Introduction

This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that social scientists need to discover new ways of researching and understanding social synthesis. It focuses to propose and demonstrate a mixed method that begins to deliver on this challenging task. Social Science gives us two fundamental research approaches to draw upon: the quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative approaches are better when issues of scale are important and where there is a good chance of sharing scale definitions of the concepts that are being problematised. Qualitative research will share some interest in the scaling of quantification and relative comparison. The methods product of the book is called Dynamic Pattern Synthesis (DPS). It uses quantitative data to help make qualitative decisions about the evolving of social patterns, but it also searches for these patterns by applying a method of synthesis rather than analysis.