Workshop report: Feeling and Being Understood (Day 1)

Last week, 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. 

The first day was filled with a number of inspiring workshops to introduce attendees to new methodologies in health research, new ways of working and new ideas to consider in our projects. Here is a brief summary of each talk, including links to further information.

Workshop 1, titled “Dialogical Co-analysis: a new methodology for conducting qualitative analysis with young people as co-researchers” was presented by Michael Larkin (Aston University), Rachel Temple (McPin Foundation), and the Agency-in-Practice team, including members of the Young People Advisory Group (YPAG). The speakers described their experience as part of the Agency-in-Practice Project, which is made up of an interdisciplinary team of researchers as well as young people with lived experience of mental disorder. 

This project started as a collaboration between young people and researchers to analyse transcripts and videos of interview participants that blossomed into a methodology for co-analysing research. Members of the YPAG described their input into the methodology, for example, by calling out unhelpful jargon, and the creation of a space where everyone can be heard. Rachel Temple also emphasised the importance of agency, which inspired the project, and the necessity to balance this with safety by, for example, signposting, debriefing and taking breaks. Rachel also notes that this is important for both the young people involved and for the academics too. You can read more about the project here.

Workshop 2, titled “Photovoice, with and without the voice: combining collaging, phenomenology and photographs”, was led by Will Day (Aston University). In this workshop, Will introduced delegates to the photovoice methodology, showing us how he used such a method himself in the development of his PhD project which focused on the lived experience of those with invisible chronic illnesses. He noted that, in the context of welfare reforms, these individuals faced significant stigma and were not often discussed in the psychological literature. 

Will sought to capture the day-to-day lived experience of this group during the pandemic by asking participants to take and submit photos that represent their days. Each photo was then analysed using Boden & Eatough’s (2014) framework for analysing drawings, generating an individual analysis for every photo. The photos were also cut up and collaged to group them by mood, generating group experiential themes. It is in this way that photo voice is embedded into Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (a qualitative research method) for a rich discussion of the participants lives.

Our thematised statements from workshop 3

Workshop 3 developed and expanded on the use of the photograph in qualitative research. In their talk, “Polyphonic Photo Analysis in phenomenological research”, speakers ‪Mikołaj Zarzycki (Liverpool Hope University), Shioma-Lei Craythorne (Aston University) and Kisane Prutton (Derby University) walked us through their new methodology for analysing photographs. The speakers note that photos are usually used to elicit verbal data but with Polyphonic Photo Analysis it becomes possible to analyse the photos themselves. Inspired by Dostoevsky, the method involves being open to multiple perspectives at the same time. Using photos collected for Kisane’s PhD project on experience of peacebuilding for women in Northern Ireland, the conference delegates were split into roughly 3 groups, each attempting a stage at the analysis. 

Group 1 focused on the first stage: observing the visual features of the photo, including its composition, colour, and framing. Group 2 focused on the next stage, which involved interpreting the photo from the research perspective (i.e. an outsider perspective) to look for possible meanings in the photo without the context of the participant. Group 3 then took on the analysis state which involved interpreting the photo alongside the participant’s narrative to explore further features of the participant’s lifeworld. The last stage, completed by the speakers themselves, involved taking the statements we made in the analysis process and synthesising them (see photo above).

During the lunchbreak, Julie Kane (Aston University) lead a pop-up workshop on “Exploring sense of belonging through zine making” where Julie talked us through some of the history of zines, introduced to some beautiful examples and gave us free rein to create our own!

A range of colourful zines from which to draw inspiration!

Workshop 5 was delivered by Lisa Bortolotti on her work with the Agency Project and EPIC, co-authored with Rose McCabe. In her talk “Epistemic injustice, agency, and youth mental health”, Lisa argued that when responsibility is associated with blame, blame can damage the relationship between the patient and their healthcare provider, undermining knowledge exchange and mutual trust. As agency can be threatened by a number of environmental factors and factors outside our control, we never have full responsibility for an event .

Drawing on the work of Brandenburg (2018), Lisa argues that in the therapeutic context responsibility should be replaced by the affirmation of the person's capacity to contribute to change. This is important because it reduces the risk of burdening young people experiencing a mental health crisis with responsibility for past events and implying that they are to be blamed. For more information on enhancing the agency of young people in mental health, see the post on the McPin blog here.

Workshop 6 introduced us to a narrative development of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Nathan Thomas (University College London) led this talk, titled “Understanding Experience using a Narrative Variation of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (NIPA)”, which took us through the adapted steps to generate a narrative analysis of a qualitative interview. Nathan’s account draws on both narrative and hermeneutic phenomenology (as developed from Paul Ricœur) which looks at experience as it presents itself in a narrative text (in this case, an interview transcript). 

Narrative gives our experience a kind of order, and so when we analyse narrative we also analyse an aspect of experience itself. So in Nathan’s narrative variant of IPA, the narrative structure needs to be maintained. To do this, instead of breaking down the order of a participant’s account to group statements into themes (as is done in IPA), Nathan suggests developing a narrative description of the account. This should read as if the participant were telling their story, capturing the essence of the interview and amplifying key information. Participants can also be involved in the process to give them the chance to craft their story. The resulting narrative replaces the transcript in the rest of the analysis, informing the themes which are compared and contrasted with other participants.

A floorplan of where medication is kept in the home

The last workshop of the day was a powerful discussion lead by Zoë Boden-Stuart (Open University) titled “Medications and care: a reflexive workshop exploring embodiment, spatiality and meaning”. In this workshop, delegates were invited to participate in three creative exercises. For the first, we drew floorplans of our living spaces, noting where in our homes we kept medications and the factors that have led to them being there. In discussion, we noted many similarities and differences in locations as well as the implicit reasons that go behind choosing these places. In the second exercise, we chose a medication box from a selection, reflected on some of the phenomenal features of the box (e.g. its texture, weight, size) as well as its meanings to us. This culminated in the third exercise where we reflected on a situation in which we were to give these medications to someone else.