Multimethod research on precarious work under disabling capitalism: Methodological reflections

Plain English summaryThere is evidence in the literature showing that involving patients and the public in health research can have a positive influence on quality, relevance and impact of research. However, patients and the public are not always involved in all stages of the research. There is often no explanation as to why they were only involved in some stages of the research and not others. Additionally, there is often no description of researchers’ or PPI contributor’s experiences of involvement. This also raises another issue which is a lack of recording of impact such involvement can have on the research process and the people involved in the research. In this paper, we present what PPI in a doctoral research should look like by providing a detailed description of how involvement occurred from pre-funding to dissemination stages of the research process. We provide some practical examples of how this was done and how involving patients made a difference to the research project. Finally, we present reflections from the patient and public contributors and the researcher on involvement in this project along with some recommendations for future doctoral and postdoctoral researchers considering involving public/patient contributors in their research.BackgroundPatient and Public Involvement (PPI) has received considerable attention in the last two decades and working in partnership and co-design have now become a prerequisite in health services research in the UK. However, there is a lack of evidence and consistency in recording PPI and related activities. Researchers and PPI contributors are encouraged to record and reflect on the impact of PPI on research. There is significant variation in the way PPI contributors are involved, and it is often limited to some stages of the research cycle than others, without any reflections on the decision-making process for such involvement or any transferable learning. This has resulted in failure to provide a narrative of the research journey including researchers’ and PPI contributors’ personal reflections of involvement. Therefore, this paper provides an exemplar of what PPI in a doctoral research context should look like by providing a detailed account of how PPI was embedded in a doctoral research project, the PPI contributors and researcher’s reflections and key recommendations for involving people specifically in doctoral research.MethodsA reflective approach was taken using data from PPI contributor and researcher notes, e-mail correspondence, meeting notes. Data is presented narratively to reflect on the experiences of involvement throughout the research cycle.ResultsUndertaking PPI enhanced the quality and relevance of the doctoral research, contributed to the recruitment of study participants, data analysis and dissemination. Building trust and relationships with PPI contributors was key to continued involvement throughout the life of the project and beyond. There is a need to adopt flexible approaches rather than a one-size-fits-all model when working with PPI contributors. Reflections by PPI contributors and the researcher emphasises that involvement was a rewarding experience.ConclusionsThis paper contributes to the wider literature by providing an exemplar of how PPI can be embedded in doctoral research and demonstrates the value of PPI to the research process and the individuals involved. We also present recommendations on how PPI can be incorporated by doctoral and postdoctoral researchers when planning PPI in their research project.

This article is a critically reflexive account of how collaborative processes and democratic relations were negotiated in a doctoral research project which combined elements of institutional ethnography, self-study, and, significantly for this article, critical participatory action research. The critical participatory action research dimension of the project involved a group of academics working in the same university faculty, critically and collaboratively examining their own pedagogical practice and the conditions which constrain and enable critical pedagogical praxis in their setting. The article explores what possibilities for democratic participation were created and limited by the circumstances and conditions that constituted this critical participatory action research. I consider the kind of democratic participation that was possible, what enabled this kind of democratic participation, and challenges that emerged in attempts to realise democratic goals. The discussion highlights some of the complexities of fostering democratic participation in critical participatory action research within doctoral research.

Migrant and refugee communities are at the forefront of highly feminised and precarious community sector work. Facing insecure labour contracts and contingent, competitive funding for activities, these communities routinely move between paid and unpaid work. Drawing on multi-sited and participatory ethnographic research and 30 semi-structured interviews with women of different African backgrounds living and working in western Sydney, this article explores the relationship between collective sharing practices and life as precarious workers. The sharing of material resources, information and support takes place beyond designated ‘workplaces’ and on a continuum of activity that moves between the formal and informal, public and private, productive and socially reproductive. This article uses a practice-based approach to foreground the social world of working migrant women. In doing so, it sheds light on the hidden, precarious work of an increasingly marketised community sector and the everyday and emergent ways that marginalised communities respond to precarious work under neoliberalism.

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.

Aim/Purpose: This paper aims to provide important learning insights for doctoral students, researchers and practitioners who wish to research on sensitive topics with research participants from a significantly different culture from their own. Background: Embarking on doctoral research in different cultural contexts presents challenges for doctoral students, especially when researching a sensitive topic. Methodology: This paper uses an autoethnography as its research methodology. Contribution: This paper extends the literature on doctoral researchers’ experiences of exploring the lived experiences of senior travellers who have faced major life events. Little of the previous literature on the experiences of PhD students has explored the experiences they had while researching on a sensitive topic in a different cultural context to their own. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents an autoethnography of my experiences. Findings: This paper presents some critical insights into undertaking research in another culture. Its findings are outlined under the following four themes: (a) Feeling vulnerable, (b) Building rapport, (c) Preparing for the unexpected, and (d) Exploring lived experiences. Recommendations for Practitioners: When conducting sensitive cross-cultural research, understanding researchers’ vulnerabilities, rapport-building and preparing for the unexpected are very important. The use of a visual element is beneficial for the participants in their idea generation process. Visual methods have the potential to capture the lived experiences of participants and enable them to reflect on those. Recommendation for Researchers: Doing cross-cultural sensitive doctoral research poses a number of methodological and practical challenges. It was very important to gain a wider cultural understanding of the country and its people in my cross-cultural doctoral research. To this end, this paper suggests that future doctoral researchers consider volunteering with the community as a way to gain understanding of the research context when preparing to undertake cross-cultural research. Impact on Society: The findings support the importance of cultural sensitivity when doing cross-cultural research. Future Research: Future research could be conducted in a different cultural setting to reveal whether the key themes identified here are universal.

Art therapy master's programs are required to include research coursework in their curriculum; however, they differ in content and types of required projects. Students encouraged to conduct studies that increase the evidence base of art therapy may struggle to do so. This article describes a research collaboration that allowed a master's level student to develop research competency while simultaneously developing her professional identity and clinical skills. A master's level action research study was nested within a doctoral student's larger-scale participatory action research project, which provided a developmentally effective model for achieving mutual goals. As a result, the master's student grew more self-confident in both art therapy and research practice.

Participatory action research represents the convergence of two intellectual and practical traditions, that of action research and participatory research. Although participatory action research is by no means uncontentious, it has become a familiar term to social research practitioners. However, in recent years critiques of Western epistemologies by sociologists of knowledge, feminists, post-colonialists and postmodern scholars present challenges for participatory action research in Africa. This article critically examines epistemologies that support and underpin participatory action research. It particularly interrogates the dominance of Western epistemologies in supporting models of participatory action research used in Africa and elsewhere, and explores spaces for indigenous epistemologies and Western epistemologies to be performed together within participatory action research processes.

Rapid advances in technology brought dramatic changes into the labour market, regarding precarious, flexible and informal work. The gig economy has enabled new forms of labour exploitation, social exclusion, intermittent and vulnerable professional trajectories. Not having fully recovered from the Great Recession, the Portuguese society is crossing a Covid-19 global pandemic which has accelerated the digitalisation and platformisation of work fecting not only the value chains, but the labour market dynamics in a heterogenous way. Between 2019 and 2020, 53 in-depth interviews were conducted with precarious workers in Portugal, comprising a focus on 15 life trajectories from digital platform workers. Through their voices, it was concluded that job insecurity is deeply intertwined with the global supply chain management operated by algorithmic control. Most of platform companies threaten established employment relationships, atomising workers who live in the present time without any future aspirations.

Participation is recognised as having a key role in health, for increasing the relevance and effectiveness of health interventions, for the health promoting benefits of community empowerment and as an ethical imperative. Participatory approaches to health research are also increasingly valued for bringing the insights of lived experience, and more relevant research and action. In this paper, we explore key remaining issues in participatory action research highlighted by scholars, practitioners and published literature, and highlight some useful conceptual resources which help to better understand them. We distinguish participatory action research as a paradigm involving those most affected throughout the research process, contrasting it with the more limited use of participatory tools and methods. We outline several aspects of participatory action research in health that would benefit from further theoretical and practical development, including: shifting power in the research process; the compatibility of participatory research with biomedical research; linking local inquiry and action to broader changes in policy and practice; and working with experiential knowledge in a rigorous research process. We highlight useful theory from a range of disciplines (including beyond the participatory research literature) that helps to understand some of the key processes and dynamics implicated in the issues highlighted and how this affects the outcomes achieved. We outline and share these conceptual/theoretical resources, identified as part of preparation for conducting a realist review on participatory action research in health, to contribute to ongoing reflection and development in the field.

Participation is recognised as having a key role in health, for increasing the relevance and effectiveness of health interventions, for the health promoting benefits of community empowerment and as an ethical imperative. Participatory approaches to health research are also increasingly valued for bringing the insights of lived experience, and more relevant research and action. In this paper, we explore key remaining issues in participatory action research highlighted by scholars, practitioners and published literature, and highlight some useful conceptual resources which help to better understand them. We distinguish participatory action research as a paradigm involving those most affected throughout the research process, contrasting it with the more limited use of participatory tools and methods. We outline several aspects of participatory action research in health that would benefit from further theoretical and practical development, including: shifting power in the research process; the compatibility of participatory research with biomedical research; linking local inquiry and action to broader changes in policy and practice; and working with experiential knowledge in a rigorous research process. We highlight useful theory from a range of disciplines (including beyond the participatory research literature) that helps to understand some of the key processes and dynamics implicated in the issues highlighted and how this affects the outcomes achieved. We outline and share these conceptual/theoretical resources, identified as part of preparation for conducting a realist review on participatory action research in health, to contribute to ongoing reflection and development in the field.

This qualitative case study explores the Human Resource Development (HRD) interventions utilised in respect of local eco‐skills with one marginalised group, the Roma, in the City of Liverpool, UK, and responds to HRD research calls into the cause of cycles of inequality. The case study illustrates the challenges experienced by precarious workers in accessing education and training. Further, it shares the interventions taken to address inequalities that a Higher EducationUK University and a local Non‐Government Organisation took between 2016 and 2019. Roma is among the UK and Europe's most disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Working in partnership, utilising Community‐Based Participatory Research, we developed three HRD interventions: stakeholder groups (adult and young Roma), motivational interviewing and employability/education events. The findings unpack an understudied experience and context: the need for more attention to developing skills at a local level for marginalised precarious workers. We found that aspiration grew through focused community support and a partnership approach, and educational opportunities emerged, albeit at a relatively slow pace. This paper ends with a call for action for more HRD educators to work with those at the margins of society.

Labour migration has both social and economic drivers that channel workers into jobs that are less desirable to citizens of the receiving countries. Immigrant workers find jobs through contacts from their home countries, including temporary staffing companies. These workers tend to co-locate in segregated communities and coalesce in jobs that entail hard work, low wages, and limited social benefits. As such, labour migration adds a dimension to the structural and social determinants of health (SDOH) that can broaden our understanding of health inequities, and that can point us toward policies and practices to enhance the health and wellbeing of migrant workforces. However, to generate evidence, align interventions with workers’ needs and priorities, and move evidence to action, it is crucial to engage communities. This presentation describes a community-university research partnership that co-investigates the relationship between work and health as experienced at the community level in two high-economic-hardship neighbourhoods in Chicago, Illinois/USA. The academic and practice partners co-developed and tested a conceptual model of the interrelations among migration, work and health, conducted an inventory of local employers, and executed a street-level survey of 497 workers in these two communities. The research findings helped enhance existing models of the structural/social determinants of health and of work precarity, thus informing methodological approaches to measure work precarity, labour exploitation, and their health effects. The community-based participatory research further led to several action-research projects that are ongoing. This presentation will describe the development of the community-university research partnership and its work, the subsequent enhancements made to the worker precarity and SDOH models, and preliminary findings of the partnership’s current action-research projects.

This paper draws upon my doctoral research into the experiences of women who have been sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia. I utilise this case-study as a lens through which to examine the relationship between women, crime and economic factors. From my data derived from 47 ‘elite’ interviews, as well as legal and media database searches (resulting in information on 146 cases), I argue that current feminist criminological theorising should be updated to incorporate the relationship between women’s crime and precarious work. As I show, precarity is gendered and disproportionately affects women from the global south. Overall, I find that many of the women who have been sentenced to death in Malaysia were engaged in precarious work and drug trafficking was a way to make ‘quick money’ to address economic insecurity. Clearly, capital punishment is incommensurate with the crime.

Background: Despite growing evidence that participation in psychological trauma research is well tolerated by children and parents, ethics boards may voice concerns regarding research with families with recent acute trauma exposure. Factors impacting child and parent experiences of research participation are not well documented, particularly for methodologies including observational components. Objectives: This study describes child and parent perceptions of research participation involving an observational task following an acute traumatic event and explores potential relationships between research experience and selected demographic factors (race/ethnicity, sex, age, prior trauma exposure), and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Methods: As part of a larger study on the role of biopsychosocial factors in post-traumatic stress symptoms, 96 child–parent dyads (ages 8–12 years, M = 10.6) participated in a three–time point study following hospitalization for pediatric injury. At baseline, children and parents completed measures of reactions to research participation, post-traumatic stress symptoms, and trauma history. Measures of post-traumatic stress symptoms were repeated at 6- and 12-week follow-up assessments. Results: The majority of families reported they were glad they participated in the research study (61% children; 72% parents) and felt good about helping others (74% children; 93% parents). Negative feelings were uncommon (<10% of families). Perceptions of participation were not related to race, sex, or trauma history, but child age significantly factored into trust of the research team and informed consent (Spearman’s ρ = .289, p < .01). Reactions to research were not significantly related to child or parent post-traumatic stress symptoms at any time point. Conclusion: Current results extend past research to suggest that most children’s and parents’ research experience is positive, even when completing an observational task during hospitalization for an injury. Children under the age of 10 years may perceive their participation as less voluntary, supporting prior findings that additional steps be taken to ensure their understanding of their choice in participation.

Over the last few decades, there has been a radical transformation of Australia's labour market and education sector, with intersecting implications for gender and generational inequalities. First, the composition of the labour force has changed. There has been a significant increase in women's participation in paid work, which has been driven by the changing industrial landscape as well a significant expansion of higher education opportunities for women. At the same time, there has been a steady decline in full-time youth employment. Youth unemployment has become a persistent problem for governments since the late 1980s and 1990s and has only worsened since the global financial crisis (Denny and Churchill, 2016). Primary industry and the manufacturing sectors, once reliant upon unskilled labour, in particular young people who left school early, have waned and there has been a countervailing growth in service industries that require professional, skilled workers (Cuervo and Wyn, 2011). Not only has the composition of the labour market changed, so too has its characteristics. New jobs have different conditions to the old ones. The contemporary labour market is increasingly characterised by what Guy Standing (2011) calls precarious work. Precarious work is 'uncertain, unstable, and insecure and in which employees bear the risks of work (as opposed to businesses and government) and receive limited benefits and statutory protections' (Kalleberg, 2018: 1). It is often described as contingent or non-regular work, or referred to as 'alternative work arrangements' or 'flexible staffing arrangements' (Kalleberg, 2018: 12). Examples of precarious work include temporary work; contract work, including independent contractors; part-time work with a desire for more hours; work with irregular hours; casual work; and own-account self-employed workers (Kalleberg, 2018: 12). The growth in precarious work is a result of structural changes which have eroded the standard employment arrangements that emerged in the post-war period (Kalleberg, 2018). These changes have given rise to what is being termed 'the gig economy': a new way of organising economic activity, where workers are not hired on a permanent basis but for shorter or longer term 'gigs'. This reconfigures labour markets and can on the one hand be seen to encourage a new, digital form of entrepreneurship and provide new opportunities for flexible work patterns. However, especially in a flexible, deregulated economy like Australia, it also exposes individuals to greater financial risks and social insecurities which can deepen existing inequalities. Younger generations are arriving in a labour market in which 'work' has increasingly been replaced by 'gigs' and 'tasks', and this kind of highly casualised, non-standard employment is having a spill-over effect on their non-working lives, which are increasingly disrupted by these social changes. This is what we term the gig economy era. In many ways, it is an extension and continuation of the neoliberal forces which have created the 'new precariat' (Standing, 2011), for whom insecure and non-standard employment has become the norm. The introduction to this special issue, 'Gender and Generational Inequalities in the Gig Economy', begins by mapping the context and configurations that have led to this era and its impact upon young men and women, and introduces the articles contained in the issue. It concludes with a discussion of future avenues for research.