VIDEO: Intelligence and insight gathering on COVID-19 experiences through Community Research
In April, we began utilising our Community Research model in partnership with Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity to gather intelligence on how the residents of Lambeth and Southwark were adapting and coping during the Covid-19 pandemic. We used a semi-structured interview style which lasted over six sessions, with over 40 residents across four months. 78% of people interviewed were Black and 65% had at least one health condition such as diabetes, cancer lung problems or diabetes.
The positionality of our researchers within the community allowed us to take an insider approach to circumvent the research weariness within communities, caused by the research extraction that often takes place with traditional institutions. My colleague Shaun Danquah often refers to this as the outdated parachute model in which institutions get the ‘juicy scoop’ from communities without empowering them during the process or leaving a legacy. We, therefore, co-designed our research by including credible members of the community in every phase of our research to make sure our methodology, ethics and evaluation were all reflective of the community’s needs.
In this model, our access to the cultural nuances within the community was born out of the sense of trust we were able to establish with our interviewees, which developed organically over the course of our sessions. We utilised the cultural competency and cross-cultural dexterity of our researchers to broker between Lambeth and Southwark’s residents and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity investigation into people’s lived experience of Covid-19. This was powerful because it counteracted the institutional disconnect often expressed by the people we were interviewing. All the while, we applied the same academic rigour of traditional research methodology, utilising the qualified academic talent we have within our team to compile and analyse the data we collected.
During each round of interviews, we conducted a thematic analysis to try and identify overall patterns and themes coming up across multiple interviewees. We then relayed our insights back to community members and researchers to try and unpack all of the cultural nuances we’d missed, which in turn empowered the community to be a part of the research process. In the end, we created the film footage you see before you, which summarises our findings directly and succinctly. Our interviewees once more were included in this phase of research, as we relayed the footage back to them for further insights and approval so that ethically we were able to remain consistent from top to bottom in our treatment of those who were involved in the research.
I personally unearthed the entrepreneurial resourcefulness of those interviewees who had the capacity to do so during the lockdown. Although there were many who expressed that they were struggling to access sufficient healthcare, due to either financial, digital or social limitations, it was encouraging to know that communities were utilising whatever equity they had to their advantage during these trying times. Interviewees voiced that it was a morale boost for them to feel they were being heard and that it was therapeutic for them to have an outlet for their worries and anxieties, and space to discuss their plans for the future.