The Power Of Naming

Posted by Helen Kara

words When I first learned about research, as a student of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s, the people we collected data from were called ‘subjects’. They were subject to our research, and subjects of our research; we were (told we were) the objective neutral researchers with the power to collect and analyse data. That power came from knowing how to do those things: special, arcane knowledge available only to insiders, i.e. those with enough educational capital.

By the time I got back into research, around the turn of the century, researchers had begun to acknowledge that positivism might not be the only game in town. The terminology had moved on and ‘subjects’ were becoming more widely known as ‘participants’. We felt good about this: instead of subjecting people to our whims, we would let them join in with our research (up to a point, mostly defined by us). How kind.

I’m beginning to think it’s time for another shift. I’m enjoying the way some researchers are being creative here, such as Alistair Roy with his ‘tour guides’. However, while that term works well for Roy who conducts walking interviews with marginalised young men in cities, it’s not universally applicable. So I’m wondering about… contributors?

I also think it might be time to rethink ‘data’. The word is drawn from the Latin meaning ‘something given’. Yet more often data is something researchers take and keep. The ability to classify things as ‘data’ has enabled serious abuses, some of which are still ongoing today. For example, in her magisterial book An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates that Euro-Western researchers retain the human remains and burial offerings of millions of Indigenous people by classifying them as ‘data’. For Indigenous peoples, these remains and offerings are sacred, yet Euro-Western researchers continue to ignore their requests for the return of their sacred objects, using ‘science’ as the reason. On this basis it might make sense to reword ‘data’ as ‘loot’ or ‘swag’.

Another option would be to refer to people who provide information for research as ‘people’ and to the information they provide as ‘information’. I’m in favour of this because it has a levelling quality, especially if we researchers also refer to ourselves as ‘people’. It saves us from the irregular verb effect: I am a researcher, you are a participant, they are users of research.

All this is still researcher-led, though, so potentially paternalistic (or, in my case, perhaps maternalistic?!). A further option could be to let people who contribute to research decide how to define both their roles and what they offer to the process.

Some readers may regard all this as quibbling over semantics. However, given the strength of the relationship between language and thought, it seems to me important to consider these issues. Names have power: power to identify and classify. When we name individuals, roles, groups, artefacts, we are saying something about how we see the world. As always we need to use this power with care.

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Aftercare in Social Research

Posted by Helen Kara

aftercare When does a research project end? When a report has been written? When a budget has been spent? When the last discussion of a project has taken place? It’s not clear, is it?

Neither is it clear when a researcher’s responsibility ends. This is rarely spoken of in the context of social research, which is an unfortunate omission. A few Euro-Western researchers recognise the need for aftercare, but they are a tiny minority of individuals. There seems to be no collective or institutional support for aftercare. In the Indigenous paradigm, by contrast, aftercare is part of people’s existing commitment to community-based life and work. Euro-Western researchers could learn much from Indigenous researchers about aftercare: for participants, data, findings, and researchers ourselves.

The standard Euro-Western aftercare for participants is to tell them they can withdraw their data if they wish. However, it is rare for researchers to explain the limits to this, which can cause problems as it did for Roland Bannister from Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Bannister did research with an Australian army band, Kapooka, which could not be anonymised as it was unique. Band members consented to take part in Bannister’s research. He offered participants the opportunity to comment on drafts of his academic publications, but they weren’t interested. Yet when one of these was published in the Australian Defence Force Journal, which was read by band members, their peers, and superiors, participants became unhappy with how they were represented. Bannister had to undertake some fairly onerous aftercare in responding to their telephone calls and letters. Of course it was far too late for participants to withdraw their data, as this would have meant retracting several publications, which is in any case limited in its effectiveness. However, particularly in these days of ‘long tail’ online publications, we need to be aware that participants may want to review research outputs years, even decades, after the substantive work on the project is done. We have a responsibility to respond as ethically as we can although, as yet, there are no guidelines to follow.

Data also needs aftercare, particularly now that we’re beginning to understand the value of reusing data. Reuse increases the worth of participants’ contributions, and helps to reduce ‘research fatigue’. However, for data to be reusable, it needs to be adequately stored and easy to find. Data can be uploaded to a website, but it also needs to be carefully preserved to withstand technological changes. Also, it needs a ‘global persistent identifier’ such as a DOI (digital object identifier) or Handle. These can be obtained on application to organisations such as DataCite (DOIs) or The Dataverse Project (DOIs and Handles). As well as enabling reuse, a global persistent identifier also means you can put links to your data in other outputs, such as research reports, so that readers can see your data for themselves if they wish. This too is an ethical approach, being based in openness and transparency.

Then there are the findings we draw from our data. Aftercare here involves doing all we can to ensure that our findings are shared and used. Of course this may be beyond our power at times, such as when working for governments who require complete control of research they commission. In other contexts, it is unlikely that researchers can have much say in how our findings are used. But we should do all we can to ensure that they are used, whether to support future research or to inform practice or policy.

Researchers too need aftercare. In theory the aftermath of a research project is a warm and fuzzy place containing a pay cheque, favourably reviewed publications, and an enhanced CV. While this is no doubt some people’s experience, at the opposite end of the spectrum there are a number of documented cases of researchers developing post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their research work. In between these two extremes, researchers may experience a wide range of minor or major difficulties that can leave them needing aftercare beyond the lifetime of the project. For that, at present, there is no provision.

Not much has yet been written on aftercare in research. If it interests you, there is a chapter on aftercare in my book on research ethics. I expect aftercare to be taken increasingly seriously by researchers and funders over the coming years.

An earlier version of this article was originally published in ‘Research Matters’, the quarterly newsletter for members of the UK and Ireland Social Research Association.

Why Research Participants Rock

Posted by Helen Kara

dancing I wrote last week about the creative methods Roxanne Persaud and I used in our research into diversity and inclusion at Queen Mary University of London last year. One of those was screenplay writing, which we thought would be particularly useful if it depicted an interaction between a student and a very inclusive lecturer, or between a student and a less inclusive lecturer.

I love to work with screenplay writing. I use play script writing too, sometimes, though less often. With play script writing, you’re bound by theatre rules, so everything has to happen in one room, with minimal special effects. This can be really helpful when you’re researching something that happens in a specific place such as a parent and toddler group or a team sport. Screenplay, though, is more flexible: you can cut from private to public space, or include an army of mermaids if you wish. Also, screenplay writing offers more scope for descriptions of settings and characters, which, from a researcher’s point of view, can provide very useful data.

Especially when participants do their own thing! Our screenplay-writing participants largely ignored our suggestions about interactions between students and lecturers. Instead, we learned about a south Asian woman, the first in her family to go to university, who was lonely, isolated, and struggling to cope. We found out about a non-binary student’s experience of homophobia, sexism and violence in different places on campus. We saw how difficult it can be for Muslim students to join in with student life when alcohol plays a central role. Scenes like these gave us a much richer picture of facets of student inclusion and exclusion than we would have had if our participants had kept to their brief.

Other researchers using creative techniques have found this too. For example, Shamser Sinha and Les Back did collaborative research with young migrants in London. One participant, who they call Dorothy, wanted to use a camera, but wasn’t sure what to capture. Sinha suggested exploring how her immigration status affected where she went and what she could buy. Instead, Dorothy went sightseeing, and took pictures of Buckingham Palace. The stories she told about what this place and experience meant to her enriched the researchers’ perceptions of migrant life, not just the ‘aggrieved’ life they were initially interested in, but ‘her free life’ (Sinha and Back 2013:483).

Katy Vigurs aimed to use photo-elicitation to explore different generations’ perceptions of the English village where they lived. She worked with a ladies’ choir, a running club, and a youth project. Vigurs asked her participants to take pictures that would show how they saw and experienced their community. The runners did as she asked. The singers, who were older, took a few photos and also, unprompted, provided old photographs of village events and landmarks, old and new newspaper cuttings, photocopied and hand-drawn maps of the area with added annotations, and long written narratives about their perceptions and experiences of the village. The young people also took some photos, mostly of each other, but then spent a couple of hours with a map of the village, tracing the routes they used and talking with the researcher about where and how they spent time. Rather than standard photo-elicitation, this became ‘co-created mixed-media elicitation’ as Vigurs puts it (Vigurs and Kara 2016:520) (yes, I am the second author of this article, but all the research and much of the writing is hers). Again, this provided insights for the researcher that she could not have found using the method she originally planned.

Research ethics committees might frown on this level of flexibility. I would argue that it is more ethical than the traditional prescriptive approach to research. Our participants have knowledge and ideas and creativity to share. They don’t need us to teach them how to interact and work with others. In fact, our participants have a great deal to teach us, if we are only willing to listen and learn.