Community research: moving from exploitative extraction to genuine collaboration

Community research is an urgent necessity in the COVID era, but how can we move from exploitative extraction of local knowledge to genuinely collaborative research?

Shaun Danquah and Luke Billingham have both been involved in grassroots community and youth research of different kinds. Shaun is working with TSIP team members on developing 
new models of community-led research, and Luke worked with two paid young researchers to produce the Hackney Wick Through Young Eyes report, which has had a big impact on Hackney decision-makers. This blog is an exchange between Luke and Shaun about community research, who owns knowledge, exploitative vs empowering forms of research, research weariness and scepticism, and more.

Well-connected consultancies and grassroots intelligence

Luke: As you know, Shaun, I'm a grumpy cynic, and one thing that makes me especially grumpy is the superabundance of consultancy/research/service design organisations that run around scooping up big dollops of local authority or central government funding, descending on local communities with flip-chart paper and post-it notes, running workshops which offer little to their participants, and then producing beautifully-presented reports, which result in pats on the back all round (for them), and in them being described as experts in community engagement.

Obviously, there are other organisations that do brilliant research, engagement and design work rooted in their communities: Hackney AccountTake Back the Power4front ProjectAdvocacy Academy, and The Plug YIA being just a few examples. But these organisations seem to get less kudos and less funding than those more "traditional" consultancies that hoover up funding and then take insight & expertise from local communities without giving much back - why is this, do you think? 

Research by extraction vs. research as collaboration


Shaun: I agree with you! For too long, communities suffering from the consequences of inequality and wealth disparity have been the subjects of research programmes, instead of partners in the design and implementation of research activities and active agents in developing solutions for improved wellbeing. It’s something I've certainly witnessed over the last 15 years: researchers have been jettisoned into communities to conduct research based on what Gaudry (2011) calls an ‘extraction model of research’. This is the process by which localised knowledge is removed from communities without any commitment to involving or benefitting the communities being researched. It’s a deeply entrenched model of how research works.

I’ve been working with TSIP colleagues to develop an inclusive research model. We train, employ and support local people to do research, engagement and consultation on behalf of organisations. It ensures that people who are living in a place, and who are experiencing the challenges that organisations are trying to solve in that place, are more involved in both local research and the social projects that come out of that research.  

Why isn’t there more properly collaborative community research?

Luke: It seems crazy to me that there isn’t more community research undertaken in that kind of collaborative way. I guess it’s at odds with the way that research and charity have developed in this country since Victorian times – well-heeled researchers holding their noses as they observe the destitute. As James Sharpe has put it, “poorer urban brethren” were viewed during the Victorian era as “at once fascinating, intimidating and incomprehensible” (Sharpe 2016: 412). I fear similar attitudes are fairly common today. I’ve definitely seen plenty of “othering” and condescension towards community members in research.

I’d love to see more of the collaborative forms of research that you mention. I’d like to think that our research at Hackney Quest, Hackney Wick Through Young Eyes, was undertaken along similar lines: we paid two young people to work with me on the research, and I grew up in the area myself. Who is involved and where the money goes seem like fundamentally important questions to me – if no-one in the community being studied is paid for their time, insight or expertise, and no-one undertaking the research has a rich understanding of the neighbourhood, there’s a big problem. UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity is another example of how to do things right: they train and pay local people (who they call “citizen scientists”) to work with their researchers. We worked with them on their Youth Prosperity Index research.

But what do you think are the reasons that there aren’t more of these collaborative forms of research, and what could change things? 

Power imbalances, community credibility, and community ownership 

Shaun: I think, ultimately, it’s about power. Historically, those from higher up in the social hierarchy dictate to the “other”: they are the political leaders governing poorer people, they’re the headteachers educating poorer people, and they are the researchers coming in to study the poorer people. They feel they’re on a more enlightened plane. Researchers inspired by the European Enlightenment fancied themselves to be intellectually beyond the colonial savages, and so saw them as subjects to examine, not partners in understanding. There’s a kind of neo-colonialism in some research to this day: “We are coming to find out why you’re so poor and why you’re so disorganised. We’ll listen to you and maybe we’ll offer you some tips.” 

But now we’re increasingly seeing the negative consequences of this. What we’ve seen in health research, for instance, is that nuance gets lost if there isn’t community rapport and credibility. Nuance shapes lives, so if you miss the nuance, you can’t understand someone’s life. If you come to my house, you’re going to see some things, but you’re going to miss a lot because you don’t live here. 

COVID-19 shows how vital it is to understand all the nuances of particular communities in an effective way, in order to promote more equitable health outcomes. But the more historically marginalised a community is, the more likely you are to find research weariness and medical scepticism in that community – because they’re more likely to have been exploited or mistreated by researchers and medical professionals. In the age of COVID-19, this can be deadly.

Through our new community research approach, we’re trying to address all this. If you’re a part of a community that you’re researching, it means you have access to certain networks, conversations, debates, and ideas that dwell in that community, which outside research institutions could rarely access. There is more validity and richness in the data we can produce by exploring and telling the story of our own community than if someone else parachutes in.

So this is partly about communities recognising their own worth: communities understanding the insight and intelligence they have access to. They have magnificent data! There’s a currency to that, or at least, with a few research tools, these raw materials can become currency – data and insight that has exchange value. Too often, outside institutions want to get to the raw materials to make their own currency, rather than supporting the communities to do so.

Through our community research model, we get community members involved in the design, data collection, analysis, evaluation, reflection – we’re aspiring for the most collaborative approach possible.

Principles for genuinely collaborative community research

 Here’s our list a list of the key principles for properly collaborative research in communities:

  • Train community researchers

  • Treat community researchers as equal partners – that means partnering with them from the start before the research questions are set, maintaining that partnership through to the end, and paying for their time

  • Pay research participants for their time and insights at every stage

  • Make participation in your research fun and worthwhile

  • Avoid taking big chunks of people’s time, for free, and then boring them!

  • Offer community researchers and participants other opportunities if possible (e.g. give young people an insight into university applications if you’re an academic)

  • Hold yourself accountable for the effects of your research – do all you can to ensure that something tangibly beneficial comes out of it for the community you studied

  • Be completely clear with participants about who’s funding the research, what it’s for, and what might come out of it

To find out more about the approach to community research that Shaun and the team are developing at TSIP from the perspective of community researchers, see here.

 References

Gaudry, A. (2011). ‘Insurgent Research’, Wicazo Sa Review, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 113-136

Sharpe (2016). A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England, London: Penguin