A good friend said they liked what they understood of my previous posts. *face-palm* I’m leaving them there because I know my naive, soapbox bullshit is going to amuse me in years to come but I’m also going to give you a brief explanation of what I do for a living here, and then strive to make all the posts that follow this one jargon free.
What is a social researcher?
Social research is a method for understanding people and society – often so that services, goods, systems etc. can be designed to suit them (or someone else).
There are four types of social research:
– qualitative; this is about direct communication with people and getting an in-depth understanding of individual views, rather than broad knowledge about large groups
– quantitative; this is about numbers, usually on a large scale, that are gathered through surveys/polls and statistically analysed to give insight into large populations.
You could say that quant gives you the ‘what’ and qual gives you the ‘why’ or the ‘how’.
– primary; primary research is about researchers going to the source (people) with specific questions and getting clear, reliable, answers
– secondary; secondary research is about going to relevant sources that have already done primary or secondary research and bringing that knowledge together to draw conclusions or answer specific questions as best you can.
Secondary research is usually called a ‘literature review’ and in an ideal world we’d do literature reviews before primary research every time, to avoid unnecessary duplication and ask the best questions we can (‘cos it’s informed by stuff that’s already been done). Whether this happens or not depends on all things context … and budget.
You probably do research all the time – you ask people questions and google search stuff because you’re interested or you’re meeting a need. If you want a new music device you ask around and read reviews before buying anything, right? The only difference with social research is we’re just more systematic about it.
Doing social research day to day looks like:
– doing literature reviews
– talking to clients/responding to ‘tenders’ (a tender is what a client puts out for research organisations/individuals to apply for, we all pull together proposed methods and they choose the best quality or best fit – hopefully both! A client can be anyone with a research need and some money. Researchers in public services tend to have specialisms like transport, health, education etc. They probably have specialisms in market research too, which focuses on brands and products – dunno *shrugs*).
– figuring out what questions need answering
– figuring out who to ask what
– designing surveys and discussion guides (for interviews and workshops)
– managing events and design processes
– turning up to places and asking people things
– writing down what they say
– thinking about everything that everyone said and what that means
– writing reports for people who want to know the answers
A good social researcher, in my view, will:
– think about bias at all stages and how to minimise it
– be clear and consistent in their methods e.g. search terms or interview approach
– make sure all research participants have a positive experience
– write reports that are clear and actionable
– consider ethics and abide by some kind of moral compass e.g. being clear and transparent about what participants’ views can and can’t change, not using language to describe participants in the office that they wouldn’t use to their face
What kind of research do I do?
I’m a qualitative researcher that does primary and secondary research. My policy area is social care and health and I specialise in working with vulnerable/seldom heard groups (in any policy area). So, I spend a significant portion of my time:
– doing all of the above, with a focus on social care and health services OR
– doing all of the above, with a focus on talking to vulnerable/seldom heard groups in a way that is inclusive and not annoying for the folk who answer the questions
– getting annoyed about people’s assumptions
– getting annoyed about my own assumptions
– feeling sad there’s so many people I can’t reach from the ivory tower I now live in
What does vulnerable mean?
I didn’t know I’d specialise in this when I landed but over time I realised that loads of people I know are ‘vulnerable’ and apparently, so am I (or at least I was for a really long time and being haunted by it is helpful now). From what I can tell, being vulnerable means having a physical, cognitive or mental health issue, or some other kind of disadvantage like poverty or an identity people hate on, that affects something relevant to the research e.g. being blind makes it harder to get out of an unfamiliar burning building, having a mental health issue might make you easier to manipulate online, not having any money might make you less likely to stay in school etc. It’s context driven, so who is classed as vulnerable varies.
Being ‘hard to reach’ is pretty widely disputed (now) as an issue of the person saying it, rather than the person who’s hard to reach. ‘Hard to reach’, now known as ‘seldom heard’, are words used to describe groups of people who are under-represented in research. So, they’re the people who don’t readily get involved when they’re asked, usually because of mistrust or other barriers, or don’t get asked because the people doing the research have no idea how to reach them, don’t have the budget to be adaptable enough to engage them, or perhaps haven’t realised they should. ‘Barriers to participation’ means stuff that stops people getting involved, might be trust, language, transport costs, caring responsibilities – anything that stops them ‘engaging’.
Now you’ve got all the background I can tell you about an even more specific specialism I’ve recently gone into; “public dialogue”. Over the years I’ve done a lot of ‘deliberative engagement’, which means the research discussions I’ve designed and facilitated involve participants considering their views with each other and working towards collective recommendations.
Public dialogue basically looks like:
– difficult policy or service issue to solve e.g. wtf do we do about climate change?
– many hours spent on creating balanced, un-biased and clear materials
– large group of people with a wide range of life experience in a room – the ‘public’
– a range of experts, policy-makers and other stakeholders in the room with them
– many hours spent absorbing information, talking to experts and with each other
– deliberating and compromising to make recommendations to policy-makers
I love this shit. The word transformational is generally over-used, I know, but – this shit is transformational. I watch members of the public realise that people give a proper monkeys about them and come to understand the difficulty of the daily lives of decision-makers. I watch decision-makers and experts come to realise that given the right circumstances and information the public are well up for these conversations and provide amazing insight and suggestions. Love. This. Shit
I’m ridiculously excited to be right at the start of a journey where I’ll learn all about the different methods of dialogue. I hope I can help to up the game of, and spread the word of, this potential way of making democracy work, hopefully pulling our society away from cyclic nonsense on social media or one-way conversations through PR.
I’ll finish with an anecdote. This happened at an event I facilitated at a while back. In this moment I realised the power of this work and my commitment to it.
A guy announced to the table early on in the day that he’s the leader of a small political party in his area. He later said everyone should be sorting their own shit out, like he’s had to. Nobody attacked him – careful, impartial facilitation that keeps the conversation on topic and productive, and the atmosphere, ensured this. At the end of the day, he told me he’d never thought about distributing resources and taking care of others like this before. He looked dazed – “perhaps we should.”
