Telling Research

What to call 'people' in research?

I was prompted to write this post after participating in an analysis session where some of the people who had taken part in the research were referred to as ‘ethnos’. Whilst I’m all for ethnography, it’s hard not to smile when people are referred to as ‘ethnos’. No offense Matt+John as I love your research but I’m not mad keen on the term ‘ethnos’.

But it does open up that old dilemma about what to call people in qualitative research. Quant is simpler. People are percentages, standard variables or ‘outliers’. In qualitative research they are just people, but that sounds far too ordinary in an industry which values its own creative intelligence rather more than the down to earth chumminess which is part and parcel of the qualitative process.

When I started work in a qualitative agency mainly involved in advertising and branding work, reports were generally written referring to people as ‘respondents’. The word ‘respondents’ works when people are responding to storyboards or branding concepts. I feel it is often how focus groups attendees like to see themselves (as sort of powerful guinea pigs). However it is rather passive and doesn’t really work when people are co-creating policy solutions or describing oral histories.

People are called different things at different times and by different people in a project. All fieldwork companies call people ‘respondents’ (almost as annoying as their habit of encapsulating everything as ‘market research’). During the analysis phase of a project people are often referred to by researchers by their actual names – though I am sometimes uncomfortable with this for confidentiality reasons. I had a colleague once who always wrote reports calling people ‘consumers’ – even for social research clients.

A common loophole in this dilemma and one I use myself is to term people on a project by project basis. A recent report I wrote looking at people in war torn countries made extensive use of the term ‘civilians’. Though cumbersome, the term ‘children and young people’ is common enough in research reports. For social research there is always the catch all term ‘service-user’.

Opinion Leader has a habit or referring to people as ‘participants’. Emotionally this is my favourite term because of its inclusive tone. It matches the atmosphere of some of the larger events they convene. I sometimes extend this to ‘research participant’ as I feel it gives people a stake in the process without implying they are involved in the analysis or report writing process, which generally they are not.

I quite often fall back on the term ‘interviewee’. It’s bog standard. It’s not pretty. But it’s true.

Pink or Blue? The rights and wrongs of finding out the gender of your unborn child

Did anything surprise you this week? Something did me. I was chatting to a pre-school mum pregnant with her second child. Her first child is a girl. In the now routine exchange (“when are you due?”, “do you know what you are having”) etc. she told me that on finding out the gender of her unborn child (a boy) she had been so disappointed she had actually wept in front of the ultra-sonographer. Now that surprised me. Mainly because I imagined that most people would be pleased to have one of each and to harbour such a passionate desire for two girls seemed to me, well, both odd and greedy.

I have heard (though it could easily be an urban myth) that hospitals serving areas with large immigrant populations refuse to reveal gender for fear of increasing terminations of female babies. I think I am safe in saying that the vast majority of people, from all backgrounds, are not going to terminate pregnancies for this reason. Therefore, offering parents a pre-emptive glimpse of their baby’s gender presents itself as merely a harmless treat– handy for name decisions and room decorating purposes.  But is it really so harmless?

On the positive side, knowing the gender of the child in advance personalises the baby and facilitates the bonding process pre birth. Many parents name their baby whilst they are in the womb - a delight for parents-to-be though it can make that birth announcement a little anti-climactic for the rest of us.

The downside of finding out the gender of the baby in advance is that it genders children far sooner than is necessary or perhaps desirable. Yes it’s true the Victorians were sexist but if you look at very old photos of children in that era they appear to have treated infants with wonderful equality – in dress at least (all in white frills). There is something rather grim about the rigid modern day segregation of the girls and boys clothes sections in baby shops.

When the ultra-sonographer makes that all important announcement of pink or blue, in a way the ownership of the gender passes from the child to the parent.  Newborn babies don’t have much, but what they used to have, which they don’t have now, is the ability to surprise their parents with their gender at birth. In my experience this is the most common reason parents give for wanting to know the gender of their baby is to avoid any disappointment at the moment of birth – particularly for second and third babies. But suppressing your curiosity and developing the habit of allowing your child to surprise and sometimes disappoint you is probably a better preparation for parenthood than getting the room the right colour.