What did we do?
In our UK work, Save the Children UK are focused on ensuring that all children get the best start in life. But how we do this is also important. We are committed to working with families in an empowering way to drive this change together.
We think that families’ voices should be heard and their experiences and views should be shaping the development of services and policies which affect them. One of the ways we can do this is through projects that are guided by families themselves, such as participatory research projects.
We partnered with a local organisation in Margate called Beyond the Page, who support migrant mothers. Migrant mothers accessing their support typically struggle to engage in services due to language barriers and lacking confidence. Following discussions with mothers they support, the group decided that a participatory research project would be a great way to explore migrant mothers’ experiences of local family services.
A small group of migrant mothers received training to become peer researchers. As a peer researcher they went out and conducted the research; speaking in depth to other migrant mothers as well as local family practitioners. They explored mothers’ experiences and the barriers they faced in accessing family health services, children’s centres and schools.
You can learn more about our participatory research project in Margate in our short film here.
What is participatory research?
- Participatory research (or Participatory Action Research) is about working with a community and supporting them to become peer researchers who are making informed decisions throughout all aspects of the research process with the aim of social change.
- The idea behind participatory research is that those people who are most impacted by research should take the lead in deciding what the research looks like and how it is conducted.
- We want all service providers and policy makers who are designing services and policies for families to be asking families what they think.
Five things we learnt from our participatory research project in Margate:
1. You need to give it time – one of the things that are common to all participatory research projects is that they will take time; probably more time than using a traditional research approach. This is time to engage with the community, bring on board a peer research team, provide them with the skills and confidence to take a leading role in the project, and to work around any constraints that the peer researchers have. With this project (a relatively small-scale project) it took 12 months from the start of talking to the community to presenting the findings. This extra time should be planned for in advance.
2. You’ll need to share responsibility to keep families safe – in all of Save the Children’s work, how we keep families safe is our number one priority. When working on this project, as we are working with peer researchers, we need to make sure that they stay safe, but we also need to ensure that the families they speak to are kept safe. This means sharing some responsibility with the peer researchers.
We took steps to keep all families safe in the project, by providing training to the peer researchers on how to keep families safe, ensuring that interviews only took place at Beyond the Page’s venues and always having members of staff nearby to alert to any issues.
3. Consider how to incorporate peer researchers’ views – peer researchers are in a unique position compared to a typical researcher. A typical researcher may have limited direct experience of an issue that they are researching, but peer researchers have a shared experience with the people that they are speaking to as part of the research. This gives them a greater ability to connect with the people they are speaking to, and to understand the data collected. However, it also raises a challenge; as peer researchers could also be a participant, should their experiences be included in the data? As with most challenges with participatory research, we found the best approach is to address it in a participatory way and talk it through with the group. When we asked our peer researchers what they wanted, they said that they wanted their experiences to be incorporated into the research. So our team interviewed the peer researchers and included this data alongside the peer-to-peer interviews.
4. Consider how to thank participants for their time – with all research activities people give time to participate and there is always a question over how to thank someone for this – whether that be with money, or vouchers or gifts. In this project, there were both the peer researchers as well as the mothers and practitioners they spoke to, who gave their time. In line with participatory principles, we asked the peer researchers what they thought would be the best way to thank them for their time and took this approach.
5. It’s all worth it! - despite the time and the challenges faced, working with families on a research project where they are guiding what should be asked and interpreting the data gathered all leads to a much more meaningful project. Peer researchers were able to build rapport and relationships with the other migrant mothers in a way that those outside the community would have struggled to do. The peer researchers are now sharing the findings with the community, through a film and an event that will be attended by practitioners and policy makers from local family services. Hearing directly from the families should mean that service providers understand families’ strengths as well as the challenges they face and then make changes so that services work well for all families.
Any questions, or interested in hearing more? Please get in touch with Ellie at [email protected].
