modes to mitigate mode effects (Gummer et al., 2020; Will et al., 2020) and used experiments (Panter-Brick et al., 2021) and subsample or secondary populations for comparison across modes (Leemann et al., 2020; Sastry et al., 2020). Such efforts have provided greater understanding of mode experiences (Leemann et al., 2020) and distinguishing mode effects from pandemic effects (Will et al., 2020). Even so, the challenge of achieving representative survey samples has been exacerbated by the pivot to multi-pronged sampling and using social media (Ali et al., 2020; Ramlagan et al., 2021).

Comparability of survey data amidst major societal change is concerning. Fell et al. (2020, p. 1) ask: ‘How can we ensure that conclusions drawn from data collected during the pandemic are valid, representative, generalisable to a post-pandemic world, and comparable to the pre-pandemic one?’ In response, survey researchers have included guidance on how to answer questions from a pre-COVID or in-COVID time perspective (Burton et al., 2020; Will et al., 2020), by adding new questions (Burton et al., 2020), separate COVID-specific modules, sometimes with their own mode (Gummer et al., 2020; Will et al., 2020), or adding surveys within longitudinal studies (Burton et al., 2020). There has been a drive to produce data and report findings quickly to inform policy and action (Huber & Helm, 2020; Ramlagan et al., 2021; Sakshaug et al., 2020), with speed a trade-off with the representativeness of survey samples (Connelly & Gayle, 2020; Fell et al., 2020; Huber & Helm, 2020).

Turning to trustworthiness in qualitative research, some researchers have argued that ethnographic research should be, and is, well positioned to respond to validity issues raised by the pandemic by accounting for changes in method and object. When, as in ethnography, experience is the main method (Pandian, 2019), the typical distinction between object and method is dissolved. For other researchers using qualitative methods, building participant trust has been critical to the trustworthiness of the research in its role as fundamental to producing rich data. We return to this in the next section.

Making research ethical

The rethinking of research plans during the pandemic has been seen as an ethical imperative (Kara & Khoo, 2020). Researchers have been juggling the need to do research with the need to address heightened risks to participants, to themselves (Rahman et al., 2021) and other stakeholders. Carrying on has necessitated not just adapting research methods and designs, but agile, careful decision-making about deferring and resuming in which ethical questions have been at the forefront (see, e.g. Malila, 2020; Pascal & Bertram, 2021). There has been little evidence of people deciding not to do their research at all having weighed that it constitutes an unnecessary burden to continue (Fell et al., 2020). Often the stance has been that it is ethically most responsible to continue as this causes least detriment to locally embedded research collaborators and researched communities (Carayannis & Bolin, 2020). Moreover, social research can contribute unique and valued insights into crises like the pandemic (Pacheco & Zaimağaoğlu, 2020; Scott et al., 2021) and do good through providing outlets to talk and connect (Averett, 2021; Kobakhidze et al., 2021; Snow, 2020).

The pivot to digital methods has raised major ethical challenges, such as working with limited communicative access to participants’ wellbeing (Braun et al., 2020; Partlow, 2020) and across the digital divide (Chatha & Bretz, 2020) with inequalities in digital access interacting with inequalities in research representation. Researchers have developed strategies to build rapport and trust and to monitor participation in online spaces (Roberts et al., 2021).

Over and above these challenges, the research evidence we scrutinised and generated underlined the need for radical reflexivity for ethical practice (Ravitch, 2020) and highlighted critical and feminist ethics of care approaches (Averett, 2021; Liegghio & Caragata, 2020). Participant wellbeing has been promoted by using methods that are therapeutic (Pacheco & Zaimağaoğlu, 2020) or that provide a sense of purpose (Clarke & Watson, 2020; Gratton et al., 2020).

The pandemic has also initiated a shift in research relationships. Restrictions on access to research sites and communities have led to an increased reliance on gatekeepers, research partners and local researchers (Verma & Bizas, 2020). Most significantly, with researchers less able to travel from richer, more privileged areas, local researchers in the Global South, in low- and middle-income countries, and in conflict areas have assumed more prominent roles, empowering them to challenge established power imbalances, and call for greater equity in the recognition and remuneration of knowledge and expertise (Carayannis & Bolin, 2020; Mwambari et al., 2021; Nambiar et al., 2021).

Making research sustainable: methods, methodologies and practices for an uncertain future

Garnering a big picture of changes to social research in the pandemic brings the advantage of gaining a longer view. Our work has spanned the first methods papers to appear addressing the impact of the pandemic through to when a mix of business as usual, vastly changed social context, and new uncertainties began to emerge. Therefore, we now turn to what we have learned about methods, not just for the challenges of pandemics and other crises, but for an ongoing uncertain future. One certainty is that methodological and ethical issues will require continued review and reflection. Methodological adaptation during COVID-19 involved a process of unlearning and re-learning (Renosa et al., 2021). This has left fundamental questions about the future of research practice, with Lane et al. (2021) suggesting pauses to projects can be productive, creative spaces. Similarly, it is helpful to pause and take stock of which of the changes to research discussed in this paper are sustainable into the future, through necessity or desirability, and to reflect on what we have learned that we should retain or develop further. Our experience of this project sheds light on the ongoing discussions we need to be having in a ‘pandemic-triggered … revaluation of academic research norms’ (Smith, 2021, p. 176).

A major discussion is emerging about the future of in-person and online methods and about combining them in survey and qualitative research, raising the questions of whether it is sustainable to retain a mix of these (see, e.g. Chatha & Bretz, 2020; Cuevas-Parra, 2020; Dodds & Hess, 2021; Gummer et al., 2020; Scherpenzeel et al., 2020; Will et al., 2020). Decisions will, it seems, be guided by finance in pressed economies as research funders look for cost-effective options. Also, important are questions of how much mode choice we can, and should, give participants, many of whom are connected and skilled online in ways that were unimaginable pre-pandemic. Is there any going back, we wonder, from what Braun et al. (2020) refer to as ‘the onlineification of everything’. There are certainly pressures to ensure that the gains made in widening digital inclusion in research are sustained and extended. Social researchers, we argue, play an important role in further highlighting and addressing the digital divide.

Doing social research in the pandemic brought wellbeing into the spotlight as researchers and research participants struggled together and apart with threats to their lives, livelihoods, plans and dreams. With the affective dimension to the fore and researchers’ human vulnerabilities exposed, having seen inside each other’s homes, shared in each other’s routines, will we go back to emotionally distanced research or will we continue to feel joy in being in the physical or online presence of others involved in our research? Some of the emotionality of the early pandemic literature had already faded in 2022, yet the need to support researcher well-being, which has suffered during the pandemic (Sedysheva, 2021) is an ongoing one, demanding the development of sustainable research norms and mechanisms for caring for both researchers and researched. More systemically, it has become clear that the long-standing global inequalities in research exposed by the pandemic need to continue to be challenged. For future sustainability, we need to build on the new opportunities and empowerment that have arisen for local researchers in the Global South.

The crisis of pandemic times brought the agility and flexibility of methodological practices into the spotlight. There is much to be learned from researchers (e.g. Lane et al., 2021) who responded positively to pandemic uncertainty with optimistic refocusing and reframing to reinvigorate research and research relationships. The literature indicates a desire to embed resilience in future projects in which researchers can be ‘more aware of when to adapt and change and when to take a break, pause, and evaluate’ (Rahman et al., 2021, p. 8) and much learning about how to ‘plan for unexpected disruptions’ (p. 2). There is a desire to minimise the impact of crises and other disruptions through strategic and adaptive research design and enhanced risk assessment as advocated by Hermans et al. (2021), and to develop proactive contingency planning as advocated by Rahman et al. (2021); this may be most important for longitudinal research. Douedari et al. (2021) highlight that major uncertainty requires major flexibility, which places new demands of research funders as well as researchers. Sustainable working is likely to involve social researchers and funding bodies working together to build options into research grants for changes to timelines and flexible use of methods and budgets.

Making research sustainable: emerging, maturing and consolidating methodological adaptations

In addition to sustainability discussions, there are areas of methodological adaptation to crisis that are important because they are at a critical point of development. Here, we can apply a maturity model in that such models ‘describe the development of an entity over time’ (Klimko, 2001, cited by Wendler, 2012). Evolving methods adaptations being discussed in the methods literature may be at an early stage, a critical juncture in terms of potential sustainability, becoming quite embedded, or somewhere between these points. Concern with these different stages of maturity is evident in the recent funding call in the UK from the Economic and Social Research Council¹ that follows on from our work. The funding council seeks research ‘to refine recently developed methodological approaches [since the first lockdown in March 2020] to enable them to be fully embedded in social science research practice … maximising their contribution to social science research’.

Maturity models represent a well-used way of conceptualising progress towards a goal using delineated steps (Storm et al., 2014). Steps or stages might be awareness, evolving, operational, sustaining, or initiated, developing, defined, integrated and optimised, marking the transition from building awareness to continuous innovation (see ISH4 Systems for Health Framework, PAHO n.d). The research council is concerned with refining and consolidating methods developments showing that a maturity model offers a convenient way of conceptualising progress towards strategic goals that are valuable for decision-makers. Maturity models are intended to help see evolving trends and ‘trouble spots’ and ‘to stimulate discussion among practitioners to initiate activities for continuous improvement’ (Boughzala & de Vreede, 2012, p. 306). While originally developed for evaluating effective delivery of software development projects to mitigate the risk of project failure, and now widely applied in quality assurance (Boughzala & de Vreede, 2012), evaluation and validation of maturity models themselves lack maturity, as Wendler (2012) shows. Nonetheless, the core ideas have resonance when considering the progress of social researchers adapting to crisis and uncertainty.

At the earlier end of an imagined methodological methods maturity continuum are adaptations to crisis that still very exploratory, often flagged by social researchers for further work, such as exploring how the clinical and healthcare practice response to COVID-19 of virtual consultations can be adopted/adapted by social researchers (Tremblay et al., 2021). Early-stage adaptations may make isolated appearances in the literature without echoes across different projects, for example, developing an online version of Q methodology (Alanazi et al., 2021). Equally relatively immature may be on a less granular scale, such as the methodological shift involved in doing anthropology at a distance, what Podjed (2021) calls armchair anthropology.

It becomes more difficult to comment on the level of maturity of developments in methods and methods practices that clearly precede the COVID-19 but that were boosted by the crisis. Letter-writing and telephone interviews, for example, had gone out of fashion but became newly relevant, gaining fresh attention and illustrating that progress may be less smoothly linear than maturity models might assume. Approaches like ethnography are ever-evolving, and the evolution towards digital versions was spurred on by the crisis (Lee, 2021), whereas the approach of community-based participatory research, mostly used with marginalised groups who suffered badly in the pandemic, had a bumpy ride (Valdez & Gubrium, 2020). In terms of the well-established practice of methodological bricolage (Buddefeld et al., 2021), novel early-stage versions emerged such as using mobile instant messaging interviews in mixed methods or longitudinal studies (Kaufmann et al., 2021) and triangulating multiple available data sources, such as interviews with secondary data (see Kobakhidze et al., 2021). Another example is mixing and combining online and offline methods to create hybrid in situ methods like walking interviews with the researcher connecting from a distance via mobile phone app proposed by Shareck et al. (2021).

At the other end of the continuum from early-stage adaptations to crisis are the methods that were repeatedly rehearsed and refined during the pandemic and that we argue are quite embedded and likely to be self-sustaining now that sufficient knowledge about them has been gained and put into the public domain. We include here: conducting online interviews in which rapport is established (Renosa et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2021) and conducting online focus groups in which the technical and ethical aspects are successfully managed (e.g. Howlett, 2021). Considerable progress has been made in making best use of community leaders, local stakeholders and local researchers for engaging groups who are remote or vulnerable, older people and people experiencing poverty to sustain and nourish local relationships and contributions in research in times of crisis (Melis et al., 2021; Moraes Silva & Mont’alverne, 2020). And importantly there is a growing evidence base on selecting and using expressive methods to fit particular populations, such as collaborative autoethnographies for academics and students (Markham et al., 2021; Martel et al., 2021), digital diaries for young people (Gwenzi et al., 2020; Malachowska et al., 2021), and mobile phone use for remote populations (Nagpal et al., 2021) that all worked in this last crisis. There is also repeated evidence about using new variants of (collaborative) autoethnography to develop understanding of the impact of crises on people’s everyday lives and support them with meaning making and coping.

Perhaps, the most interesting outcome of applying maturity model thinking to our synthesis is the identification of methodological developments that are at a critical juncture. It is these that perhaps most require funding for their refinement and consolidation so that they become sustainable. We include here the need to enhance capacity to diversify sampling and recruitment practices, including using social media, to establish good response rates in surveys particularly among under-represented groups; this was much needed in the recent crisis (see Ali et al., 2020; Ramlagan et al., 2021). Similarly, capacity building is needed to address the digital divide and other inequalities, such as access to safe, quiet, private spaces, solutions to care burdens and social stigma, by finding methods and providing resources, rewards and incentives that reduce barriers to participation (see Lathen & Laestadius, 2021). Also, at a critical juncture are efforts to better understand how to build and sustain research relationships when working remotely; design remote, mixed, or flexible mode surveys with representative samples and mitigations for mode effects; adapt visual tools such as Likert-scales, and visual approaches such as Photovoice for incorporation into telephone methods; adapt in person workshop-based methods to online versions facilitated by video conferencing in which use of chat functions and collaborative whiteboarding platforms are optimised; adapt methods typically used in home visits to online (or hybrid) methods, including making stronger use of people and objects in the home as research tools. We suggest particularly critical might be expanding mobile instant messaging interviews and other usages of smartphone apps for research and achieving optimal trade-offs between pace of data collection/analysis and rigour and ethics in time-critical research, particularly rapid surveys and rapid qualitative studies. These shine out as issues in the pandemic where the potential is yet to be realised and where the solution or points of principle are yet to be established.

Conclusion

We draw some brief conclusions from this work. First, it is not sustainable that every researcher finds their own way through crises and uncertainty in social research without an evidence base to draw on. Capacity to refer to analyses of emerging and tested methodological adaptations must be helpful for research quality, even if in every case the method must adapt to the evolving situation. The global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that a significant body of methodological literature was published in a short period of time. This is very different from previous, arguably more localised recent crises, such as hurricane Katrina, the Ebola outbreak, and the financial crash in high-income countries. The social and health impacts of these were researched, but less so the process of conducting social research. The COVID-19 pandemic has many legacies and one is the building of capacity to research in periods of crisis.

Second, researchers need to consider and address the significant ethical and epistemic challenges alongside the practical and technical challenges of research impacted by COVID-19 and other crises and uncertainties. We need to recognise that ‘crises could come in many forms’ (Rahman et al., 2021, p. 9) interrupting and disrupting research in small and big ways making it wise to embed research resilience wherever possible or to make more radical shifts in positioning research as forever unfixed and context-dependent. By this we mean resilience in the way Rahman et al. (2021, p. 9) use the term, ‘the ability to adapt and continue the research throughout a crisis while maintaining consistency with the overall research design to successfully complete a research project’, and in the wider sense of the research community developing capacity with remote and flexible research methods and combinations of methods to fit changing conditions. The institutions supporting social research have a critical role to play in ensuring changing research practices meet current needs with minimal threat to future working.

Third, there is limited benefit in trying to intricately map methodological progress across stages of maturity. Application of maturity model thinking risks closing down opportunities to grow methodologically in rhizomic rather than linear fashion and it risks implying more certainty than there is. The state of maturity of methodological adaptation to crisis will vary across disciplines, cultures, participant group, subject matter, and especially the resource-richness of the national context. Nonetheless, identifying methodological developments that are at a critical juncture could help to indicate where the methodological capacity-building focus should be. Notwithstanding the longer term need to also progress methodological developments from early to embedded levels of maturity, with finite resources, this might shed light on where investment should be in readiness for crises ahead.