PARTICIPATIVE RESEARCH EXAMPLE FROM BELGIUM

The partners we invited were three types: the university-based teachers/researchers, families and, in particular, mothers and fathers in families experiencing poverty, and social work professionals in child and family social work.  

The co-coordinating (university-based) teachers/researchers had pre-existing relationships and were already well established with the relevant social work organisations, who supported the families on an everyday basis for a long time. This was important for ethical reasons: while doing the participative research, we could rely on the trusting relationships we had developed with these partners through their involvement in previous teaching and research. 

The service users as research participants were recruited with the help of these social work organisations. We asked them to recruit families ready to participate, with whom they had given support and who experienced financial difficulties over time. After these preliminary contacts, we negotiated directly with the families and obtained their informed consent. We conducted open qualitative in-depth interviews with parents of young children who had experiences with a diversity of social work interventions. The families had several children, preferably one of their children being aged between zero and three years old. In the course of the research process, we interviewed 14 parents (ten mothers and four fathers) from nine different families. Some parents only intermittently joined the conversation, yet nine parents (seven mothers and two fathers from seven families) were interviewed more extensively.  

Within a series of two to four conversations, which lasted one to five hours, parents told their life stories and their experiences of social work interventions. All 27 interviews were fully audiotaped and transcribed, and the researcher shared the reconstructed family histories again with the parents to refine the findings and storylines. The process of working together to (re)construct the parents' family histories steered us, by mutual agreement, to an attempt to visualise their life histories. This allowed us to deepen our understanding of the poverty situations the research participants lived in. We were able to document existing resources, events and key incidents at specific turning points (Millar, 2007). Our life history approach resulted in a complex mosaic of life experiences, which were pieced together and contextualised through constructing an individual lifeline in close collaboration with the parents. These lifelines ran through each research process as a common thread and were gradually corrected, elaborated and refined. This allowed us to gain a profound understanding of how transitions, events, and resources (including social work interventions) led to these transitions being experienced by these families. 

ONE'S OWN POSITION

We deemed a participatory yet also reflexive approach in social work research particularly vital since family history research "is a practice that is not merely enacting a prescribed research role according to steps in a manual" but requires a recognition of the reflexive role of the researcher (Roberts, 2002: 173).

We wanted to take into account the power imbalances typically implicated in participatory knowledge production about the complex social problem of poverty. Our impetus for using a participatory approach to social work research has been to reconfigure the power relations implicated in knowledge production by emphasising the participation of the research partners in co-constructing knowledge. Nevertheless, determining how to interpret and write about the research insights 'is in the hands of the researcher and not in the hands of the researched, the interviewed' (Krumer-Nevo, 2002: 305).  

We follow Krumer-Nevo (2009: 282), who states that many scholars engage with participatory research approaches 'but do not specify the process through which they had produced it (...). The role that people in poverty took in them is not clear'.  

For us, the life history research approach involved methodological and ethical dilemmas, complexities and ambiguities (D'Cruz and Jones, 2004), which required the necessary openness to discuss our doubts and considerations emerging during the research process (Roose et al., 2016).  

References:

Roose, R., Roets, G., Schiettecat, T., Piessens, A., Van Gils, J., Pannecoucke, B., Driessens, K., Desair, K., Hermans, K., Op de Beeck, H., Vandenhole, W., van Robaeys, B., & Vandenbroeck, M. (2016). Social work research as a practice of transparency. European Journal of Social Work, 19(6), 1021-1034.

Schiettecat, T., Roets, G., Vandenbroeck, M. (2018). Capturing life histories about movements into and out of poverty: A road with pits and bumps. Qualitative Social Work, 17(3), 387-404.