Changing direction, or broadening the scope?

Midwinter is a curious time to be settings goals and trying new things, and yet we do it every year, because our Gregorian calendar sets January 1st as the start of the New Year. In other traditions, the New Year starts at different (or far less chilly) times of the year. I think it’s worth seriously considering…after all, who really wants to start an outdoor hobby like running, in the depths of winter??

However, one useful thing about the turn of the year, is the prompt to reflect – to look back and consider the successes and learning points of the year, and how you might want to build on them in the year to come. Quite a lot has changed for me this year, personally and professionally and whilst some of it has been very hard, other parts have been positive and hopeful.

For one thing, I got a new job! I left the Research team at my local hospital where I had been working for nearly seven years, and started a new role with Portsmouth HDRC (Health Determinants Research Collaboration). I’m a Research Facilitation Lead and for the first time in a long time, I’m part of a team with people who are doing similar roles to me. I’ll be taking part in regular meetings with colleagues to reflect on projects that we’re all doing together, or at least side-by-side and that’s going to be very new for me. In my previous role, I was the only person who had that job and at times that was very isolating. Prior to that I worked as a freelancer for ten years – again, on my own and not integrated into a team; just visiting. I think it’ll do me good to be bedded down with a group of people for a while 🙂

The other thing I’m having to think about is my research work. I really want to do an MRes (Masters in Research) and possibly then even a PhD, but since I started at HDRC, the scope of that has changed somewhat…possibly in a good way.

Prior to changing roles I had been focussed on researching Social Pedagogy as an underpinning methodology for public involvement and engagement in research. Initially that had been with a focus on healthcare research, but since then I have come to realise that the same issues are present in academic and public services research, and so the application of Social Pedagogy to those two additional realms could be equally beneficial. Research approaches in general, quite frankly, could do with some healthy boundaries when it comes to working with people with lived experience.

But since I’ve started with the HDRC, I’ve been introduced to some other, complimentary theories working in this space. Not in PPIE specifically, but looking more at how we work with/alongside people in public or social services. I’ve explained these in previous posts so I’ll let you wander back there and have a look. (I thought the Bake Off Technical Challenge analogy was particularly good!)

However, this now leaves me with a bit of a conundrum in terms of what my research focus might be…? I could persist with Social Pedagogy in public involvement in research (in the widest sense), or I could look into relational practice in public services and how that shapes/impacts the work. They compliment each other, but they’re focussed on different areas.

If I do research as part of my role at HDRC, then logically it should compliment the work I’m doing with them – therefore the relational practice route makes more sense. But what about public involvement in research?? This still feels like important work – not just for people with lived experience, so that they get treated more considerately and less like a commodity, but also for the public involvement practitioners, who often stand in the gap between researchers and the public, trying to support good quality research whilst also maintaining high ethical standards for working with public contributors. The role of PPIE Lead or facilitator has been neglected and undervalued for too long, often lumped in with other roles such as Comms or Patient Experience, both of which are already a job in themselves. The skillset for working successfully with public contributors is entirely based around relational practice which is a values driven model, whereas research practice operates within a systems driven model – and so they often clash.

Clearly there are links between the two research areas, but one of the biggest challenges in designing effective research is having a clear research question – in other words: don’t try and solve everything at once or answer all the questions, because you’ll get overwhelmed and end up answering none of them very well!

So this is where I’m at. And the reason I’m sharing it is that I think it’s helpful to be transparent about these things. This is the reality for many researchers: the on-going, behind-the-scenes thinking, reading and processing which finally results in a clear(er) sense of direction. It’s the hard-graft behind the polished sentence. When someone says: “My research question is…” what they haven’t told you is the months or even years of work it took to develop that one line, and how many people, events, experiences and learning went into being able to summarise it in that way.

And then comes the challenge of convincing a grant maker that your idea is worth funding…but that’s a story for another day!