Telling Research

RNIB launches personal shopping service for the blind

Oooh, the research I did last year with the Hub social design consultants in Manchester made it to the daily mail!

What to wear for interviews with blind people?

(extract)....When we begin to talk I realise that Julia’s blindness has given me a cloak of anonymity. The interview has been arranged by a third party (the RNIB) and we have never spoken and she knows nothing about me other than my name. She can hear my voice and what it might convey (female, regional/class accent, and some approximation of age) but she cannot see my skin colour, my age, my marital status, my style of clothes or indeed anything else an imaginative person might construe from my appearance. I quite enjoy my newfound invisibility but I sense that it is unfair. I want, as Goffman says, to achieve a ‘working consensus’ so that we can have a meaningful conversation on an equal footing.  For Goffman, a working consensus is achieved not when both parties can be completely candid, as this is rare and fraught with the risk of faux pas, but instead arises when each participant: “Conveys a view of the situation which he feels the others will be able to find at least temporarily acceptable.” Knowing so little about me, Julia is socially disadvantaged; she is inexpert at editing her conversation to be in tune with how she perceives me, the interviewer. Should I give her more information, to match the knowledge I have gained from seeing her? I am unsure what to say or what information to give, perhaps I should tell her what I am wearing, but I decide this would seem odd, so I give little away.

My construction of the interview starts when I get dressed in the morning. I am unusually conscious of my clothing for these particular interviews because although my general purpose at the initial meeting is to get to know the women, I will also be asking some questions about shopping and clothes. Aware that my outfit relates to the topic in hand, but will not be seen, I decide to dress as I would for any other in-home interview. My standard winter interview outfit is a dark blue A line denim skirt, good quality leather boots, a V necked sweater and a corduroy coat. I disapprove of wearing denim jeans to interviews. For me, jeans are not professional enough when meeting someone for the first time in an interview situation. Informality is desirable, but the actual wearing of jeans for me exudes an artificial chumminess which I prefer to avoid. Nonetheless, denim has many advantages, its chameleon like qualities for blending in in different situations, and the material itself which moulds onto the body without being clingy. As Miller and Woodward state in their Manifesto for a Study of Denim:

“the profundity of denim lies in the way it manages to be simultaneously our single most global garment and the most personal garment we possess” (Miller and Woodward, 2007)

A well cut denim skirt is my sartorial solution, denim but not jeans, smart, respectful, informal, intimate.  I wear light make up as usual, though I am somewhat relieved my face will not be scrutinised in any detail.

Selecting my clothes in this way is part of the identity project of my working life. In this sense they are signs, a presentation of myself as the ‘approachable professional’. But they are also who I am, real objects I think with, use and live with, and not superficial at all. The fact that my outfit will not be seen by those I am interviewing adds a new way of thinking about the interview.  I become compulsive in my thinking. I could turn up in a clown-suit and conduct the entire interview that way, she wouldn’t know. The fact I wear what I always do highlights the habitual groove ‘the interview’ has become for me, the seasoned interviewer, well honed in the art of extracting information and stories, yet also my choice of clothes and the fact they differ little from interview to interview speaks of my interview ideals; authenticity and egalitarian exchange.

Getting doctors to ease up in conversation

I've recently been interviewing doctors and once you've got over the mental hurdle - I'm not really at the doctor's and I'm not sick - it's been fascinating. There are of course whole research companies devoted to interviewing doctors and I'd never really been attracted to it. In the research business doctors seem to have a bit of a reputation as cagey know-alls with out of control egos. I have come across a few egos but there's nothing wrong with a little bit of ego in the right context and for the most part I've found doctors to be imaginative and likeable.

The main problem seems to be getting the conversation out of  robotic exchange in which the doctor aims to give the 'correct' professional answer. Usually this entails a recital of NICE guidelines or similar and not a muse on 'doctor as person' perspective that I'm really looking for. My conclusion has been that doctors are imaginative people but the challenge is getting them to use that imagination in conversation with a pesky researcher such as myself.

Usually in a one to one interview I expend much energy putting people at their ease and helping them understand the research process. This is all about redressing the power balance which at the beginning of a qualitative interview is typically all with the researcher. This is all unnecessary with doctors who believe themselves to be in control. They feel they are being consulted as experts and the interview set up can echoe the patient consultation experience itself. They are quick to control the conversation and second guess what you are trying to find out. I'm all for power to the respondent but none of this really accesses the creative part of the brain. I want witch doctor mode, not medic undergraduate trying to pass their viva.

Getting round this is difficult but I think creating an 'off the record' environment, interviewing in conjunction with nurses and observation in unexpected settings might help yield more lateral results.

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.

Is public opinion on climate change moving on?

 

What are the great British public actually doing to combat climate change?  Certainly public understanding of climate change, its causes and effects, has moved on enormously over the last ten years and more than ever in the last three.  The language itself has moved on.  The public used to talk about “rainforests” but now that term has been superseded by “global warming” and “climate change”.  I still feel that nothing has quite caught the public imagination as spectacularly as CFCs and the ozone layer did twenty years ago, but contemporary images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels come close.

There is a tendency to present the British public as car-loving, technology consuming couch potatoes, but personal actions to help the environment have moved on enormously.  Ten years ago the only personal action most people could think of which might help the environment was saving paper (“I always use both sides..”).  That has evolved into a wider concept of recycling and now includes a range of energy saving measures.  The fact that even apparently benign actions such as google searches have an impact on the environment is now more widely known and accepted.  People often want to know what they can do to do more.

However, in my work which involves interviewing people in their homes, I much more often come across accidental sustainable behaviours than deliberate ones.  People and families are full of contradictions. I recently met a retired couple who moved close to the airport so they could take advantage of dozens of cheap flights every year, yet lovingly grew their own vegetables and recycled everything.  When I do interviews with married couples there is often a lot of bantering about who undermines who in saving energy measures such as switching lights or the heating off.

I am a passionate believer in action on climate change myself, so during interviews I do have moments of hopelessness which have to be suppressed.  One recent conversation springs to mind.

                “How do you get your clothes dry?”
                “Tumble drier”
                “But I notice you have a rotary drier outside”
                “Yeah, but I don’t use it because, um, you know, a bird might crap on it or something”

There was also the retired couple who claimed the reason they kept on two cars was to help pick up their grandson from school.  Initially I thought this fairly reasonable until I found out the grandson was a strapping lad in sixth form old enough to drive himself.  Couldn’t he get the bus or cycle, I wondered. The truth about behaviour is that most is just habit and below the level of conscious thought.   There is also quite a lot of buck-passing and spouting of excuses I have heard too many times before.  The most crushing excuse I always find is the “they can’t do anything anyway, people will never change”.

I also have moments of hopefulness.  The desire to create and nurture is strong.  I have stopped being surprised when I visit high rise council flats and find lovingly tended gardens on the balconies.  In fact I have come to the conclusion that they exist not in spite of high rise living but because of it. 

People long for community and explicitly say so.  Closer knit communities have less need to hop in the car several times a day and more opportunities to act together to improve their local space.  It’s true that British householders are fond of consumption but most people are fond of Britain too.  The Transition Town movement which aims to foster sustainable local communities is an experiment in environmental localism and dare I say, patriotism too. Complicated carbon calculation is beyond much of the population who want to experience something collectively rather than worry if they’ve got their recycling sorting right.  .  After scores of interviews with members of the public I have come to the conclusion that the right sorts of instincts and desires exist amongst people to live sustainably; we just need to find a society to match them.

Doing research differently

I am currently reading Doing Research Differently by Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson.  It is really good and so far seems to endorse my own research style which is nice!  The authors are qualitative researchers looking at fear of crime.  They criticise traditional quantitative questions used to measure fear of crime such as "how safe do you feel walking alone in this area after dark" as too suggestive of particular types of crime and evoking fears which might not relate to crime at all (Why might you be "walking alone" in the first place?  Is this not the stuff of nightmares and films rather than everyday experience?)  They point to alternative qualitative approaches and in particular the "non-inventionist free narrative".  This approach does not expect the interviewee to understand completely their own actions, motivations or feelings and looks for clues within stories for psycho-social explanations for why they feel the way they do about crime.  Story telling has the advantage of having 'indexicality' in that they contain certain facts or signficances beyond the tellers intentions.

One problem with the free narrative is that whilst I'm sure it can work excellently in a one to one conversation about crime, which is after all a whole literary genre, I'm not sure it works nearly so well in group situations addressing less colourful subjects, say dishwashers or pensions.  In addition, one of my problems with facilitation can be overindulging  the keen story tellers at the expense of the other participants' boredom levels.  My rescue is the facilitator 'box of tricks' which has to be prepared well in advance.  This contains small exercises such as point allocation games, completion tasks or role play to get out of the groove of well rehearsed stories and into new and surprising terrain.

Your health, your care, your say

Talk about a working weekend.  On Saturday I facilitated a session for the Department of Health's huge consultation event in Birmingham.  A thousand members of the public attended - brought in on buses from all over England.  I had 10 people in my group ranging from 21 to 83 years of age with a whole catalogue of health issues!  It was much more fun than it sounds!  Particularly enjoyable was the voting which was done periodically throughout the day on individual key pads.  The results could be seen instantly on screen.  It complemented the qualitative aspect quite well as people explained their reasoning in the group discussions. 

To keep energy levels high we had a 10 minute session of aerobics led by a specialist instructor from Birmingham City Council.  The 83 year old joined in with gusto, but the men all went to queue for the loo!  On that note we ended up having an interesting discussion about men's attitudes to health overall and I notice today that all three leaders of the main political parties are joining forces to promote prostate cancer awareness. 

The whole event was modelled on American style town meetings pioneered by America Speaks but I feel it transferred fairly well to a British setting.  The day got quite a lot of press interest and was featured on quite a few news channels.  I was grateful not to be one of my colleagues who was in the 'studio room' and her group had to be webcast live across the Department of Health's website. 

The main question on everyone's lips is "was it worth the money?".  I think what my participants appreciated the most was their hotel visit.  One of my participants had not spent a night away from home in 40 years!

Your health, Your say

Moderating at this event in a couple of weeks. It's a public health deliberative event in Birmingham run by Opinion Leader Research and supported by Patricia Hewitt.   It's going to be quite extraordinary.  Not only are there going to be about a 1000 people attending, all the feedback from the breakout groups will be fed into an electronic system in real time so that some of the ideas and results can be shared at the event.  Yes, that's typing and moderating at the same time!

Middle class revival?

I was in the Sunday Times last Sunday commenting on a "middle class revival". An advertising agency have produced a report pointing to an increase in the popularity of etiquette guides and tea shops (!) I thought it highly tenuous in terms of the evidence and came across like just another opportunity for chav bating (see previous post). My contribution states that people are still embarrassed to be described as middle class.

Bog problems

As a loyal user of public transport I have always held the belief that the people who complain the most about public transport are those who don’t use it. I never learned to drive and consequently all my fieldwork is conducted by rail, bus, taxi and walking. I’ve usually found this to be surprisingly efficient. Next week I plan to visit Finchley, Newbury, Eastleigh, Winchester, Croydon, Leatherhead and Stoke and I’m fairly optimistic about arriving everywhere on time.

So, it’s not like me to complain about public transport, but I did recently have the most odious experience on a GNER train back from Birmingham. I don’t want to go into too many details but almost all of the toilets were out of order and there was the most heinous smell permeating through the train. I was disgusted enough to complain to head office and received a £5 rail voucher for my trouble. I had forgotten about the matter, but I was horrified to discover via this blog that toilet trouble on trains has been chronic throughout the summer and is particularly bad on the new rolling stock. Those new Pendolino trains really are awful. The booking systems never work, the seats are uncomfortable and the serve yourself shop is confusing. I also finally found out what the highly annoying repetitive “beep beep beep” noise is on the trains. There is an emergency button in the toilets which looks very like the “lock door” button and some unsuspecting toilet-goers press it trying to lock the door. I strongly suspect the train companies didn’t do any consumer research whilst designing these trains.