Читать книгу Researching in the Age of COVID-19 Vol 2 - Группа авторов - Страница 7
ОглавлениеSu-ming Khoo and Helen Kara
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in the early months of 2020, researchers have had to react – responding to and rethinking their ongoing and near-future research. As researchers have begun to adapt their research methods to a world that is continuing in a pandemic response mode for the medium and longer term, there are also opportunities to reflect more deeply and widely on fundamental issues and assumptions, and to reconsider ethics beyond the necessary, but limited formal procedures of institutional research ethics approval. Researchers in every part of the globe have responded to the new challenges of researching amid the COVID-19 pandemic in diverse, thoughtful and creative ways – from adapting their data-collection methods to rethinking researcher–researched relationships and fostering researcher and community resilience, while accommodating mutual needs for care.
The problem of vulnerability becomes more salient in emergencies and disasters like the current global health emergency. This points research towards the question of how it can contribute to the obvious and immediate necessary actions to save lives and deliver relief and help, but also highlights broader responsibilities to ameliorate conditions that produce or worsen vulnerability and places a magnifying glass on conditions of structural injustice and economic violence. The need to uphold principles like human rights and global solidarity becomes more salient in such conditions (ten Have, 2018, pp 490–491). Resilience is what emerges out of crisis. It is the capacity to respond to, and move through, crisis. Researchers and participants continue to communicate and foster relationships through situations of disaster and emergency. In moving through shared experiences and challenges, researchers, research participants and communities may collaboratively adapt and change assumptions, behaviours, processes and structures (Goldstein, 2012), both within the research relationships and beyond, to re-create intention and a sense of community that serves the research process, but also other, wider transformative goals.
This book is the second volume in a series of three Rapid Responses. Together, we hope that these books help academic, applied and practitioner-researchers worldwide to adapt to the new challenges COVID-19 brings. While the first volume focused on researchers’ rapid responses and reassessments, this second volume twines together and connects the themes of care and resilience, while focusing on the common concern with wellbeing.
Part I and Part II of this volume address the intertwining themes of care and resilience by first addressing researchers’ wellbeing (Part I) and then considering participants’ wellbeing (Part II). As it is apparent in all the contributions that the two are entwined, Part III further explores care and resilience as a shared and mutually entangled concern. In joining rather than separating the perspectives of researchers and participants, we aim to keep these in view together with solidarity and wellbeing in mind, avoiding the risk of researcher and participant interests becoming ethically separated, diverging and becoming ‘frayed out’ (Khoo, 2015, p 277).
Chapter 1 by Petra Boynton begins Part I on researcher care and resilience with a guide to researchers’ safety, wellbeing, training and assistance needs. Boynton outlines key issues that were already present before the COVID-19 pandemic and discusses how these have played out in the current pandemic context. She addresses researchers directly and kindly, offering practical guidance and pointing to up-to-date resources to support mental health, rights and care for students and staff undertaking research, particularly in laboratory and fieldwork settings. In Chapter 2, Stephanie Snow reflects on an ongoing national research project in the UK, an oral history of the NHS: ‘NHS at 70: The story of our lives’. This inclusive archive of personal testimonies explicitly includes seldom-heard and less-represented voices, such as disabled people, people with chronic illness, black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities and prisoners. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a critical juncture that could re-shape the project, highlighting the common vulnerabilities of research participants and of the researchers as ‘vulnerable listeners’. The interviews themselves became vital spaces for reciprocal care, support, meaning making and concern, with interviewees expressing care and concern for the wellbeing of the interviewers.
In Part II on participant care and resilience, Chapter 3 by Rachel Yoho offers a perspective from public health and health professions research and education in the US. The need for diversity, equity and inclusion education became especially complex and urgent when viewed from the context of the ongoing pandemic and unfolding anti-racism/anti-police brutality protests and social upheaval. Chapter 5 by Getrude Gwenzi and four colleagues employs ethnographic diaries to understand children’s everyday lives under lockdown in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria. Different issues arose in the different countries and these are explored, bearing in mind the ethical considerations that arise in balancing children’s right to be heard with ethical requirements to ensure that children’s vulnerabilities are kept in mind and that they are protected. Chapter 5 by Leanne Monchuk and three colleagues also explores co-research with young people across seven countries to understand how young people are experiencing and responding to the COVID-19 public health crisis. They adopt an asset-based conception of child rights and place young people at the centre of their participatory action research. In Chapter 6, Nicola Jones and six colleagues explain how their research using diary writing and digital storytelling, conducted under lockdown was rooted in existing relationships with young people in Jordan, Lebanon and the Gaza strip. It was important to explore the impacts of the pandemic lockdown on young people in contexts where they are already significantly impacted by political instability and economic exigencies, in order to know how to provide effective support. Chapter 7 by Osasuyi Dirisu, Godwin Akaba and Eseoghene Adams presents research on the issue of maternal and newborn child health (MNCH) in different parts of Nigeria under the conditions of COVID-19 lockdown. They have pivoted their research to online methods to assess the impact of lockdown on MNCH and compare the impact of the lockdown on MNCH service utilization, in a context of already concerning low and uneven levels of utilization and high maternal and infant mortality.
Part III explores the intertwining of shared care and resilience and Chapter 8 by Oliver Hooper, Rachel Sandford and Thomas Quarmby explores the ethics of conducting research on care sectors already experiencing significant strain in the UK. Doing research in a time of health emergency might result in ‘piling on the pressure’. Researchers must assess what genuine potential there is for meaningful benefit to participants. If not, it must be asked whether that research should be conducted at all, given that the participants’ work was already challenging, even before the crisis began. Relationship-building work is central to all social research, but is particularly important in challenged contexts, for example within children’s social care systems and work with vulnerable youth who experience ‘official adults’ entering and leaving their lives. Chapter 9 by Nicola Gratton, Ryan Fox and Teri Elder explores the idea of doing ‘messy research’ in times of lockdown as an extension of their ‘Keep Talking’, UKRI Enhancing Partnerships project for place-based engagement. Their project encourages the people most affected by a research problem to take a full and active role in the research process. This is a long-term community research project in the UK, often involving people who have experienced multiple disadvantages. Gratton, Fox and Elder argue that the wellbeing of the community researchers must be prioritized. The focus on wellbeing acts as a catalyst for creativity and community, as they evolved approaches including poetry, photographs, illustrations, blogs, a podcast and a WhatsApp group to facilitate social connections. Chapter 10 by Danielle Hitch and three colleagues explains and operationalizes a concept of ‘occupational being’ to measure quality of life and resilience within individuals and communities. They report on the operationalization of an Occupational Being Status Scale, plus additional outcome measures of quality of life and resilience in the context of lockdown in Melbourne, Australia. In Chapter 11, Emma Partlow shares a perspective from an early research stage and by an early-career researcher. As Editors, we felt it was particularly important to include and address different levels of experience, scope and process across the three volumes. Partlow’s chapter on researcher decision making and research design discusses her thinking-through how research methods include or exclude people, with a particular focus on disabled people. She reflects on the issue of power in the researcher–researched relationship and considers how power differentials may result in greater inclusion or exclusion, especially when engaged in remote and digital methods of working and researching.
Taken together, we hope that this volume offers a useful window on what researchers across many countries and regions of the world, in different research settings and at different stages of their research projects and careers, are thinking about and doing, as they adapt to researching under new and particularly challenging conditions. This volume’s emphasis on care and resilience points to the collaborative and mutual nature of research and the importance of supportive, mentoring and learning mindsets. It has highlighted the importance and complexities of researching with, as well as about, vulnerabilities, especially of young people, already marginalized or disadvantaged minorities and people with disability. These concerns foreshadow the last volume in this three-book series, which focuses on researchers adapting to the challenges of researching during a global pandemic through creativity and ethics. We hope that these contributions offer useful support, ideas and inspiration for your own research.
References
Goldstein, B.E. (2012) Collaborative Resilience: Moving through Crisis to Opportunity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Khoo, S. (2015) ‘Solidarity and the encapsulated and divided histories of health and human rights’, Laws, 4(2): 272–295.
ten Have, H. (2018) ‘Disasters, vulnerability and human rights’, in O’Mathúna, D.P .,Dranseika, V ., andGordijn, B . (eds) Disasters: Core Concepts and Ethical Theories, Cham: Springer, pp 157–174.
