Home » For and about students » Events: Conferences, Workshops, Lectures, Talks » 2023 » March 2023 » Collaborative and Ethical Research Methods

Collaborative and Ethical Research Methods

21st Mar 2023 - 22nd Mar 2023

To attend this workshop please book on Inkpath. Inkpath is an app available to all Techne students, if you're not already using please click here to find out how to get started.

This online workshop has two sessions: 11am to 1pm on 21st & 22nd March. You should plan to attend both sessions.

In the course of their research, many PhD scholars work with a range of individuals and communities who bring their own complicated, nuanced relationships with institutions, academic and otherwise, to the exchange. This training will focus on ethical and collaborative interview and research methods that focuses on the specifics of data collection and ongoing, participant informed consent.

By the end of this two-day course, participants will have considered:

How to develop positive and productive relationships with intermediaries who may act as ‘gatekeepers’ between researchers and research communities.

How to set up, conduct and evaluate participant interviews and projects in a manner that is ethical, trauma aware and consent based.

How to adopt, monitor and adapt an ongoing practice of ‘informed consent’ throughout the research process and up to publication.

How to acknowledge, evaluate and contend with practical limitations in research (language barriers, unknown interpreters, cultural challenges etc.).

This training will be delivered by Dr Jade Lee, Director of Aurora Learning, and Dr Harriet Barratt who will be specifically drawing on her experiences as a Senior Research Associate at York St. John where she led a two-year research and evaluation project in collaboration with Northumbria University for the 'Converge' programme which connected people with experience of mental ill health with free arts education.

In this session, Dr Harriet Barratt will present the Converge evaluation project, a two-year qualitative research project evaluating the impact of a university-community partnership programme for people with lived experience of mental ill health. Across the project, 174 people contributed over 100 in-depth interviews, 77 survey responses, 5 workshops, and creative work by 13 autoethnographic researchers. Using this project as an example, Harriet will discuss co-production approaches, the need for early involvement of peer researchers and participants, and how to structure your data collection and analysis collaboratively. The session will provide you with templates to help you with your ethical review planning, consent forms and interview protocols when working with vulnerable groups, and will also include time to discuss your own projects and a Q&A session.

This training is open to all Techne students who think they will find it helpful but, is particularly targeted at early (first or second year) PhD students whose practice-based research focuses specifically on gathering material (whether interviews, life stories or narrative/art-based work) from a participant group.

Biography

Dr Harriet Barratt has fifteen years’ experience in project development, fundraising, and arts, health and education partnership work. She was awarded her PhD on representations of medical objects (psychoanalysis, literature and material culture) in 2020 at the University of Sussex, and has since worked as a university tutor and on the UKRI-funded ART/DATA/HEALTH project at the University of Brighton (2019-20). In 2020-22 she led a collaborative team of academic and peer researchers on the Research England-funded Converge evaluation project at York St John University. She is a core collaborator on the Wellcome Trust-funded ‘Senses of Health/Care Environments’ Network and a member of the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust’s ‘Onward Arts’ Group, and was a volunteer interviewer for the major oral history project ‘NHS at 70: Voices of COVID’ throughout 2020. See her Academia profile for more information.