TOCICO

Academic research into complex problems draws from a range of research methods which often include the methods of qualitative research. These methods have served the social science research community well, and assisted researchers to explore fascinating topics, collect rich data, and engage in intriguing discourse. The methods have been used by millions of researchers worldwide and are in widespread use throughout the academic world. The methods have been honed to overcome many difficulties, with many improvements and refinements such as greater reliability and ethicality of the research, and dissemination of results. However, researchers still face many difficulties at various steps in the research process: for example, constructing initial workable research questions, collecting the right data, making sense of the data, and communicating the logic of the findings. Over a decade of academic research involving several postgraduate research projects, we have explored the use of TOC tools to address these concerns, and especially to complement qualitative research methods. This has been applied to a variety of deductive, inductive and abductive research and in combination with a range of qualitative methods, including questionnaires, interviews, action research, case study, and sets of case studies, and using various approaches within the TOC tools. The result of combining both methodologies - qualitative and TOC - allows us to use each method to complement gaps in the other, forming threads of validation, to make the research logical and coherent. This paper will draw on a number of these research projects to describe the different benefits of qualitative and TOC methods and how they complement each other.