The introduction of digital approaches is perhaps the most significant change to the way that healthcare research is conducted that has been seen since computers first came into use. This introductory chapter will set the tone for the rest of the book. The book is divided into two parts: 1. digital platforms, and 2. approaches to healthcare research that are either uniquely digital or are adaptations of existing approaches to the online context. Within each of these parts, a collection of chapters by distinguished and rising authors present digital platforms and techniques and consider these as applied to a wide range of healthcare studies. This introduction will consider the broad area that the book addresses and will similarly be divided into the same two sections. The unique aspects of digital research approaches will be highlighted and emphasised, and the reader will be prepared for the chapters that follow.

This chapter explores and provides guidance on the e-Delphi method, and challenges in ethical recruitment, data management, and security.

Qualitative research has much to contribute to our knowledge regarding lived experiences in a crisis, but most research in the context of crises is quantitative. Domains of qualitative research remain under-represented. Qualitative researchers bear the responsibility to voice populations who may be already struggling in a health crisis. This chapter aims to disentangle a few dilemmas of qualitative researchers in planning and implementing rigorous research upon and during an outbreak of a crisis. Initial dilemmas are whether and how to conduct a qualitative study during the outbreak or retrospectively; how may the researcher access study populations; and how the researcher may encourage participation. Other dilemmas concern obtaining informed consent, determining the right timing and length for the interviews, and creating interviewee--interviewer trust and intimacy. The dilemmas following data collection relate to the quality criteria of data analysis.

Chapter 2 focused on the structural features of networks. These features are determined by the links that are present and how they are arranged among the nodes. Different arrangements of links lead to different shapes, which has consequences for how things might spread through the network, which nodes are important, and how cohesive a collection of nodes is. In empirical research about social networks, the real nodes and links in question will have substantive meaning. Adding those substantive labels to the nodes and links is a start, but we might have additional information about the nodes and links that we would like to incorporate in our study. It is possible to integrate substantive information about nodes and links with structural information in ways that can enrich a network study.

This chapter provides an overview of selected studies assessing technology-aided programs to promote independent leisure and communication or combinations of independent leisure, communication, and daily activities in people with mild to moderate intellectual disability often associated with sensory and/or motor impairments. The studies included in the overview offer an opportunity to describe the development of those programs, the technology solutions used to support them, and their outcomes in terms of participants’ independent performance. Following the presentation of the programs and their outcomes, the discussion focuses on three main issues: (a) effectiveness of the programs and methodological considerations, (b) accessibility and affordability of the programs, and (c) implications of the programs for professionals working in daily contexts. With regard to the last issue, an effort was made to examine ethical and moral questions that may accompany the possible decisions of professionals to adopt those programs in daily contexts.

This chapter uses a case comparison to show the behavioral consequences of uncertainty about relationality – how it prevents new collaborative relationships that people would value from forming in the first place.

This chapter discusses the importance of collaborative relationships in civic life, and how the relationships that people would value do not always arise on their own. Instead, there can be an unmet desire to collaborate. It underscores why it’s important to distinguish between two types of goals for collaborative relationships: informal collaboration oriented toward knowledge exchange, and formal collaboration oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability. It also introduces the book’s main argument, which is that in addition to commonly cited factors such as resource constraints and a lack of organizational incentives, unmet desire arises because potential collaborators (who often begin as strangers) can be uncertain how to relate to each other. Uncertainty about relationality is a key barrier to new collaborative relationships. Last, the chapter also connects a rich understanding of the science of collaboration to several other topics: the nature of democratic agency, how to strengthen the link between science and society, the nature of discursive participation as a form of civic engagement, and how we conceptualize civic competence.

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, and then presents a tool called an unmet desire survey (designed based on those findings) that potential collaborators and organizational leaders can use in order to form new collaborative relationships. It also briefly discusses how the findings are helpful for forming new research partnerships, a type of formal collaboration discussed in greater detail in one of the appendices. Last, it includes several policy recommendations for how organizational leaders can put the results into practice, as well as science policy recommendations for valuable future research on the unmet desire to collaborate in civic life.

Relationality captures how people want others to relate to them, and how they will relate to diverse others, yet as this chapter shows “relating to others” may include many different elements and be person- and/or context-specific. This chapter uses interviews with nonprofit practitioners and researchers, and also national surveys of policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders, to lay out some of the ways in which different kinds of people who seek change in civic life express uncertainty about relationality.