Creative Research Methods in Practice

Posted by Helen Kara

I have an exciting new venture to share with you. For the last couple of years I have been working with Policy Press on a new series of short affordable books on creative research methods in practice. And we have just gone public! The first book is on its way: Photovoice, Reimagined by Nicole Brown. And there are several more books in the pipeline. Two are being written right now – one on fiction in research, and one on phenomenography – and four other book proposals are under review.

I wanted to edit this series because there are no such books available to help researchers learn in detail about why, when, and how to use a new research method. There are several books giving an overview of creative research methods, within or across academic disciplines; some sole-authored, some edited collections. These are useful texts but they do not generally offer enough depth of information to enable readers to try out the methods for themselves with confidence. The main rationale for this new series is to do just that.

One of the hardest things to sort out was the design for the covers and webpage. That took months and a lot of emails, discussions, and meetings (most of which I didn’t need to attend, thank goodness). We almost agreed on some covers and then the sales and marketing people at Policy Press said the designs weren’t good enough. They were absolutely right. So we went back to the actual drawing board and started again. I am so pleased with the final result. I think hot air balloons are a delightful combination of science and art, innovation and exploration and adventure – just like creative research methods. (Let’s not focus too closely on the ‘hot air’ part, OK?!) Also Policy Press likes to have a Bristol element to their designs, and Bristol holds an annual International Balloon Fiesta – Europe’s largest event of its kind – so the design works from that viewpoint too.

I am so happy to be able to tell you about this new book series. And if you would like to propose a book for the series, do get in touch!

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Writing Retreats And Courses

Posted by Helen Kara

I ran my first academic writing retreat in 2015, over a weekend, for doctoral students at Staffordshire University. It was very enjoyable for me and, judging by the feedback, for the students too. Since then I have led many retreats and courses, mostly for doctoral students and/or university staff at institutions around the world. My standpoint is that all writing is creative, writing is a research method, and writing can be fun.

This month I ran an academic writing retreat over three days for Cumbria University in a delightful rural venue; a welcome change from the gritty urban spaces I usually go to for such gigs. This one had a transdisciplinary flavour with people from health and criminology, fashion and social care, media and education, and no doubt other departments I have forgotten. I never mind working with people from a single discipline, school, or faculty, but I do find that transdisciplinary groups have richer discussions. And the feedback I got was very positive.

I also get rich transdisciplinary discussions and good feedback when I run my four-day creative academic writing course for the Methods@Manchester summer school, which this year is from 3–7 July online. The people who come on the course are always from a wide variety of disciplines and professions, and every year it is exciting to find out who I will be working with. (There are still some tickets available if you’re interested.)

And I run creative thesis writing courses for various universities, doctoral training partnerships, and other clients such as Guild HE. In fact I am running a creative thesis writing course next week for Liverpool John Moore’s University.

I love these parts of my work. I really enjoy demystifying the writing process, seeing the light-bulb moments people have, and witnessing their satisfaction in the progress they make. So I have taken the big step of booking other delightful rural venues for three independent residential retreats in 2023–24, one of which will be co-facilitated. In brief:

16–19 October 2023: creative thesis writing for doctoral students, at Northern College near Barnsley.

4–8 December 2023: creative research writing, at Gladstone’s Library near Chester, with Dr Lucy Pickering.

20–23 May 2024: creative research writing for publication, at Northern College near Barnsley.

My retreats are supportive, with some taught sessions, plenty of breaks, lots of time to write, and optional one-to-one chats with me. Costs are inclusive of accommodation and catering. The venues are delightful. More information here and if you have any questions, please ask in the comments or email enquiries@creativeresearchemethods.com.

PhD Guides – Second Editions

Posted by Helen Kara

Back in 2015–16 I published a set of short affordable e-books for doctoral students – or, in the case of the first book, would-be doctoral students. Starting Your PhD: What You Need To Know was free on all platforms, because I wanted it to be easily accessible for people thinking about maybe doing a PhD or a professional doctorate such as an EdD or DBA. The other five were each around the price of a coffee in the UK, which seemed a reasonably affordable price.

Over the last year I have revised these e-books thoroughly and the second editions are now available. The first e-book is still free on all platforms except Amazon, because now the minimum price for a Kindle e-book appears to be 77 pence in the UK (and presumably equivalent amounts elsewhere). If you only have a Kindle, I recommend getting the e-book from Payhip where you can get a free epub.

I have updated all the text, references and resources in each of the books. Also, this time around I used a formatting service. I would have liked to do that last time but I couldn’t afford it – I paid for editing and cover design, and that was all I could manage. This time I used the same covers with a ‘second edition’ banner added, and my support worker did the editing for me. So I was delighted to be able to work with Leigh Forbes of Blot Publishing, a hugely experienced formatter of e-books and paper books. Her advice was consistently helpful and her professional approach made working with her a pleasure.

To celebrate the launch of these second editions, I am offering them to readers of this blog post at half price until 9 May 2023. This is also through Payhip where if you use this code at the checkout – RLCFPO6XU9 – you should receive 50% off any of the e-books. Or you can buy all six in a bundle, which is priced at £15.00 on Payhip, cheaper than Amazon UK where the whole series is currently £18.22. The 50% off code will work for the bundle too. Please feel free to share the code with others in your networks, though do also tell them about its expiry date.

In case it’s of interest, I am not doing this as a money-making exercise. The first editions never even covered their costs, let alone making any profit to pay for the time I spent in writing and publishing them. I charge for five of the e-books because (a) I am an eternal optimist and they might cover their costs this time and (b) I know that, bizarrely, people value things more if they cost money than if they are free.

I got ‘paid’ in good reviews which were heartening and encouraging to read. However, a downside of producing second editions is that all the first edition reviews have disappeared. I hope some people will write new ones soon, to help potential purchasers. Maybe even you!

International Creative Research Methods Conference – tickets now on sale!

Posted by Helen Kara

I am glad to say you can now buy tickets for the International Creative Research Methods Conference in Manchester, UK on 11-12 September 2023. Tickets are available in limited numbers for in-person attendance, and in unlimited numbers for online attendance. There is a sliding scale of prices and bursaries are available; the closing date for bursary applications is 30 June. More information here. Hope to see you there!

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!

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.