Complexity informed social research : from complexity concepts to creative applications

This chapter describes and demonstrates a complexity informed qualitative social research approach, associated methods and techniques. To theorize human experience and sense making from findings and ideas of complexity studies in nature, translation and interpretation is required. The chapter explains these translations and interpretations based on the assumption that qualitative research, like complexity, has to take a radically relational approach to interpreting interrelationships between sense makers, fragments of knowledge, cultures, histories, futures and aspirations. It sets out how complexity offers a paradigmatic orientation to assist qualitative researchers in discerning nonlinearly-based pattern and order. Vortical postmodern ethnography as an inquiry approach is described along with the narrative generating method of coherent conversations and the techniques of fractal narrative analysis and attractor narrative analysis. Vortical postmodern ethnography effectively re-conceptualizes a number of problematic issues in ethnographic inquiry. The chapter concludes with a demonstration of this inquiry approach and techniques in a research project.