Achieving Collaborative Multi Voice Research
We followed the 3 stages below to carry out the research:
Stage 1 Participants’ stories and themes
We provided a space for the participants to reflect on their experience and learning, deeply embedded as they were in these partnerships. The programme participants who wanted to take part and ourselves met four times as a group. At each session, two or three people told their stories, discussed the story with us all, and then together we pulled out themes across stories. Each session also built on themes from the previous sessions. See 'Participant Themes' in Research Findings [add link] for what the group felt were common themes or shared concerns and ideas from telling their partnership stories. This stage was inductive: participants used data from the very immediate stories they were telling to pull out common themes. Each session was taped and transcribed. Participant Themes
Stage 2
We also wanted to 'hear' other voices. through gaining access to the different actors involved in each partnership. These are often sensitive situations where some aspects are difficult to make public. For each 'story' or partnership, participants approached other actors involved and, where they agreed, we interviewed them. We simply invited them to tell their story of the partnership and its history as they saw it. We heard their perspective on what were often a difficult set of encounters and relationships. We agreed with them what could be made 'public' both for other people they were working with in that partnership and for interested outsiders via the website. Sometimes the first aspect was the most sensitive to agree. Notably people often wanted to ‘tone down’ their words. We asked people to devise an assumed name and in the early phase some people wished to change their gender in agreeing a name. All this underlines the emotions and delicate, difficult issues that emerged in our findings.
Stage 3
All the stories were posted on the website, initially only for co-researchers and their partnership colleagues to access. We grouped each into a case study with an introduction about the context and then each person’s agreed story displayed. At the same time, we as lead researchers noted where stories illustrated and linked to theories and frameworks from the growing literature on partnerships, power and change. You will find our reflections on the different stories in the ‘Researchers’ commentary’ section of each case study, with hyperlinks to theories and frameworks.
