Data Analysis and Community Research: capturing reality on housing estates in Bradford, UK

Citation

Blakey H, Milne E & Kilburn L (2012) Data Analysis and Community Research: capturing reality on housing estates in Bradford, UK. In: Goodson L & Phillimore J (eds.) Community Research for Community Participation: from theory to method. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 105-119. http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?k=9781847424358

Abstract
In 2007, Bradford University's International Centre for Participation Studies began an innovative research project with two UK housing estates, employing and training residents as 'community researchers', to facilitate an estate-wide process of self-research into resident involvement in local decision-making. Drawing on grounded theory and participatory action research, the project aims to involve residents in genuinely participatory research. It is a key aspect of our understanding that community research is characterised by the involvement of community members in research planning, analysis and dissemination, in addition to data collection. Community involvement in data collection certainly brings improved access for the researcher, but we believe that it is involvement in the other areas of the research process that recasts the power relationship between researcher and ‘researched’. Here, we focus on the implications of involving community members in the process of research analysis. We argue that protagonists within social processes bring an often sophisticated understanding of their situation to bear upon their lived experience. The community research process can enable such actors to locate their experience within the wider reality of their community as a whole, and to apply their understanding to that larger picture. We reflect on the ability of community research to facilitate and capture this analysis, so that the knowledge generated through research is genuinely of the community and owned by the community. Thus the processes of facilitating reflection and analysis themselves generate rich data for the project, blurring the perhaps artificial distinction between data collection and analysis. We explore the potential, difficulties and limitations of two (complementary) approaches to facilitating community analysis: collaboration between academic and community researchers, and the use of visual methodologies, both of which we have used in our case study. We suggest that if this process (of facilitating analysis) is successful, the resulting findings can be seen to be rigorous through repeated testing against the experience of the ‘researched’, and in addition are more likely to generate outcomes in the community itself. In this way, our research raises questions of who is seen to have knowledge, even at a very local level. After perhaps years of fighting to be heard, being ignored or ‘patronised’, community researchers are recognised as having the potential to speak out for their communities and engender change. We ask what implications this has for processes of social change and what role participatory research can play in exploring and challenging these perceptions.

Keywords
Visual Methods; Visual Analysis; Community Based Research; Participatory Action Research; Participation; Participatory Methods; Bradford; Keighley; UK; Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Qualitative Research; Focus Groups; Photovoice; Participatory Video; Community Mapping; Community Researchers