On the 6th and 7th of February, EPIC project members Lisa Bortolotti and Jodie Russell spoke at the conference "Feeling and Being Understood" which was organised by the Phenomenology of Health and Relationships (PHaR) group at Aston University and took place over two days.
You can read about the first day here.
The second day involved a series of talks on delegates' work in order to stimulate further discussion and thought along the themes of
the previous day.
The first event was a lively workshop, led by Charlie Gunn (Aston University), that participants could really sink their teeth into, titled “A better recipe: collaborative, accessible study design and participant information through the use of edible and creative methodologies when working with vulnerable participants”. Delegates were invited to use a range of edible materials, including iced biscuits, fudge, icing sugar and food colouring, in order to construct a response to the prompt “What does good workplace mental health support look like?”
In this process, we got first-hand experience of working with an accessible experience-making activity designed by Charlie to find that ‘sweet spot’ of a research method that encourages communication with vulnerable adults. Charlie also introduced us to the participant information sheets she created for the project with accessibility in mind. You can see them here and learn more about the project here.
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| "Eyes are windows to the soul": inspired by the concept of 'sonder' one group interpreted good workplace mental health as acknowledging that everyone has a rich inner life. |
This workshop was followed by the first talk of the day, titled “The use of creative prompts to support an IPA interview”. Speaker Laura Martin (Sheffield Hallam University) led us through her work with probation officers, highlighting how it is a job with complex associations attached to it. For example, Laura described how probation is often thought of as “dirty work”, and for one participant her decision to become a probation officer was highly disruptive to family dynamics. This raises the question of why people train to become probation officers in the first place.
In order to investigate and capture the journeys to this profession, Laura introduced us to the life map exercise where participants would trace their journey to becoming probation officers. The maps themselves were constructed in diverse ways, reflecting a diversity of narratives.
The third talk of the day was given by Valeria Motta (University of Birmingham) and titled “From participant to co-researcher: Navigating different levels of knowledge production with young people”. Valeria described her work within the ASP Belong Project, which focuses on using augmented reality through smartphones to help young people strengthen their sense of belonging.
In conducting this research, she noted that the way we conceptualise ‘vulnerability’ has important consequences for framing research questions, as it can imply that an individual is inherently vulnerable regardless of policy change.
However, Valeria argues that this obscures the role of systems, institutions and elites in effecting someone’s vulnerability, and, ultimately, their health. From this, Valeria aims, in her first study, to investigate experiences of belonging in young people with an integrative and functional account of vulnerability.
Valeria then plans to undertake a co-researched study
with young people to find the best arts-based methods for eliciting,
expressing, and communicating vulnerable experiences. Both of these studies,
she notes, involve different ways of working with young people.
Jess Webster (Aston University) led the fourth talk, titled “From Lego-balancing to Information Sharing – how do you make the jump?” Jess notes that early intervention for mental health is sorely needed, especially in the case of young people and children.
To this end, a series of protective factors were introduced to pupils in schools to investigate which were the most important and effective, and therefore which ones could be implemented. Pupils were given Lego, a set of scales, ‘daily stressors’ and ‘protective factors’.
Pupils then used these to
represent how they felt a particular protective factor would mitigate (or
balance) the stressors. For example, “self-kindness” and “school connectedness”
where two such factors said to be effective by pupils. This information could
then, Jess says, be turned into a PSHE lesson with a take-away tool kit.
Conference delegates where then invited to participate in an activity
practicing self-kindness, which involved decorating a hand with affirmations.
Ainhoa Rodriguez-Muguruza (University of the Basque Country) then presented on her research in collaboration with Arantza Etxeberria-Agiriano (University of the Basque Country) on “The Concept of “Relational Health”: How menstruating bodies are key for understanding health”. Ainhoa argues that women’s health is been neglected in medicine, in part, due to structural gender biases in science at large.
Moreover, as medicine has become more specialised, the body has increasingly been conceptually carved up by function; menstruation is then relegated to the ‘reproductive function’, which is seen as just a woman’s problem. This then treats menstruation in isolation of other functions of the body.
However, as Ainhoa highlights, the body cannot be understood in a a
static and isolated way; menstruating bodies not only get sick differently, but
they also react differently to drugs and treatments. In their work, Ainhoa and Arantza
argue that a concept of health is needed to capture the dynamic nature of
menstruating bodies, i.e. how bodies can change over the cycle of month and a
lifetime. They refer to this notion of health as “dynamic, differential and
relational”.
Jo Billington (Reading University) and Shioma-Lei Craythorne (Aston University) followed up a second zine-making session over lunch with their talk “Adapting IPA to work inclusively with diverse ways of being”. Jo led the delegates in a discussion on what “diverse ways of being” could mean, noting that while diversity exists in abundance in nature, academia itself lacks diversity.
This discussion was based on the speakers’ recently submitted paper “Toward epistemic justice: using a multimodal Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodological approach in research with autistic children”.
Jo and Shioma-Lei note in this paper that the double empathy problem – the idea that autistic and non-autistic individuals experience with world in very different ways – can be a useful lens for approaching research with autistic people.
They note a resonance with the concept of the ‘double hermeneutic’ in IPA, where the investigator is trying to make sense of the participant’s account, which is itself the participant trying to make sense of their own experience.
Following
this, Jo led us to reflect on what adaptations we might need to make to
facilitate this investigation and described to us her own experience of an
interview with one of her participants which was able to continue successfully
over email after problems communicating in person.
Joanna Farr (Birbeck University) introduced us to her research which explored the everyday experiences of adolescent girls in her talk, “Understanding young people’s everyday experiences using mobile phone video diaries, film and IPA”. Joanna asked participants to report their daily reflections using video diaries captured on their mobile phones. She noted that that this captured spontaneous, familiar and temporal experiences for rich data, but, importantly, it also gave participants a greater sense of choice and control as to what they shared.
This
method made the experiences of adolescent girls more accessible but were
coupled with qualitative interviews in order to further explore the participant’s
emotional experiences. Participants were also invited to a workshop where they
were given their diaries back and taught to edit complications of them into longer
videos.
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| Michael Larkin's "monster manual" for challenges in qualitative research |
In the last block of afternoon sessions, Michael Larkin (Aston University) set to outline a unifying set of key challenges we face as qualitative researchers in his talk, “Attunement and Perspective through Collaboration: finding an ethical and just way forward for phenomenologically-informed qualitative research in psychology”.
Drawing on the tropes of table-top roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, Michael argues that we can understand these challenges to be like tests as we undertake the quest of our research, like gateways to other realms of knowledge, or like side quests that distract us from our main objective.
Michael then reframes these challenges as classic D&D monsters; for example, the Rigour Zombie represents those individuals who police discourse about what counts as science. Rigour zombies are dangerous in that they can push the quest off course, and as adventurers we can become unhelpfully preoccupied with monsters that ultimately can’t do much harm.
To keep on the right path, however, we need only rely on the equipment we already have in our trusty bag-of-holding, i.e., our skills in attunement, collaboration, and perspective taking.
Sally Latham (Open University) followed with a discussion of the problem of self-deception in her talk, “Narrative therapy and the falsehood objection”. Sally notes that Narrative Therapy is built on the premise that stories influence identity and life opportunities, and so to combat a self-narrative about the individual’s deficiencies and problems Narrative Therapy seeks to identify unique events that challenge that narrative.
However, Sally argues that there
is a risk of self-deception; the individual receiving the therapeutic treatment
might develop false memories or the therapeutic process might misleadingly (or falsely)
imply that the event they are pointing to generalises to the rest of someone’s
life. Sally argues this is unethical because it violates autonomy; you cannot
fully consent to being deceived. Because of this, it wouldn’t be sufficient to
merely disclose that false memories and false implied generalisations are
possible with Narrative Therapy. A different solution is needed.
Lastly, Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham), postdoc in project EPIC, closed the day with her talk, “Intersectional invisibility and its impact on belongingness and being understood”. Her goal was to give a phenomenological account of “intersectional invisibility” and discuss its implications for qualitative research. Intersectional invisibility refers to when a person has multiple group identities and belonging to one group renders them ‘invisible’ with respect to some of the social structures that affect other groups.
For example, men who experience mental disorder may be rendered invisible because of patriarchal expectations about what constitutes the group ‘men’; this may not include men who show vulnerability or emotion, which might be typical for people with mental disorder.
These men may then be invisible with respect to the group ‘men’, but they might not be seen as fully fledged members of the group ‘people with mental disorder’ either as they may still hold some patriarchal norms and values not typically shared by the rest of the group.
Intersectionally invisible groups, like men
with mental disorder, might not then be able to participate in group activities,
like generating and sharing knowledge for self-understanding, simply because
the norms of one group may conflict with the norms of another.
