Key dilemmas that researchers face when working with marginalised groups is the ability to hear real experiences that are not impacted by the researcher’s own assumptions and the power dynamic between researcher and researched.  A range of strategies can be employed to ensure authenticity such as collecting data in ways that minimise the power imbalance for example mobile interviews, meeting people in neutral territory, or enlisting participants to become co-researchers using emancipatory approaches.  

Three researchers will share their methods for working with marginalised young people and their families, ensuring that they are trying to elicit authentic voices and challenging their own assumptions about each context. 

Presentation 1- The researcher has explored the retrospective cultural and linguistic brokering experiences of child migrants in England. The methodology that she employed was Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM). The open-ended interview approach which starts with the elicitation of a free narrative based on a single prompt, offers the opportunity for participants to control the information shared in their narrative. Furthermore, BNIM explores how participants’ subjectivity towards their experiences changes over time. Finally, this method offers a staged approach to analysis where the researcher hypothesizes emerging themes from the narratives, which are brought before a panel of academics and/or professionals with knowledge or experience of the research topic, for further scrutiny or discussion.  The panel discussion offers the researcher the opportunity to identify and challenge their own positionality and explore alternative interpretations of the participant’s narratives.  

Activity: Delegates will be given a short extract from a research transcript and asked to get into 3s to act as researcher and BNIM panel. The ‘researcher’ will offer her themes to the panel and the panel will discuss.  

 Presentation 2 Will discuss the use of a steering committee of disabled young people and their families in a research project. The researcher is exploring the voice and views of disabled children and young people in the Education Health and Care process and needs to ensure that she can understand the contributions of all participants who may communicate in a range of ways. Children who are learning disabled in particular have in the past had their narratives ignored (Grove, 2015) so taking a rights-based perspective, research should ensure participants are empowered and heard. For this reason, the methods are being designed around the participants, with input from a steering group of people with lived experience of the system.  

Activity –. Delegates will then reflect on the experience of taking part in a steering group considering the challenges they faced and how these might be overcome in a ‘real world’ research situation. 

 Presentation 3- The researcher conducted 5 online focus groups with parents of disabled children in order to understand challenges to and mechanisms of support for social, emotional and mental health issues for children with a life limiting impairment.  Issues that in particular affect online focus groups with parents of disabled children are discussed and the impact this can have on the ability to collect authentic data. Issues around the inability for people to see non-verbal cues when speaking online, not being able to naturally speak incase you speak over someone else, and technological difficulties where there are ‘gaps’ in the conversation. According to Babad (2009) we communicate only 7% of our intentions through words, 38% by how we use our voice and the rest by how we use our body such as gesture and facial expression. 

 Activity: a practical interview activity with no visual cues where delegates will be role-playing as interviewer and participant and considering the difficulties that interviews conducted where there are no visual cues present. 

We will be discussing emancipatory research methods (Barton 2005) as we investigate the use of advisory/steering groups of disabled people and families. We will discuss the Biographical Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) and narrative analysis We will discuss online methods and the role of non-verbal communication in data collection (Martikainan 2020)

We expect to have an interesting exploratory and interactive conference session where delegates attempt to take part in some of these methods or experience the challenges of some of them. We expect delegates to understand how BNIM works through an analysis panel and become aware of the role of steering committees in emancipatory research.

Ungar, M (2005). A Handbook for Working with Children and Youth: Pathways to Resilience Across Cultures and Contexts. London: Sage Publications Ungar, M. (2008).Resilience Across Cultures. British Journal of Social Work. (38), pp.218-235.