Using Documents In Research

Posted by Helen Kara

Do you know what a document is? Of course you do – yet there is no agreed definition of a document. In her first book on the subject of using documents in research, Aimee Grant offers a helpful definition of a document as something that includes:

‘written, graphical or pictorial matter, or a combination of these types of content, in order to transmit or store information or meaning’ (p 11).

So documents have a range of purposes, and can come in a wide variety of forms and formats: digital or hard copy; reports, letters, emails, social media posts, forms, meeting minutes, web pages, leaflets, shopping lists; and so on. Documents are rarely just containers of information, they are also tools for people to use in the world. Documents are used for purposes such as communication (letters, emails etc), or enforcement (legislation and legal judgements), or to make something happen (a child’s birthday present wish-list or an adult’s last will and testament).

Documents can be rich sources of data for research. They may be collected, from libraries, the internet, archives etc, or constructed, such as when a researcher asks participants to keep a diary of relevant events for a specific time period. Collected documents are secondary data, and using secondary data where possible is an ethical approach to research, because it reduces the burden of primary data collection for participants and for researchers.

There are many ways to analyse documentary data: thematic analysis, content analysis, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and metaphor analysis are just a few. And documents are being used as data for research across a wide range of disciplines and fields: psychology, ecology, education, health, technology, linguistics and many others too. Innovative work is being done with documents in research all around the world.

What does not yet exist is an edited collection of chapters to give a sense of the breadth and depth of possibilities offered to research by documents. So I am delighted that Aimee Grant has invited me to co-edit just such a book, which we intend to showcase some of the excellent work being done with documents by researchers worldwide. We formulated our call for proposals last week; the deadline is midday BST on 24 April 2023. Please help us to spread the word!

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How To Edit Your Writing

Posted by Helen Kara

When I teach creative academic writing, students sometimes ask: ‘How should I edit my writing?’ It’s a good question. There are lots of books and courses to teach you how to write; far fewer to teach you how to edit, which is a key part of the writing process.

Editing is really quite straightforward. The first step is to make a list of the editing tasks that need to be done. This list will be different every time, and for different writers, and for different pieces of work. It will also be different if you are editing your own first draft into a second draft, or if you are editing in response to reviewers’ comments.

In producing different drafts, it may help to consider that in the first draft you are telling the story for yourself, to figure it out and get it clear in your own mind. Then in the second draft you are re-telling it for other people, to help them understand the story you have to tell. When you have a complete first draft (and have celebrated your achievement and taken a break from your writing), you can read it through and make your list of editing tasks based on what you find that needs attention. My list for a journal article might look something like this:

Pull out sub-headings to check that structure is OK – revise if necessary
Make sure tenses are used consistently
Find over-long sentences and split them up into shorter ones
Check that conclusion is effective
Make sure all literature cited is in reference list
Make sure everything in reference list is cited

Your list might need to include different tasks. Mine doesn’t say anything about spelling because the Spelling Gods blessed me with champion spelling abilities. But it does mention consistent use of tenses and over-long sentences, because I know that in first drafts I don’t always use tenses consistently and sometimes I forget to use punctuation where I should. As an experienced writer, I can often write my editing to-do list without re-reading my work (or maybe just re-reading a bit of it), because I know my failings and what I need to do at the second draft stage.

You may also notice that the list above doesn’t include polishing tasks such as reading carefully line by line to check for errors. This is because those are end-stage tasks, for the third draft, but editing is a middle-stage task, for the second draft. The distinctions are not hard-and-fast – some people would leave tasks 5 and 6 above for the third draft, and that would be fine – but the general point is sound.

If you are working with reviewers’ feedback on a journal article, your list may include things like:

Revise abstract for clarity
Include work of X in literature review
Expand methodology section
Delete all references to Y as it is beyond the scope of the article
Take a more critical analytic approach to findings – don’t just describe
Ensure article is as culturally sensitive as possible

When you have your list, the second step is to do each task in turn. Don’t try to do them all at once as you work through your draft because you will inevitably miss things. It can become tedious to keep on going through the draft again and again, so take plenty of breaks, or aim for a certain amount each day. This is particularly important if you are working on a long piece of writing such as a dissertation, thesis or book.

As you work on your text, you may notice another task that is needed, in which case go right ahead and add it to your list.

And that’s it! Simple, yes?

Ten Top Tips For Debiasing Your Work

Posted by Helen Kara

We all have biases and prejudices that affect our lives in many ways, from the choices we make to our interactions with others. And of course our biases and prejudices can affect our research work too. We can never completely escape from our biases and prejudices, but there are a number of steps we can take to mitigate their impact. Here are ten of the most useful.

1. Get as much good quality information as you can.

The less information you have, the more space there is for biases and prejudices to operate. Ideally, seek information from reputable sources that is backed up by other reputable sources. Of course in some research areas, at the frontiers of knowledge, there is little to be found – but there will be foundational information to build pioneering research on, and again this needs to be demonstrably solid and trustworthy.

2. Use structures to help you think.

Structures, such as checklists, can bring rigour to your thinking. They should be predetermined and tested. One structure I use frequently is the eight criteria identified by Sarah Tracy for assessing the quality of qualitative research. These criteria were themselves developed from a systematic analysis of debates on quality in the qualitative research literature – exactly the kind of demonstrably solid foundational information I referred to in Tip 1 above.

3. Take steps to mitigate the effects of your emotions.

Our emotions are always with us and they inevitably affect our work. We need to be aware of our feelings so we can take the necessary steps to ensure they are not unduly influencing our decisions. Where emotional influence is unavoidable, we should be open about this in our reporting.

4. Seek the opinions of others.

Other people are often better at spotting our biases and prejudices than we are ourselves. It can be useful to talk through your work with someone you trust to give you an honest opinion. Ask for their views about where your biases and prejudices lie, and how they might be affecting your research.

5. Value scepticism.

Remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Of course it is possible to overdo scepticism: doubting the accuracy of every single thing is annoying for others and bad for your own mental health. But scepticism in the form of truly critical thinking can be a useful counterbalance to bias and prejudice.

6. Flip the viewpoint.

This involves conducting thought experiments and is particularly useful for debiasing during analytic work. If you think your data is pointing towards a conclusion that group X needs intervention Y, try imagining the opposite. What if group X didn’t need intervention Y? Or what if group X needed intervention M rather than intervention Y? This may sound fanciful, even pointless, yet I recommend that you give it a try. It can be a really useful way to shed light on your findings.

7. Consider accountability.

Who are you accountable to? What would they think of your work? It won’t just be one group of people, so think this through for each group: participants, participants’ families, participants’ community members, colleagues, superiors, maybe funders, your family, your friends… Try to see your work as each group would see it, and consider what that tells you.

8. Use mindfulness.

Bias and prejudice can creep in when you think and work fast. There are incentives in most people’s working lives to think and work fast, but deliberately slowing our thinking can be a very useful guard against bias and prejudice.

9. Practice reflexivity.

Reflexivity involves carefully and critically examining the influences on our work, such as our characters, institutions, identities and experiences. There is no set way to do this, except that it should not become an end in itself; it should serve our research work, or it risks becoming self-indulgent. Working reflexively involves asking ourselves questions such as: Why am I doing this research? What and whose purposes does it serve? Why do some aspects of my research work please or trouble me? And so on.

10. Read work by people who are not like you.

I cannot stress this enough. Learn about others’ views. Read work by people of different genders, ages, ethnicities, cultures, religions/beliefs, political persuasions. Find out how the world looks to them. And this loops us right back to Tip 1 above, because gathering more information about people who are not like us helps to dispel any biases and prejudices we hold about them.

Do you have any other tips for debiasing work? If so, please pop them in the comments.

How Much This Academic Writer Earns

Posted by Helen Kara

I have been writing for Policy Press since 2011. I am contractually forbidden to tell you the level of royalties they pay me, but I can tell you it is higher than any of the other publishers I work for. However, there is nothing to stop me telling you how much money I make from the writing I do for them. I just received my most recent royalty statement, which is my tenth.

Before we get to the actual figures, you need a sense of the scale of the work I have done for them. I have written three full-length sole-authored books. Two are now in their second editions, and the third edition of the first one will be out early next year. I have co-written two full-length books and co-edited three e-books and a full-length book. I have also created four short digital books, adapted from chapters in my first full-length book. Even over 11 years, that is a lot of work. And my books sell well.

However, you also need to know that, as yet, none of these books have been translated into other languages. Translations are great for writers because they are effectively free money. This means they are good for publishers, too, and I know Policy Press has tried to get translation deals for me. Maybe one day they will succeed. But in the meantime, all the money I have earned to date has been from the original English-language editions.

I began writing in early 2011, my first book was published in September 2012, and I received my first royalties in October 2013. Royalties are calculated on sales from August to July. Here are the amounts, by year:

2012-13 – £128.39
2013-14 – £324.76
2014-15 – £482.70
2015-16 – £1,040.00
2016-17 – £1,627.20
2017-18 – £1,663.70
2018-19 – £947.46
2019-20 – £1,901.93
2020-21 – £5,197.57
2021-22 – £2,417.27

Total: £15,748.98

Average per year (11 years): £1,431.73

Assuming 42 writing days per year: overall, on average, £34.09 per day.

You can see the upward progression has not been smooth. Between 2017 and 2018 there was not much increase; between 2018 and 2019 there was a big reduction. 2021 was a bumper year, probably because the pandemic led to lots of e-book buying (and I had negotiated higher royalties on e-books with Policy Press), but 2022 was again a big reduction.

I negotiated a good royalty deal when Policy Press were a younger, more idealistic organisation, wanting to support independent researchers and others outside the academy. I don’t think any author would be able to negotiate such a good deal now, even a more experienced author, even if their books sold well.

It is fortunate that I love writing books. Also my Policy Press books increase my income in other ways. I get well-paid teaching and speaking work, particularly because of my creative research methods and creative academic writing books. And I was accepted to work as an ethics expert for the European Commission largely because of my research ethics book.

Also, I get a few hundred pounds every year from ALCS (the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, which gathers income from mysterious sources such as educational photocopying). I get very little from PLR (Public Lending Rights, which gathers income from library loans) because they don’t include academic libraries.

So it’s not just the royalties. But they do count. And their count is surprisingly small. Even if I add on my royalties from my other publishers (which are very much smaller) and from my self-published books (smaller still), I don’t get anywhere near the average income from book sales for an author in the UK. The latest survey, done in 2017 and published in 2018, found that the average was £10,500. I dream of my royalties hitting five figures, but I have a long way to go.

New Online Space For Researchers

Posted by Helen Kara

I am sure you are aware of the chaos and uproar around Twitter, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform. I have been very sad about this because I love Twitter and, in common with many neurodivergent people, I find this kind of change very difficult. I couldn’t cope with Facebook’s new format which they introduced in late 2020, and used that as a lever to get myself off Facebook (and effectively also Instagram, though I haven’t actually closed my account there yet). I needed to stop using Meta products because the company is so ethically questionable. Now Twitter is becoming increasingly ethically questionable, so I guess I will need to move from there, too.

A lot of researchers I know have already moved to Mastodon. I checked out Mastodon myself, and had a serious conversation with my techie partner about whether we could set up a server on there for the research community. We decided against it because it would involve a lot of unpaid work (I mean a LOT – it’s not just the set-up, but also the ongoing moderation) and we already have more unpaid work than is entirely sensible. I considered signing up for Mastodon as an individual, but have decided not to because the volunteers running Mastodon servers are already swamped and I don’t want to add to their burdens.

Digital sociologist Mark Carrigan has been thinking and writing about this and related topics for a long time. He wrote a post a few weeks ago, for the LSE Impact Blog, in which he posed Musk’s takeover of Twitter as a potential opportunity. I found this interesting and helpful because up to that point I had mostly been thinking it was a disaster. Mark said: “A more varied landscape of online community (ranging across blogs, podcasts, collaboration servers and social networks) is possible and could support richer interactions than the strange amalgam that Twitter has become after over a decade of use within higher education.”

Inspired by Mark’s post, I began to imagine a different online space. A space less cluttered with trivia and irrelevant updates. A space specifically for research and researchers. And I have created a space which may become that space, if enough other people like the idea.

After some exploration of various platforms, I chose Discord. This was for several reasons. First, I had a little knowledge of it as a user, have found it easy to use, and it is free to join and interact on the platform. Also there were no existing research methods/ethics-focused resources on the platform. And it is a for-profit platform which runs on a subscription model. Of course that comes with its own ethical difficulties, but at least I am not expecting something for nothing, or burdening already over-burdened volunteers. Another reason was that I really like their guidelines for individuals and communities, which are written in plain English and make a lot of sense.

I have set up a community called Research Methods and Research Ethics (aka RMARE) to which you are all invited. There are various text channels there for us to chat, share resources, ask and answer questions, learn, hang out – whatever works for you. I have set it to text only for now to keep things simple as we all learn how it works and decide, together, how we want it to develop.

This community needs a moderation team. Would you like to join? If so, please email me via my contact form. Bonus points if you have online moderation experience, though this is not essential. What you will need is good teamworking and communication skills, and the ability to offer some time for the work. The role is quite simple and should not be onerous.

Discord is not perfect. If you want to create a hyperlink in text, you have to use a ‘webhook’ which involves going to a different web page and filling in a form. (There is a useful guide here.) This is way more convoluted even than Blogger was when I joined in 2004 (almost 20 years ago!). I only had to learn a smidgen of HTML to create a hyperlink in Blogger, which took a couple of minutes. Creating my first hyperlink in Discord took about 90 minutes, which included a lot of searching for help online and several incorrect attempts. Also, Discord help pages have lots of exclamation marks everywhere! Because Discord was originally created for gamers! So I guess they try to make support look like fun! Spoiler alert: doesn’t work.

Having said all that, since the start of the pandemic, Discord has made great efforts to become more accessible to more people. I have found it to be much more user-friendly than not, and the support is responsive and helpful.

The space I have set up is very much a work in progress. I have not administered an online space before, and I am well aware that few people may be interested and the whole thing may fall on its, er, posterior. But, y’know, nothing ventured…

See you over there?

Why Peer Reviewing Is More Difficult These Days

Posted by Helen Kara

I have been a peer reviewer of journal articles for the last eight years. I documented my first peer review, in late 2014, on this blog. Peer reviewing has never seemed easy to me – and I don’t think it should. Reviewing original work by other scholars is bound to be intellectually and emotionally demanding. But I feel as if peer reviewing has become more difficult, even over the comparatively short time I have been involved. There are several reasons for this, and I will focus on three of them here: hoaxes, malpractice and complexity.

Academic hoaxes pre-date my reviewing experience. In 2005, three US-based doctoral students in computer science, Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo, created SCIgen. SCIgen is a computer program which can generate whole computer science journal articles including graphs, figures and citations, that look credible but are in fact nonsensical. A lot of articles generated by SCIgen have been accepted by, and published in, academic journals, despite the use of peer reviewers.

And such hoaxes are not limited to computer science. In 2017–18, three UK-based scholars, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, wrote 20 fake articles using social science jargon. They were able to get several of these articles published in academic journals, even though some of them promoted morally questionable acts. The aim of these three scholars was apparently to highlight what they saw as poor quality work in some areas of the social sciences. However, I am not sure this intended end justifies the questionable means of duping reviewers and editors into publishing bogus research.

Sadly, though, it seems that academic journals are regularly duped into publishing bogus research by researchers themselves. Retraction Watch, based in the US, has been keeping track of retracted journal articles for the last 12 years. Some articles are retracted because their authors made honest mistakes. But the Retraction Watch database lists a lot of other reasons for retraction, including falsification or fabrication of data, and falsification, fabrication or manipulation of images or results. And the numbers are staggering. At the time of writing, there are over 1,500 articles listed on the database as retracted due to the falsification and/or fabrication of data, and over 1,000 due to the manipulation of images. Also, the database only includes those articles in which fabrication, falsification or manipulation have been detected and reported. By its own admission, Retraction Watch is biased towards the life sciences, so problematic journal articles in other sectors will be even less visible.

A bunch of people make it their business to find and publicise these problematic articles. One even does it under her own name: Elisabeth Bik. Others use pseudonyms such as Clare Francis, Smut Clyde, Cheshire, and TigerBB8.

Bik specialises in identifying manipulated images, and has found through empirical research that their prevalence is increasing. However, Bik has a particular talent for pattern recognition. Of course it is useful to know that images may be manipulated, and Bik regularly shares examples on social media and elsewhere which can help others understand what to look for. But even so, spotting manipulated images can be difficult for the average, harassed, unpaid peer reviewer. And catching fabricated or falsified images, data or results may be almost impossible without inside information. Most journal articles have strict word limits which can work against them here. These restrictions mean researchers are used to some aspects of their processes receiving a cursory mention at best, and this can enable cheating to pass undetected.

When reviewing goes wrong, consequences can be disastrous. The link is to a recent controversy about a published article promoting a morally questionable act. I am not using any of its keywords in this article. I think there are some particularly interesting aspects of this case. It is not the first article to be published that features morally questionable acts. I have read the article; it is well written, and I can see how a peer reviewer could regard it as worthy of publication – as its own peer reviewers did. The problem, for me, lay in the background of the author who promotes morally questionable acts outside of academia. He may have written this article in the hope that publication would lend legitimacy to his actions. Even if he did not, publication might be perceived to confer such legitimacy, which could cause reputational damage to the publisher and the university concerned.

So, the article you are reviewing may be a hoax, and/or may contain data, images, and/or results that have been manipulated, fabricated or falsified, in ways that are difficult or impossible to detect, and/or may have been written by someone with a dodgy agenda. But that’s not all. Academic work – and, indeed, the world around us – is becoming more complex. More research is transdisciplinary, pushes methodological boundaries, is multi-lingual, and so on. The process of peer review was devised when people worked in neat, tidy, single disciplines and fields. In that landscape people could act as experts on other people’s work in its entirety. These days that is not so easy. Topics such as sustainability, the climate crisis, and food security transcend disciplines and methods. This means that nobody, really, is an expert any more, so peer review is effectively obsolete. Yet it is still being used.

This means we need not only peer review before publication, but also after publication. Luckily there is a tool for this: PubPeer, a website where you can comment on published journal articles, anonymously if you wish. This enables researchers with inside information to whistleblow without risking the loss of their jobs. Also, you can use PubPeer to check articles you are intending to cite, to make sure nobody has raised any concerns about the work you want to use. At the moment PubPeer focuses mostly on laboratory and clinical research, but there is also (not surprisingly) some computer science. In fact PubPeer can be used for any published journal article as long as the article has a recognisable ID such as a DOI. Also, there is a PubPeer browser plugin which enables PubPeer comments to be visible on other websites besides PubPeer itself.

Travelling For Work Again

Posted by Helen Kara

I have been working entirely from home since mid-March 2020. It was a sudden transition. In the week beginning Monday 10 March 2020, I was zooming all over the place, and this was normal. On the Monday morning I set off from my home in the English Midlands to travel to Southampton by train. The train was delayed, so I missed two meetings I had planned for the afternoon, but arrived in time to have dinner with a colleague who had flown from South Africa for my workshop the next day. On the Tuesday I taught creative research methods all day, then caught a train to Gatwick and an evening plane to Stavanger in Norway. On the Wednesday morning I gave a keynote speech at a conference in Stavanger. The plan had been for me to teach at the conference in Stavanger on the Thursday and return home on Friday, but the pandemic was taking hold in Europe and there was talk of airports closing. My clients were understandably worried, and conference delegates were leaving, so they booked me onto a flight home on Thursday afternoon, and into the Premier Inn at Heathrow for the night as I arrived too late to get back to my home in the Midlands. On the Friday I travelled home by tube and train. I remember seeing a man on the tube with a big black bin bag which was obviously full of toilet rolls, and thinking, wow, this is different.

In the first couple of months of 2020 I worked in Brussels, Manchester, Sheffield, Brussels again, Cork, Dublin, Belfast, and Glasgow, as well as Southampton and Stavanger. It was rare for a week to go by without a trip; in fact, I would block out a ‘no travelling week’ in my calendar every few months so I could catch my breath. Since mid-March 2020 I have not travelled for work, and I have not used public transport at all apart from one short off-peak return train journey in London, in summer 2022, to travel to the wedding reception of some good friends. Next week, though, I am going back to Ireland, to teach in Dublin and Belfast. Before the pandemic I was working in Ireland two or three times a year. I love Ireland, and I am really looking forward to reconnecting with colleagues and friends in Northern Ireland and in the Republic.

Booking travel and accommodation again was weird. I had forgotten how I used to do that, and so many things have changed. Not least the trains: I used to take the train to and from the airport, but I live on a branch line where there is now one train every two hours instead of two trains an hour outside peak times. Also we are experiencing frequent train strikes at present here in the UK. So I will be driving and parking at the airport instead, which is much more expensive and much less environmentally friendly, but with the trains in such a bad way I don’t think there is another option.

On the plus side, now I know I’m autistic, I am allowing myself to pay for airport lounges – as long as they are not too expensive – because avoiding the noise and bustle of the main airport will mean I arrive at my destination in much better shape. Also, I often need a meal at the airport, and that is included in the lounge cost, so it’s not as expensive as it looks.

I can tell you one thing, though. I won’t be travelling most weeks again, ever. It was exhausting – I really have no idea how I managed. I am glad we can do more online, because it’s better for the environment, and better for our lives. I would rather spend more time at home and less time on stations and trains, in airports and planes. Even so, I am glad to be able to travel more freely in general, and I’m looking forward to going back to Ireland in particular. If you are one of my Irish colleagues or friends – I’ll see you soon!

Resources for Creative Academic Writing

Posted by Helen Kara

I am delighted to say that creative academic writing is gaining in popularity and acceptance, at least in some parts of the world. I have been teaching creative thesis writing and creative academic writing at universities around the world since 2015, and I know many postgraduate students and early career researchers are keen to learn and to apply their learning. I know they also, sometimes, meet resistance from their supervisors or managers. The best way to overcome this resistance is to formulate an academic argument based on academic resources. I am happy to say there are now a range of resources people can cite as they outline the rationale for writing creatively in academia.

The main reason for writing creatively is that it makes your writing more interesting and memorable for your readers. I’m sure most of us want other people to be interested in our work and remember the points we make. However, the thought of writing creatively can be daunting for those of us who have learned to report as factually as possible. The good news is we don’t have to use creativity at a macro level, such as by producing graphic novels, epic poems or full-length screenplays – though for those of us with the talent and dedication, macro creativity is certainly an option. But we can all use micro creativity: sensory language, imagery, metaphor and so on. And if we’re not sure how, these resources will help.

The first is a book edited by Pamela Burnard, Elizabeth Mackinlay, David Rousell and Tatjana Dragovic: Doing Rebellious Research In and Beyond the Academy, and in particular, Part 2, which focuses on ‘rebellious writings’. I am not highlighting this book because Pam has kindly agreed to give the first keynote at the International Conference on Creative Research Methods next year. I am highlighting it because it is a wonderful, transgressive, boundary-bulldozing book. It was published in 2022 and uses colour and theory, poems and images, concepts and diagrams, prose and music, and a bunch of other devices to get its points across. This book is a real tour de force and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The next book is edited by Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell and James Burford: Re-imagining Doctoral Writing. This one was published in 2021 and is also available as an open access ebook. While it is evidently aimed at doctoral students, I think it could be useful to any academic writer wanting to work more creatively. I found it interesting, informative and thought-provoking, and I have been doing academic writing at postgraduate level and beyond since 1999.

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In 2022 a book was published focusing on creative academic writing in a single discipline. When that happens, you know an approach is taking hold. Edited by Francesca Cavallerio, it is Creative Nonfiction in Sport and Exercise Research. There is no paperback at present, only a very expensive hardback or a quite expensive ebook, so it is best to use if you have access to an academic library. Again, I think it would be helpful for people in any discipline wanting to write more creatively.

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So far, these are all edited collections. In 2021 a book was published written by Richard Phillips and, er, me, called Creative Writing for Social Research: A Practical Guide. We included 14 creative contributions from 17 researcher-writers to show how this can work in practice. I’m pleased to say we’ve had excellent feedback on the book so far. It even generated an online book club in the year of its publication.

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There are a couple of potentially useful open access journals, too, each founded in 2020. Both are aimed at the humanities, but again people working in other sectors may well find articles that are of use to them. One is from the Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and it is the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. The other is from the UK National Association of Writers in Education (aka NAWE), and it is the Journal of Creative Writing Research.

I am quite sure this is not an exhaustive list, though I hope it will be a useful one. If you have other resources to add, please share them in the comments.

International Creative Research Methods Conference

Posted by Helen Kara

This may be the most exciting blog post I have ever written. I am founding a conference! This is an audacious move for an independent researcher, and there are several reasons why I have decided to make the leap.

First, I want to go to a conference on creative research methods! I helped to organise one in May 2015, with the Social Research Association and the British Library. It was a one-day conference and it was a great success. We had around 100 submissions for presentations, from four continents – and the creative research methods field has expanded massively since then. But, to the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been another one since.

Second, I have tried to persuade various organisations and institutions to host a conference on creative research methods, but none of them have been willing and able to do so.

Third, I am confident that there will be enough interest in this conference. There is no conference on creative research methods anywhere in the world. There are a couple of conferences on visual methods, and a few conferences on qualitative methods that will include creative methods. But that’s all. And I know a lot of people are working in this area now.

Fourth, I have saved enough money to take the financial risk of signing a contract with the venue. And this is a risk – it’s a five-figure sum – I do not want to lose that much money, but I could. Yet this is how confident I am that this conference will succeed: I am literally betting on it with my very own cash.

I have spent the summer picking people’s brains and making plans. I have organised events before, so I have some useful experience, but I am also grateful for the input of a whole bunch of people whose advice and support has been invaluable.

It will be a two-day conference at The Studio in Manchester, starting mid-morning on Monday 11 September 2023, finishing mid-afternoon on Tuesday 12 September 2023. Save the dates! And it will be a hybrid conference, so people can attend in person or online.

I am delighted that my first choices of speakers have agreed to give the keynote each day: highly experienced and creative experts Pam Burnard for Day 1, and Caroline Lenette for Day 2.

If you are interested in contributing to the conference, you can download the call for contributions here. The deadline for proposals is 1 December 2022, and all the details you need should be on the call, including an email address for any queries you may have.

I am so excited about this project! It has been such a struggle to keep it secret; I am delighted I can tell the world at last. Please help me pass the word around – and I hope you can join us in September of next year.

Rapport or Respect?

Posted by Helen Kara

Trainee qualitative researchers, learning the most popular research method of interviewing, are routinely taught to use their interpersonal skills to create rapport with participants. This has been questioned for the last 20 years by Jean Duncombe and Julie Jessop. They ask, how ethical it is for researchers to fake friendship as a means to the end of gathering data?

On the one hand, it is common for people to use interpersonal skills to help us get what we want from others in our day-to-day lives. This applies whether we want a loan from a credit agency, a prescription from the doctor, a response to a complaint – in a multitude of situations, presenting our most polite and friendly selves can help to get the results we want. So it is arguable that it makes sense also to use these everyday methods in research.

On the other hand, research encounters are rather different from everyday encounters. This applies particularly to qualitative research where a researcher may spend a considerable period of time giving a participant their undivided attention. This is an unusual and often a welcome experience for participants, who often describe it in positive terms such as ‘therapeutic’, ‘cathartic’ or ‘a treat’.

Many of the people we want things from in day-to-day life are either providing us with goods and services, so that a transactional element is built into the encounter, or are already in a personal relationship with us through kinship, friendship or community membership. So the rapport we build in those situations already has a clear basis which is mutually understood. This does not apply within the research encounter, where we are usually asking participants to give us their time and information in exchange for a potential benefit to an imagined future population. (I considered the extent to which this is ethical in my recent post on the LSE Impact Blog.) Also, despite all the efforts to secure informed consent, we know that people generally agree to participate in research for their own reasons rather than ours. And where that reason is to get a little human company and kindness, which is lacking from their own lives, the practice of building rapport begins to appear even more suspect.

Imagine you are, let us say, living on minimal welfare benefits with a chronic condition which makes it difficult for you to leave the house. You have lost touch with the friends you used to have when you could go out to work, and your family live far away. You suffer from anxiety and you are very lonely. The carers who come in three times a day are brisk and professional; they don’t have time to chat, and you don’t want to hold them up because you know they are always under pressure. Then a researcher calls, saying she is doing an evaluation of the care you receive, and asking if she can visit you to ask a few questions. You are delighted because it’s been years since you had a visitor and she sounds so kind and friendly on the phone. When she visits, you tell her all sorts of things about yourself and your life. She seems really interested, and laughs at your jokes, and tells you a few things about her own life in return. You haven’t felt this good in years. When she has asked all her questions, you ask one of your own: please will she visit you again? She looks at the floor and says she would like to, but she can’t promise, because between work and her children she doesn’t have much free time. You would like to suggest she brings her children with her, but you know a ‘no’ when you hear one, so you let her go, wait for the front door to close, and listen to the emptiness of your home and your life.

Duncombe and Jessop point out that these problems are multiplied in longitudinal research, where the boundaries between real and faked friendship can become much more blurred. They share experiences of participants beginning to treat them as friends, and the discomfort that arises when they don’t reciprocate. I have had similar experiences, and I’m sure many other qualitative and mixed-methods researchers have too. It is interesting to consider this Euro-Western approach in the light of the very different Indigenous approach, in which research is deemed to be ethical when it serves to maintain and develop existing relationships. Looked at in this way, our Euro-Western approach of creating and then dropping relationships to further our research purposes seems potentially abusive.

The EU-funded TRUST project developed a Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings. It was based on four values elicited from research they did with a wide variety of people around the world: respect, fairness, honesty and care. The aim was to combat ‘ethics dumping’, where research deemed unethical in a higher-income country is conducted, instead, in a lower-income country where research is not governed by a regulatory system. I would argue that these values should also apply where research is done by a researcher with more social capital than some or all of their participants. In the vignette above, the researcher was not entirely honest and did not show care in response to the participant’s request, e.g. by signposting them to a local befriending service. This could be described as ‘friendship dumping’.

When you think about it, researchers using their interpersonal skills to create rapport with a participant as a means to an end is actually quite manipulative. This might be more defensible when we are ‘studying sideways’ or ‘studying up’, but even then it seems questionable. Showing respect for participants would be a more creditable aim, especially if it was combined with fairness, honesty and care.

The next post on this blog will be in September. You can follow the blog, above, to get my posts in your inbox.