When You’re the Researcher AND Participant: The Benefits of Collaborative Research
I’ve been a fan of collaborative research ever since I learned about it when working on my dissertation on the role of Whiteness in the gallery teaching practices of White art museum educators (like myself). Initially, I was trying to study Whiteness through a traditional approach, where I developed study questions, recruited participants (other White museum educators), designed instruments, and analyzed data on my own. But several months into data collection, my findings just weren’t addressing my questions with the richness that I expected. I finally realized: I need to examine Whiteness by critically examining it in myself.
I eventually came across practitioner inquiry, a form of collaborative research that allows educators to examine their own teaching in an inquiry group. With my participants, I co-developed research questions and we reflected on the data together. This approach hugely improved the richness of the data and findings. Not every research project calls for a collaborative approach, but when evaluating topics that bring with them certain vulnerabilities and ambiguities, including participants directly democratizes the research process and helps build trust. Ultimately, collaborative research honors the expertise that all participants have about their own experiences.
If you’re interested in developing a collaborative research design, here’s a few suggestions for ways to involve your participants in your evaluation project:
Establish research questions that are important to both researchers and participants
A truly collaborative study design is one where the research questions are mutually important to both the researcher and participants. While you might not be able to fully co-create your questions, you could share your research objectives with your participants and ask if they resonate. What might participants add? What is less interesting to them? This is an opportunity to explain your rationale for including certain objectives as well as hear participants’ concerns before starting data collection. For example, one of my dissertation study participants suggested an important addition to our research questions, revealing a bias I would not have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out.
Get feedback on data collection instruments to build trust and shared understanding of the research scope
Sharing data collection instruments (like interview guides) with participants is an easy way to involve them in the process and get their feedback. If trust building is particularly important, you could also ask participants to develop instruments with you. For me, this entailed presenting my study participants with a list of aspects of Whiteness that often surface when teaching (as well as their antidotes), and asking them to comment and add any. This ultimately served as our observation protocol that we used to examine our own teaching and provided a shared understanding of what we would be researching and how.
Honor the collaboration by considering ways to collect data WITH participants
I co-authored a recent article on collaborative research that describes it as doing research “with fellow practitioners and participants, not research done to or on others.” This can even extend to researching yourself in the same way that you study the participants. In fact, self study was so integral to my dissertation study design that we used the term “data generation” instead of data collection in order to emphasize how we co-generated our data, rather than me (researcher) collecting from them (participants). Not every project demands as close an examination of yourself, but you should always consider ways to mitigate the transactional nature of extracting information from participants. Are they getting as much out of the research as you are? How will this research improve their lives? In addition to compensating participants for their time and labor, you might also share the interview questions ahead of time so they are better prepared to answer, designate a meeting spot convenient for the participant, and/or offer multiple modes of sharing data (e.g., a participant might record their thoughts via text message or voice memo).
Share emerging findings as you go
Data analysis can be collaborative too! If your participants are really invested in the project they might jump into coding with you, but a more feasible approach could be sharing initial thoughts and themes with them and getting their feedback. It’s important to remember that research doesn’t have to be a secret until it’s published. Sharing my findings with my participants allowed me to hear more from them about a pattern that I noticed in the data regarding our difficulty naming Blackness in particular. Their responses led me to literature on anti-Blackness and sharpened my theoretical framework as a result. The beauty of collaborative research is that it treats research as the evolving, shifting, and multi-layered process that it is. Feel free to share your emerging findings with participants to see if they resonate or if they have other ideas to add.
My dissertation study participants and I were able to be vulnerable with each other about ways Whiteness surfaced in our teaching because our study design blurred the hierarchy between “researcher” and “researched.” The end project was absolutely improved because I was able to develop it alongside my brilliant participants. If you’re wondering about how to improve a study design or feeling stuck, consider a collaborative approach!
