Mel Nind talks to the government about innovative methods

The second in the Government Social Research Innovative Methods in Social Research Quarterly Seminar Series focused on innovative methods in research with disabled people. The event, which took place at the Business Innovation and Skills Conference Centre in London on 7 March, involved government researchers mainly from the Department for Work & Pensions, but also from the Health & Safety Executive, the Office for National Statistics and HM Revenue & Customs. It was a response to the increasing importance placed on involving disabled people in research that concerns them and the associated methodological, ethical and practical challenges. Speakers from government and academia, chaired by Ben Savage, DWP’s Head of Disability Strategy Analysis, discussed how emerging innovative methods can address some of these challenges.

Kathy Boxall (University of Sheffield) opened by establishing the problematic epistemological assumptions in research on ‘people like you’ from her service-user perspective. She recounted the early innovations that challenged the ‘them and us’ of disability research and the impact of developments in standpoint epistemologies, feminist research and disability studies.

Riaz Ali (DWP) and Jo Bulman (ONS) then presented their work involving a reference group of 60 disabled people in the design of the Life Opportunities Survey. This large-scale longitudinal survey of disability in Britain attempts to addresses the limited coverage of the lives of disabled people in other major surveys. The inclusive approach was aimed not just at compliance with The Equality Act but also at achieving policy relevance for the research. Encouragingly, the inclusion of those with profound impairments was facilitated by the addition of proxy consents, in-depth interviews and small-scale video ethnography.

 The communication medium of the seminar switched to British Sign Language (BSL) for Kathryn Rogers’ (University of Manchester) presentation on using online remote data capture with Deaf people whose preferred language is BSL. She showed how two studies met the ethical and technological challenges of recruiting Deaf research participants and used innovative remote, online, secure data capture technology for researching in BSL. 

 Lastly, Melanie Nind from the University of Southampton/NCRM presented findings from her ESRC-funded research about inclusive research with people with learning disabilities. The paper summarised how inclusive researchers have variously thought through and responded to challenges, providing a framework and criteria for considering quality in inclusive research emerging from extensive dialogue in the study.

 The seminar was an excellent opportunity to reflect on what is possible, desirable and necessary in conducting research with disabled people and how researchers are innovating. The GSR innovative methods group was set up to give research analysts in government a better idea of interesting methods used in and out of government research that are not widely used but feasibly applicable. Tom Green described their interest in lifting their heads to look at new ways of working. The next seminar will be on longitudinal methods.

 Melanie Nind