Welcome to our research community! Each month, our Research Ambassadors dive into a new and exciting research article, sharing their insights, reflecting and discussing together in our WhatsApp community. This is a space for learning, asking questions, and exploring research in and informal and supportive way. This blog post summarises the key takeaways from our latest journal club discussion.
This month’s featured article:
This month, Research Ambassador Molly shared an article titled ‘Researching Poverty: The Benefits of a Community Research Approach’.
This report by The Poverty Alliance and The EPiC project (Evidence, Participation, Change) explored the use of a community research approach to research poverty. Community research ‘looks to involve people experiencing poverty in the research process’. Rather than being subjects of the research process, people are actively involved in the design, delivery, analysis and dissemination of the research.
This report outlined:
- What community research is
- Looked at the various social research theories behind community research including interpretivist and positivist approaches
- Explored what is needed to conduct participatory research, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages
- Why participatory research is effective for exploring poverty
- Provided some final reflections and recommendations for the future of community research.
If you would like to read this month’s report, please visit the link below:
Key discussion points:
To start this month’s discussion, Molly provided an initial reflection on her thoughts around the report and posed questions for the rest of our journal club to think about when reading the report:
‘Although the paper is not particularly recent (2020) and is based in Scotland, I think it provides a realistic and understandable summary of how community research approaches can be used (ethically) to research poverty.
However, ‘poverty’ is a very broad concept and there are lots of debates of how poverty should be defined and measured. I think perhaps the paper should have at least acknowledged this’ – Molly
Questions:
- Anything you learnt about community research approaches?
- What are your opinions on using this approach for researching poverty specifically?
- Reflections of any experiences you’ve had using or being involved in research that uses community or participatory approaches?
These questions prompted interesting discussion from our ambassadors. Some of the common themes from ambassadors’ reflections are outlined below:
- Using participatory methods for researching poverty: ambassadors acknowledged the advantages and disadvantages of using this method, highlighting the overall benefit of people being involved in the entire research process.
- What they would have liked to hear more about: ambassadors flagged that they would have liked to see practical examples of where community research was used.
- Reflections on using participatory methods in our own research: we also discussed times when we had used participatory methods in our own work. We reflected on the unprecedented challenges that arise when using participatory methods, often including changes to timelines and project aims.
Ambassador insights:
What did our research ambassadors say?
“I think it could have been interesting to hear more about the specific projects they used the community research approach with and examples of challenges they faced in those projects. I actually ended up having a look at one of the projects the researchers used this community research approach with, which is about people’s experiences of temporary accommodation after leaving prison. It was quite interesting as they found volunteers to be peer researchers from an organisation called Routes out of Prison who had lived experience of the issues they were looking at, and having researchers who had that experience and insight seems to have been really valuable in the project for helping them access hard-to-reach participants and ensure interviews were conducted sensitively” – Joe
“Thank you, Molly, for sharing this article. I found it to be a clear and accessible introduction to community research approaches, particularly in the context of poverty research…
I was also interested in the discussion around participation being more of an ethos than a specific method. The article highlights that community research is not simply about including participants in one stage of a project, but about genuinely valuing lived experience and creating opportunities for people to influence the research process.
Overall, I think community research is particularly valuable when researching poverty because it centres the voices of people who have direct experience of the issues being studied. Poverty is often discussed through statistics and policy reports, which are important, but they do not always capture the complexity of peoples lived experiences. Community research can help fill this gap by providing insights that may otherwise be overlooked…
I also think there is a risk that organisations adopt the language of participation without genuinely sharing power. While community research has significant potential, its effectiveness depends on whether participants have meaningful influence and whether their contributions lead to real change” – Vijitha
“Although perceptions of what is considered ‘full engagement’ or ‘complete co-production’ might differ, I think you (Vijitha) do well to emphasise that the researcher’s intentions and value they place on people’s participation is key” – Molly
Valuing our journal club
Thank you for sharing this month’s Journal Club report Molly, it’s been interesting to learn about the different ways in which community research is being adopted and how we can learn from this in the future.
Our Journal Club is open to all our Research Ambassadors, it is a space for curiosity, sharing knowledge, and asking questions to build our confidence reading academic articles. You do not need to have experience in reading articles, just an interest in hearing about new topics!
Our Research Ambassador Network is currently closed to new members, but you can find out more about our research opportunities in our Research Network Newsletter. You can sign up to the newsletter by emailing our Research Officer Joe: