Vital Signs: Paper Session 2b
Wednesday 10 September, 9.30-11am, Room G32
2b. Participatory Approaches
‘’Who knows?’: Reflections of a community research team in Bradford and Keighley, England’ – Heather Blakey (University of Bradford)
In October 2007, Bradford University's International Centre for Participation Studies began an innovative research project with two UK housing estates, employing and training four residents as community researchers', to facilitate an estate-wide process of self-research into resident involvement in local decision-making. Drawing on grounded theory, participatory action research and real life methods, the project aims to involve residents in genuinely participatory research: deciding research questions, methods, analysis and dissemination.
This paper reflects on the value of using real life methods and participatory research. Our research raises questions of who is seen to have knowledge, even at a very local level. After years of fighting to be heard and being ignored or 'patronised' these same individuals are now recognised as having the potential to speak out for their communities and engender change. We ask what implications this has for processes of social change and what role participatory research can play in exploring and challenging these perceptions.
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‘Focus groups with young people: A participatory approach to research planning’ – Dr Anna Bagnoli, Dr Andrew Clark, Dr Bren Neale (Real Life Methods , University of Leeds)
In this paper we outline our experiences of conducting focus groups with young people as part of a participatory approach to research design and participant recruitment. The research is a prospective 10-year qualitative longitudinal project investigating young people’s daily lives, relationships, and identities, and the ways these change over time. It adopts a multi-method approach in which each participant has a choice about which methods to be involved with. Part of the project planning and recruitment was completed through focus groups held in schools across metropolitan and rural West Yorkshire with young people aged 13. The focus groups enabled us to recruit participants from a variety of backgrounds. They were also an important medium through which to elicit the views of young people (which were perceptively and constructively critical) about project design, methods development, and dissemination events. This paper will focus on what we learnt from these focus groups and consider the value of engaging participants in designing real life research.
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‘”Look at the state of me!”: Researching and representing everyday identities and relationship cultures in participatory research with young people in care’– Dr Emma Renold, Dr Alexandra Allan and Dr Nicola Ross (Cardiff University)
This paper is in critical dialogue with the increasing turn to visual and participatory methodologies in which young people wield greater control in the generation, analysis and representation of ‘research data’. Drawing upon on an on-going longitudinal ESRC-funded research project, (Extra)Ordinary Lives: Children’s Everyday Relationship Cultures In Public Care, the paper re-invigorates debates on the inter-subjective, situated and negotiated approach to ‘informed consent’ as on-going dialogue in everyday fieldwork relations that stretches the meaning and practice of ‘informed consent’ beyond a series of renewals (Thorne 1987) to a process of constant becoming. Foregrounding the micro-ethical moments of complex and ambivalent engagements and disengagements within the research process, the team utilise a notion of ‘becoming participant’ to analyse the complex terrain of consent, as always-in-process and unfinished. We will illustrate, through the case studies of one young woman, how notions of ‘becoming participant’ and the complex editing of performative subjectivities impact upon the representation of the substantive ‘findings’ of the research in expected and unexpected ways during the making of one short two minute films, ‘Marshmallow’.
