Yudi Wu, PhD student in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film gives an insight into their experience engaging with the public as part of their research project, establishing relationships with participants and navigating these to ensure those who contribute to a research project can be most effectively supported throughout.
Following my experience as a community arts practitioner, I chose participatory action research as a key method of my practice-based PhD research project. While there is increasing volume of literature in community-based and participatory methods, I have found that the reality of doing such research can be incredibly challenging in its details: would it be fair to ask my participants to do this amount of work,? How do I make sure that my participants can have ownership of their work within my project? How do I properly credit my participants for their work, while also protecting their identities where needed? How can I make sure that the research data collection is fair in artistic co-creation? Can I, or should I pay my participants? If yes, how much should I pay them, and in what way?
The list goes on. While these questions are also often considered in community-based work outside of academic institutions, I’ve found a serious lack of guidance and consistency on an institutional level around these questions. This has added uncertainty to my project, which then makes me afraid of investigating those questions further. After talking to several late-stage PGR researchers who used similar methods, as well as the Public Engagement with Research team, I was pointed to the same answer – go and actually talk to the community, find out what they want.
With support from the Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) Fund, I’ve set up a small focus group, and three 1-to-1 mock ‘ethics chats’ to directly engage with my participant demographic. In the mock ‘ethics chat’, the contributors were asked to role-play simulating the conversation that occurs before a potential participant decides whether to participate in research.
In creative spaces, we often highlight the importance of space for failure – which is not always accepted in academia and many other places. However, the mock ‘ethics chats’ gave me an important opportunity to experiment and fail. These sessions helped me realize the importance of providing support for potential participants before they sign the consent sheet. Through Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle, I’ve learnt about the crucial intricacies of communicating my research project to a potential participant beyond the paperwork. This helped me identify and develop a strategy of communication that is clear and flexible, and kind to my capacity as a neurodiverse researcher.
The focus group has managed to address the many questions I had in an unexpected way. It showed me what matters more than the theoretical principles: a sense of care in my practice, and a sense of fairness in project relationships. As a PGR researcher at the early stage of their journey, this process has equipped me with some much-needed knowledge and a sense of direction unique to the community with whom I am working. This has strengthened my confidence in communicating my project with others- whether that’s potential participants, external stakeholders, senior research staff, or ethics committees. I believe that this confidence, coming from my connections with my community, is something that I wouldn’t be able to get simply from reading papers.
Moving forward, I’d like to bring more of the knowledge and value from my work as a community arts practitioner into the academic world. While navigating, learning, and being challenged by the new system of academia, I sometimes forget this background. However, this opportunity has gave me the confidence to be true to my work. I believe that academia could benefit from more fair and mutual exchanges with communities. There is a whole world of opportunities to fill in the gaps and build bridges for community-based research.