Abstract
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in researching ageing ethnic minority populations in the West. However, older people from such minority communities have received comparatively little attention in wide-ranging discussions on appropriate research methodologies. By a process of critically reflecting on our experiences of undertaking fieldwork for our Economic and Social Research Council New Dynamics of Ageing study of 'Families and Caring in South Asian Communities', this paper maps out the key methodological and ethical challenges we faced and, in the process, highlights the importance of developing socially appropriate research methodologies and ethical frameworks for research with such populations. With a reflexive approach, we specifically explore the significance of gender, age, time and space to the fieldwork processes and the 'field' relationships formed at various stages of the research process. In particular, we explore three key emergent issues which conflicted with our formal research protocols and presented particular challenges for us and our older Pakistani Muslim participants: (a) structuring of time in daily life; (b) gendered use of public and private spaces; and (c) orality of informal social contexts and relationships. Using illustrations from our fieldwork which reveal the particular significance of these issues to our fieldwork experiences and performativities of public/private identities, we highlight important tensions between formalised ethical and methodological dimensions of conducting funded research and the realities of being in 'the field'. We conclude the paper by emphasising the need to explore further not only the ways in which researchers can adopt more socially and culturally sensitive data collection processes and methodologies at the micro level of their interactions with research participants, but also contextualising the particular challenges experienced by researchers and their participants in terms of the wider research frameworks and agendas as well as the broader social contexts within which they live and work.
Highlights
The recent demographic changes relating to the increasing numbers of older people from ethnic minority backgrounds ageing in their Western host countries (Burholt ; Jimenez et al ; Victor, Martin and Zubair ) have led to a greater need and interest in researching these older minority populations (Victor, Martin and Zubair ; Vincent, Phillipson and Downs )
We aim to present a critique of the formalised research ‘ethics’ for engaging in a routine process of ‘othering’ and disempowering of the older and ethnic minority participant in a myriad of ways, for example through: (a) using and reinforcing essentialised notions of ethnicity and older age in research; (b) playing a central role in thecreation of a public/private divide within the research process, disrupting and constraining the extent to which the ‘ethnically matched’ researcher can perform rapport and trust with the participant; and (c) enforcing the dominant, White middle-class, ‘ethical’ norms, standards and processes of the public forum of research within the private worlds, time and space of the participants
We have described in detail elsewhere how, in order to research sensitively and develop non-hierarchical research relationships, we focused our own efforts during our fieldwork on developing a greater trust and rapport with our participants on the basis of our Pakistani Muslim female researcher’s ‘shared’ ethnicity and socio-cultural understandings with our participants and her embodied cultural performances
Summary
The recent demographic changes relating to the increasing numbers of older people from ethnic minority backgrounds ageing in their Western host countries (Burholt ; Jimenez et al ; Victor, Martin and Zubair ) have led to a greater need and interest in researching these older minority populations (Victor, Martin and Zubair ; Vincent, Phillipson and Downs ). Methodological and procedural challenges of conducting research with older people, and especially ethnic minority older people, an increasing body of the methodological literature has attempted to identify appropriate research methods and procedures for both researching ethically and at the same time enhancing fieldwork with these populations (see Arean et al ; Chadiha et al ; Levkoff and Sanchez ; Shearer, Fleury and Belyea ; Sugarman, McCrory and Hubal ; Wenger ) This methodological literature has positioned these older populations predominantly in terms of their perceived social and cultural differences from younger populations more generally, presuming homogeneity within distinct age- and ethnicity-based social categories or groupings. This literature has shown a tendency towards locating the fieldwork challenges of researching these populations in these populations’ own particular age- and ethnicity-based differences, implicitly constructing these populations in terms of their deviation from the standardised norms of participation expected of the more ‘ researched’ social groups.
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