Video: University College London. Academic researching on Families & Community in the time of Covid

Understanding the impacts of Covid: academic research (transcript)

NB this transcript starts from 12M 30S 

Academic research context:

The two key objectives of the study were;

1/ Understanding the impact of the pandemic on everyday life. So how does living through a pandemic shape everyday family life, education and work and intimate relationships. 

2/ The second objective was to understand people's responses to rules and regulations related to the pandemic i.e. Why did different people react to measures put in place in different ways?

We were working at the level of the family, so it was a relational approach and family units and relationships were incredibly important during the pandemic.

The study makes inter and intra household comparisons.

So we study both Inter; so between and intra; within household differences, looking at how position in the household, such as that determined by gender and generation and access to various forms of capital such as that determined by socio- economic class and ethnicity,  shape the ways through which individuals respond to challenges in the context of a public health crises.

Again, working at household levels we were working with intergenerational families as well. So we have you know different members of the family across different generations.

International academic research study

Our study is also an international one. We have 10 country partners, each of our country partners is doing similar studies in their country and we're all working with the same research aims. It has been absolutely fantastic to have this international partnership in our study.

Research Methodology: Digital Ethnography

So what methods are we all using?

Well, we are using digital ethnography methods. We are using multimodal diary studies and interviews.

We're conducting qualitative longitudinal studies, so over time. Data collection for most of our partners and for ourselves started in mid-May 2020. And just to say by digital ethnography we mean remote research. Digital ethnography really helps us to understand how people behave in context and in the moment in their own home environments. You're able to really remotely walk in participant shoes.

It enables you to observe their repetitive behaviour over time and this is important because knowledge increases with time, trust increases with time and proof increases with time. So the longitudinal aspect is important.

As I said, we're focusing on families with children. Participants are 12 years and over, youth are a part of our study, but they're not the focus. We learn about youth from young people themselves but also from others in the household as well.

The research participants

So this is our sample at a glance. We are working with 30 families and that amounts to 72 participants in total. We have 13 young people in our studies, and 7 grandparents so it’s intergenerational. We're working with around 39% of our samples from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. We have a representative sample across income, so we have families from different income levels and we tried to make it a national kind of study. But what ended up happening is that the majority of our participants are in England. So you know this is just kind of a snapshot of our sample.

Indeemo as the research tool

We are using this particular technological tool for our digital ethnography and it is called Indeemo.

Indeemo is a smartphone app for Mobile qualitative research. It has a simple interface and is easy for participants to get to grips with.

There are four types of inputs; photo, video, open text and mobile screen recording. It allows researchers to schedule tasks for participants to do. Participants complete the task you set and the results start showing up from the dashboard for researchers in real time.

You know you can just see here, this is what it might look for users and for the researchers, this is what it looks like for us. You can see the results.

So this is the app we used, Indeemo. 

When I said that we set tasks for participants, this is what I mean. So these are examples of two tasks we set for young people. Their diary probes, we asked about financial worries. We also asked about family and friends and in tasks we asked them to either do photographs.
So in this one the family and friends, we asked them to upload videos. In the financial worries task, we've asked them to do a note.

There’s also photographs too. We were able to give visual cues for them to respond to as well in our tasks and were able to set flash tasks so you know, in the moment we're able to respond to how the pandemic was evolving.

So to give you an example, in the UK, when the Black Lives Matter protests occurred, we were able to set a task to ask young people and families what they thought of this.  How did they feel about protest during a pandemic

It was really, really important in this way. 

Diary Probes

In terms of the diary probes for young people, we’re six months into our project.

We set 37 tasks. So far we've asked young people things like, how they are getting on with their families,relationships with adults, family routines, disagreements. We've also asked them things about the government.

Is the government doing a good job? Tell me about your understanding of government rules.

We've asked them about personal things; How have you been coping? Tell us about your school, University and work. And then we ask them things around the pandemic. So face masks, covid tests, so we're able to get a lot of information holistically in this approach.

You can see here this is an example of some of the things we see as researchers. [18M 49S] The good thing about this app is that it allows for a responsive and reflexive approach. So you see Daffodil daughters, daffodil is the  pseudonym, then we've given anonymous or false names.  All of our participants have responded with details about a particular task and we're able to, as a researcher, respond to these directly - so interact with the participants on their phone and we can ask questions and follow up.

They can also post pictures which we can comment on and videos as well. [19M 22S]. I have to say that the videos have been really, really useful, particularly when we asked about emotions or feelings, because participants have just really opened up about these. So this is a useful feature, it allows us to be reflective and responsive.

Power of Images

The other thing is you can really see how the photographs and images work and this allows us to make comparisons across different groups, so one of the tasks we set was asking people to take a picture of where they do their work or of where they relax. [19M 44S]

You'll see three different images here and these three different images are from families or individuals from different social class backgrounds, so different income levels.
So when one child, Elderberry's son, talks about doing his work in his bedroom on his bed because he doesn't have space and then, other responses as well.

But this is just to show you that the video diary app is very, very useful to kind of get a glimpse into people's lives and people's homes and how they're working.

Methodological Challenges

So that was kind of an overview of how the methods were used in our study.

I was asked to talk about methodological challenges, so this is kind of my main focus now before I conclude. 

So I'm going to talk you through some of the metal methodological challenges of this project. So we had to set up the project very quickly. It was time sensitive because we wanted to capture how families were coping during the pandemic. We started without funding, so it was voluntary and we wanted to capture data straight away.

The project is also international so we had to rapidly set up protocols and agreements and invite our partners to join. So a lot had to happen very, very quickly. We didn't have time to think slowly through our methods, we had to act fast. We used a survey to recruit and we advertised widely within our networks. We explain to people that initially there are more tasks to do but as time went on these would be less and less.

Although further waves  of Covid could change this. We also recognized - We told participants that we recognized it was a time commitment for them, but we explained the aims and purpose of research, why it was important and how we would get the findings to policy makers.

So we acknowledged; yes it takes time but we explained this is important and would try to get this to policy makers.

Recruitment

We haven't recruited as many young people as we would have hoped. This is for a number of reasons. Some young people in the families didn't volunteer to join and also many of our families have children who are under the age of 12, but we decided not to work with children under the age of 12.

Technology

In terms of technology, we were lucky enough to work with Indeemo.

This company has been incredibly generous and offered the software for free because of the crisis but technology costs money and if we had to pay for it would be an awful lot of money and I don't know if we'd be able to use it in the same way.

The app and email allows for each participant to maintain their own diary which they do not share with other members of the family. So this is important, privacy is maintained here. And we explained to participants, including the young people and their parents, that we would keep the contents of the diary private to other family members.

In our international partnerships, some of the countries chose to use this app. However, the app didn't work well in all countries and this is because not everyone has a smartphone and the main language is that the app users are English and Spanish. WhatsApp for some countries was found to be a much better way of communicating with families.

Data Storage and Privacy

So in terms of data storage and privacy, the app complies with UK and EU regulations, so this is something to think about if you do use technology and data storage regulations. However, we had to be very careful about where we stored our other data. So we opted for a platform in our own UCL University Network, which is incredibly secure. It is important to have this, we had to explain to people where the data was being stored, how long for, and what we would do with the data and we use false names or pseudonyms for participants. So as researchers it is our responsibility to explain to young participants what we're going to do with the data.

In terms of ethics, our study went through a rigorous ethics procedure with their university ethics forums. Particularly as we move to online data collection. In order for young people to take part we had to get parental consent. We developed a video for people to watch which explained this study and made sure people knew it was optional. We had clear information sheets and consent forms. We included data details and data privacy.

To work with us, we had police clearance checks. We had to develop protocols and plans in case a young person shared anything worrying. And the fact that the app allows us to communicate directly with young people and participants means we can, and we have asked people what they think of the study and how we can improve it. We've also provided a six month feedback report and findings for participants and we give regular video updates. We also asked people to try and record videos alone and in private and we've always provided options in case people were not comfortable with video.

Now, in terms of the digital divide we fast recognized that most of the people who built out our survey were from middle class backgrounds. So in order to change this, we connected with poverty charities and other networks. We secured funding and we decided to use incentives in the form of vouchers for groceries and phone top up vouchers. .

We also included some funding to offer tablets to families who might not have them, to provide the technology to them. We worked very hard to get a diverse sample as it was important for us to say that our findings are representative. Also where people don't have smartphones, we had to adapt so we've developed our tasks into an interview and we conducted these online.

And we're going to do this at two time points across the project. In terms of attrition, if people drop out or don't follow up in their Diaries, the app has a feature where we're allowed to send push notifications and email reminders and we would also capture data at a later stage during the interview.

Final point here is the quantity of data. I mentioned there's 72 participants in the study. 72 participants taking part in diary study research is a lot of data. The data is in a lot of different forms; Photographs, diary entries, notes. So we had to have a clear storage strategy and we also had to have a clear analysis strategy and we're using software to help us with the analysis. The analysis bit is a bit like film editing. You have to make a story from all of the bits of information you have. So these were just some of the methodological challenges that we are experiencing and encountering in our study. 

Summary

And just to kind of wrap up, so what I talked about in this presentation.

Covid 19 has heightened many existing challenges faced by youth globally and we as social researchers have had to adapt our research methods during the pandemic.

And these changes have brought new ethical, methodological considerations which we have to think carefully through. But they have also brought new opportunities.

Thank you so much.
Please note the above transcript was lightly edited for clarity