I never heard about RTR, but why not use a survey with quantitative items and geographic data and process this information real-time?

Please visit this site: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pdf/validate.asp?j=elea&vol=6&issue=1&year=2009&article=8_Zimmerman_ELEA_6_1_web. Read the article.

There's no reason why you can't mix methodologies. I would just say you need to seriously consider and define the research question and objectives before you look at methodologies.

Hi Dominic

I have briefly looked at Maheswarappa Balapal Sangappad's article and would advise you to look at it carefully in order to make a decision as to whether it is the correct method to fiollow for your proposed research area. Probably if you give a little more information about you research there will be a more focused debate and questions for you to consider.

cheers

Thanks to Maheswarappa Balapal Sangappa. I looked through Zimmerman but this is a different use of RTR to what I have previously encountered. It was highly interesting but perhaps indicates that RTR isn't an established methodology. The Zimmerman usage seemed to stand for a form of 'speed-research' or 'hot-housed' research projects where research methods themselves were developed in real time. The alternative use concerned intervention in disaster scenarios in particular the recent Tsunami (see BRUN, C. & LUND, R. 2010. Real-time research: decolonising research practices – or just another spectacle of researcher–practitioner collaboration? Development in Practice, 20, 812-826). Researchers were engaged in AR but, in a sense, but uniquely as the disaster was actually unfolding. This was more what I was interested in. It is not so much the research method that needs to evolve in real time but the research setting that is particularly dynamic. My interest is to intercept a disease outbreak event - as it is unfolding - and carry out qualitative interviews and perhaps focus groups. I don't want to do a survey thanks Josef. I'm committed to my semi structured live encounters. What I was hoping was that RTR might already have established some methods for 'intercepting' events and hitting the ground running, so to speak, when the anticipated event occurs. In other words, I don't want to develop the research methods in real time. I want to have a method in place to conduct research at a moment's notice and in real time. I'm certain that other researchers will have already invented this particular wheel and have been waiting patiently for bomb to go off (metaphorically) with their research plan largely developed and sitting in a box but with enough flexibility to adapt to a set of circumstances with lots of unknowns. Perhaps I'm mistaken in thinking what I want is anything to do with RTR?