Research and Research Methods for Youth Practitioners

Simon Bradford, Fin Cullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415570855
• eBook ISBN: 9781136627729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Secondary Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Rigorous research is crucial to effective work with young people and increasingly youth practitioners need to be able to develop, review and evidence their work using a variety of research and assessment tools. This text equips students and practitioners with a thorough understanding of research design, practice and dissemination, as well as approaches to evidence-based practice.

A clear practice framework informs the book, outlining the significance of research to youth work, especially in relation to designing and developing services for young people. Research and Research Methods for Youth Practitioners:

• Analyses the research/practitioner role
• Explores the ethical context of research in youth work
• Offers a thorough analysis of key methodological questions in research in practice
• Provides a guide to data collection and analysis
• Presents five principal research strategies for youth work: ethnographic work and visual methods; interviewing and evaluation; surveys and evaluation; the use of secondary data and documentary analysis; and researching virtual and online settings
• Discusses the implications of research for work with young people as well as its dissemination.

Written by experienced researchers and practitioner-researchers, each chapter in this accessible textbook includes an overview, a critical discussion of the pros and cons of the particular method or approach, a case study, a practice-based task, a summary and suggestions for further reading. This textbook is invaluable for student and practising youth workers. It is also a useful reference for other practitioners working with young people.

1 Working as a practitioner-researcher

Fin Cullen , Simon Bradford and Laura Green

Overview

This collection is aimed at practitioner-researchers working within the field of young people’s services. If you are reading this book, you are perhaps completing a dissertation as part of a university course. You may be a practitioner or manager attempting to develop a research-led approach to policy and practice at your organisation. This chapter explores the nature of practitioner research, and outlines some of the possible tensions and conflicts that can arise when entering the field while acting as practitioner and researcher simultaneously. It explores and outlines various notions of participatory action research and praxis, in relation to how research-orientated approaches can directly influence and shape policy and practice.

Our key questions include:

• What is research for?

• What is your role as practitioner-researcher when conducting your study?

The research in which you are involved may be about developing and evaluating local services, producing a needs assessment or community profile, or activating change for a practice-based problem. However, your research may have a more theoretical basis, or may be about creating new knowledge in other fields. With this in mind, it is essential that you are clear about your study’s focus, purpose and audience. The research-based work evaluation for funders or management will be substantially different in tone and focus, for example, from an academic dissertation. For instance, the role of research may be a key part of the descriptors used to map your professional role. Currently, the UK National Occupational Standards for youth work stress the need for youth workers to be aware of the tools and processes involved in evaluating day-to-day youth work practice including involving young people in the evaluation process.¹

The following chapters aim to highlight the main debates in the area, in addition to guiding practitioners towards further materials that can develop research skills and support their work as practitioner-researchers. Given that the UK National Occupational Standards’ practitioner-oriented definition of youth work incorporates a research and evaluation element, it might seem that participatory and action research approaches have a key role in developing both research and youth work practice. Increasingly, many youth practitioners are expected to take larger roles in planning and evaluating practice interventions, in addition to evidencing youth work via a range of qualitative approaches to data collection and the accumulation of quantitative indicators.

The kinds of research you may have in mind may vary considerably – from small-scale consultations looking at young people’s needs in a small geographical area, to larger community profiles or evaluations of youth services and education programmes, to theoretically driven work that could form a Master’s dissertation. This chapter aims to encourage readers to think critically about what it means to be a practitioner and a researcher, and how those identities may complement or clash with each another. We will consider how you might think critically about the nature of power and ethics, how the research agenda is shaped and to what ends. Whilst being a practitioner-researcher might enable you to reflect critically on your practice, improve service delivery and make key links between theory, policy and practice, it may also pose significant challenges about what and whom research is for, and where your role as a researcher begins and ends.

In defining social research and practitioner research, in particular, we borrow from Barrett et al. (1999), and argue that research in education and the social sciences is always characterised by at least five principles. Your research should be systematic, critical and self-critical enquiry that aims to contribute to advancing knowledge and/or practice. In thinking through and planning your own research you should consider the extent to which you are able to meet these basic criteria for good research.

We refer to each element briefly in turn.

Systematic

By this, we mean that research should be conducted in a way that is planned; it should be completed in an appropriate sequence; and it should have a clear rationale. Anyone reading your work should be able to understand exactly how you went about the research and the reasons why you did it in that way. When you write up your work (in either a dissertation or a research paper), your writing should reflect the rationale that underlies the work itself.

Critical

In social research, criticality and the adoption of a critical stance are fundamental. This means that you should scrutinise everything that you do, everything that you are told and all that you infer from your completed research. It means continually asking how and why questions (‘How can I best research that question?’, ‘Why should I do it this way?’, and so on). You should also adopt this stance in relation to your reading: look for the possible reasons why some claim that a writer makes might not be true or correct. How is the writer making her arguments and to what extent does that represent a particular position rather than a general truth, as claimed? Criticality will help you to become more sensitive to the nature of argument and truth claims.

Self-critical

Being self-critical takes the idea of criticality a little further and helps you to focus on you the researcher. Being self-critical means that we have to think about our own position in the research and as a researcher (sometimes referred to as positionality). We have to be very clear about who we are as researchers and what we bring with us. For example, the fact that I am a white middle-aged man or a black woman from a certain class background may mean that I have particular ways of understanding the world around me. How might that understanding shape the way I choose particular research questions and go about researching them? How might it encourage me to understand the responses made by participants? What impact does my identity or my values have on interpreting the significance of those responses? Being self-critical applies to every aspect of social research, from the beginning of the project to its conclusion.

Enquiry

Social research probably starts with a sense of curiosity and an interest in a particular question or puzzle that emerges in your practice or more broadly in your professional or academic life. It might simply be concerned with asking the question ‘What’s going on here?’ or it may be something much more complex about aspects of policy, organisation, management, young people’s lives and experience, and so on. This means that in planning your research project you should have an explicit purpose in mind.

Knowledge and practice

We argue that your research project (i.e. what your research is for) should make a contribution to knowledge about young people, communities or services for young people and communities (depending on your research question). Because you are a practitionerresearcher, it should also contribute to the development of practice, where possible. Your work should therefore make a contribution to what we know and what we can do.

All social research studies need a clearly identifiable research question as a starting point. This question establishes the boundaries of the enquiry, the parameters of the study, and enables researchers to develop and design a clear research strategy – including methodological and epistemological framing. The kinds of theory underpinning researchers’ understanding of the social world often pose different kinds of research question, and such differing questions need different methods. For example, if a researcher were interested in measuring levels of homophobic bullying, a question such as the following might be posed:

• What were the levels of reported homophobic bullying incidents in secondary schools in the last year?

This research question concerns the social problem of ‘homophobic bullying’ and seeks to establish the level of this problem in schools. The question suggests using a largely quantitative approach. This might include statistical analysis of reported incidents and questionnaires for institutions, and also involve reviewing school homophobic and general bullying policies, and the reporting protocols that are in place. This would provide empirical measures that could be used across time and location to identify whether levels of bullying had changed, and whether this was an issue in particular school locations, or amongst particular groups of students.

A researcher who is interested in lesbian, gay and bisexual young people’s personal experiences of the social world might pose a different question, such as:

• How do young gay, lesbian and bisexual people narrate their experience of ‘coming out’ in school?

This question is about trying to grasp the ways in which these young people’s accounts provide understanding of individual pupils’ experiences of being ‘out’ in educational spaces. The question suggests a plan that incorporates such methods as individual and/or group interviews rather than large-scale questionnaires, in order to capture individual and group narratives. Whilst such a study could not provide the comparative statistics offered by the previous homophobic bullying question, narratives of bullying as a lived experience may be present in the students’ accounts. Similarly, LGB students may also have accounts that do not involve bullying, and may instead include positive experiences and acceptance in school. Of course, a researcher may choose to take a blended, multi-method approach, combining both quantitative and qualitative methods.

The point here is that particular epistemological framings and research aims shape the kinds of question and methods used. Whilst both research questions are interested in sexualities and schooling, and the findings may touch on the ‘social problem’ of homophobic bullying, each would have a distinct set of methods shaped by the different macro and micro understandings and perspectives of knowledge in the school settings. Both research questions would also be potentially insightful in creating policy and practice interventions within educational settings.

Epistemology is a term used to describe the theory of knowledge: how do we know what we think we know? There have been a number of main traditions that sociologists have used to frame their particular approaches epistemologically to social research. We will briefly consider two here: positivism and interpretivism.

Positivism arose at the inception of many of the social science disciplines. At its heart is the notion that researchers can study society in a scientific way. There have been various proponents of positivist methods throughout the history of sociology, including such notable, and very different, sociologists as Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. Positivism adopted many methods directly from the natural sciences, and has an emphasis on collecting what Durkheim referred to as ‘social facts’. By analysing such ‘facts’, sociologists are believed to be able to provide scientific explanations for social events, and identify solutions for social problems in order to develop and shape theories about society.

The second influential approach, interpretivism, is often associated with such sociologists as Max Weber and Georg Simmel. This places the emphasis not on the collection of social facts, but rather on understanding the accounts and the meaning making and social significance people have about their social worlds. Such an approach highlights multiple ‘realities’, in opposition to the Durkheimian position that emphasises that ‘social facts’ (broadly speaking, culture and ‘collective representations’: all the shared meanings, symbols and ways in which we understand who we are) are external to and constraining of individual conduct. Such sociological traditions frame the nature of critical enquiry and understandings, and these approaches shape the research methods, mode of analysis and claims one might make for data.

What is practitioner research?

Our broad argument is that research, as an activity, constitutes a vital and rich space where youth practitioners may engage critically with debates from the field, policy and practice, and link theory and practice. In and of itself, research provides scope for self-reflection, and personal and practitioner development, beyond that the development of knowledge for its own sake, or an examination of how one might develop progressive practice in any given area.

Everyday practice for many contemporary youth practitioners will include various forms of data gathering, recordings, needs assessments, and programme and project evaluations. The push for ‘evidence’ in many youth settings may sometimes seem to be activated on the basis of particular empirical measures – those of accredited and recorded outcomes, school league tables, about demographic, descriptive user statistics, and quick-run surveys. However, Issitt and Spence (2005: 63) note: ‘face to face practice, by its very nature is not concerned primarily with gathering evidence and creating meaning, but rather with personal and social change’. The kinds of change perceived as important by face-to-face practitioners may be of little interest or legibility in the kinds of evidence criteria and empirical measures required by policy and practice settings. Such differences in recognising and perceiving change between practitioners and policymakers/funders might suggest that a broader base of empirical measures and ‘evidence’ may be necessary in order to capture this wider range of activity and meaning in practice settings.

Whilst data gathering as an exercise may be an everyday part of youth practice, this differs significantly from social research, in that the latter is orientated around an inquiry to provide deeper understandings of the social world and/or in response to a sociological problem. The kinds of ‘evidence’ and data that practitioners are asked to gather, and that might be seen as persuasive in securing further funding or justifying the existence of a youth project, are often largely quantitative (i.e. numerical and statistical data) in order to be included in wider ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Working as a practitioner-researcher
• 2. Getting started: Developing and designing research for practice
• 3. Research ethics: Participation, social difference and informed consent
• 4. Doing ethnography and using visual methods
• 5. Asking questions: Interviews and evaluations
• 6. Using quantitative methods: Designing surveys and evaluations
• 7. Documentary research and secondary data
• 8. Virtual and online research with young people
• 9. Presenting research to different audiences
• 10. Research and work with young people: Politics, participation and policy
• Index