YOUNG PEOPLE AS CO-RESEARCHERS SEMINAR 23 rd January 2010

 Decide on aims – and develop aims  Choose the methods  Collect the data  Analyse the data  Make sense of findings (conceptualise or theorise)  Write it up  Disseminate - tell other people to influence change

 …is the most important part of Participatory Action Research…  But where does it come from?  What knowledge is it founded on?  Who shapes this and how?  Kellett (2005) – reports widespread concern about involving young people in developing ethical frames of research  Involvement in analysis and theory much more challenging to conventional researchers  But everyone has the capacity to analyse and theorise…we all do it, all the time!

3 year research relationship with African-run community project in Byker 20+/- young people of African and white British heritage aged 5 – 15 Used discussion groups, diagramming, different forms of art, creative writing, web design, etc

 Usually driven by a knowledge/action/policy imperative  Alternative: a ground up process where YP think through what research should ask  How can that be facilitated?

 Method (1): Discussion groups to brainstorm issues around hope/fear most relevant to them. Several follow ups – iterative analysis - to narrow focus.  Development of research questions and analysis  From a range of local/global concerns...  Iterative analysis by groups of their own and others’ findings on “hope” and “fear”  Prioritisation of certain issues to investigate in depth, e..g bullying, racism  Research questions continued to change: e.g. from difference to connection, from stereotypes about people to stereotypes about places  Method (2) Chose art as a means of exploring and expressing emotions and the final research focus.  Method (3) Young people designed and uploaded content for a website about bullying and racism

Ruby: Data analysis – I hate it. When doing this part of the project the day just seemed drag. Annissa: It’s just torture that’s all. Caitlin: Why is it torture? Annissa: I don’t know it reminds me of school. Ruby: It’s like to over analyse – Annissa: I think I like to speak and put things out there and not have to think about why I said them. (Caitlin Cahill, with the Fed Up Honeys, 2007)

 In conventional research analysis is:  A separate phase of the research process  Conducted by experts  Includes abstract and formal tests of validity and cross-questioning of data  Supposedly, accountable…  “Participatory analysis embraces knowledge production as a contested, fraught process. It assumes there is no singular or universal truth” (Cahill 2007)

 Techniques: a range of analytical methods can be applied to data from PAR, as for conventional social research:  E.g. content analysis, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, visual analysis, etc  Process: the process of analysis is different.  Collaboration: analysis is undertaken by participants  Classically with participatory methods, analysis is built into their use (e.g. diagramming)  Analysis may also be undertaken by others – e.g. external researcher, other stakeholders

 Conventional stages of theorisation:  Before any contact with participants: theoretical grounding to suggest research questions  May use elements of grounded theory during fieldwork… (though most often not)  Theorisation is done afterwards, separately, with no input from participants.  If many researchers question people’s ability to analyse data….much bigger concerns about theorising: an elite activity  Who gets to interpret their lives and the world?  And what power does this have?

 Writing project with young women  “Risky and painful” process: identifying how they had absorbed other people’s stereotypes  Working through differences – not to reach ‘consensus’ but to agree on key themes and findings, and priorities for action  Scaling up: particular linking global/ societal/ neighbourhood/ intimate processes and causation (contextual validity)  How to capture mess and dissonance? – experiment with different voices in outputs.

mrs c. kinpaisby-hill (2010) Participatory praxis and social justice: towards more fully social geographies, in Del Casino V et al A Companion to Social Geography