Negotiating research relationships

Last week, I attended a half-day workshop run by the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership, on “negotiating research relationships”. I really enjoyed the training, and it has sparked a lot of ideas for my own recruitment of participants, so I would like to say thank you to Dr Caron Carter (Sheffield Hallam University) and Dr Liz Chesworth (University of Sheffield) for running such a supportive and thoughtful training session.

Most of the session was structured around discussing a series of scenarios, each of which presented a different ethical problem arising from participant research. The scenarios varied, covering challenges including: working with children to gather data, recruiting participants via social media, and recruiting undergraduate students to take part in interviews.

This last was of the most interest to me, as that is precisely what I will be doing! However I gained really useful insight from discussions on all of the scenarios. As well as thanking the two workshop leaders, I should also thank everyone else who attended, as the discussion was incredibly rich and really helped me consider angles that I hadn’t thought about previously.

My key, general takeaways from the session were:

• It is essential to consider the impact of your research on everyone involved, not just the participants.
• Ethical review is an ongoing process, you may need to respond to unexpected issues along the way.
• Try to think in advance: how could this go wrong? What is the worst case scenario?
• In some circumstances (e.g. working with vulnerable people or sensitive topics), you may need to create a “distress protocol” – what to do in the moment if someone becomes upset.

The discussion about recruiting students was particularly helpful to me. One thing that came up was the issue of compensation: it’s sometimes considered unethical to pay interviewees for their time, as this can influence their responses. However I would argue that, particularly in the current cost of living crisis, it is unethical to expect students to take time away from their studies (and often their jobs and/or caring responsibilities) without properly compensating them. I also wonder if paying a standard hourly rate for interview participation might help with some of the power imbalance issues that can arise when recruiting students from your own institution as research participants. This is something I will have to consider carefully when doing my own ethics application.

Another point we discussed is how time-poor, oversurveyed, and overwhelmed with email most students are! We all agreed that email adverts are probably ineffective in recruiting undergraduate students. We discussed instead taking more active approaches, such as coming into their classes/lectures and giving a 5-10 minute briefing about the research and the benefits to them of getting involved. This also linked to another point we discussed: given how over-surveyed students are, why should they take part in your research? When recruiting participants, it is important to consider what they will get out of it, rather than just how it will help you as the researcher. Will the outcomes of your research be beneficial to them in some way? Or will the actual process of being a research participant be useful experience for them (for example, if they will be doing their own research projects in future)?

I have some ideas, as a result of this discussion, for how I could go about recruiting participants for my own study. The final, important learning point for me was how time-consuming doing recruitment in this way can be! I will need to ensure I build in plenty of time for this into my research plan.