Reflections on Multimethodology: Maximizing Flexibility,Responsiveness, and Sustainability in Multimethodology Interventions Through a Theoretically and Practically Improved Version of Total Systems Intervention (TSI)

There has been a growing interest in utilizing more than one methodology and method possibly from different spheres of thought within the same intervention. Enormously complex, multidimensional, and ill-structured problems that comprise social, behavioral, coercive, exploitative, and manipulative components require such combinations and perennially preoccupied contemporary systems thinkers to develop different and independent endeavors and competing orientations. This paper initially seeks to construct the conceptual foundations and requirements of an appropriate and sound multimethodology approach through uncovering disguised and concealed major assumptions of various multimethodology applications, and then proposes a theoretically and practically improved version of Total Systems Intervention (TSI) as a sophisticated alternative, in a far more detailed and penetrating manner, and assesses its flexibility, responsiveness, and sustainability in multimethodology interventions. To reach this aim the paper first concentrates on early developments of multimethodology in a descriptive and critical manner as well as highlights the most appropriate strategy in multimethodology. Second, it analyzes current research through reviewing some of the contributions in multimethodology in systems thought. Lastly, it discovers and forges the conceptual foundations of the most adequate multimethodology, proposes an improved version of TSI through rectifying its deficiencies on the basis of theoretical and empirical findings, and assesses the usefulness of this approach.