Sharing Qualitative Research

Showing Lived Experience and Community Narratives

Susan Gair, Ariella van Luyn, Susan Gair, Ariella van Luyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317338413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In an era of rapid technological change, are qualitative researchers taking advantage of new and innovative ways to gather, analyse and share community narratives?

Sharing Qualitative Research presents innovative methods for harnessing creative storytelling methodologies and technologies that help to inspire and transform readers and future research. In exploring a range of collaborative and original social research approaches to addressing social problems, this text grapples with the difficulties of working with communities. It also offers strategies for working ethically with narratives, while also challenging traditional, narrower definitions of what constitutes communities.

The book is unique in its cross-disciplinary spectrum, community narratives focus and showcase of arts-based and emerging digital technologies for working with communities. A timely collection, it will be of interest to interdisciplinary researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students and practitioners in fields including anthropology, ethnography, cultural studies, community arts, literary studies, social work, health and education.

Chapter 1
From inspired to inspiring

Community-based research, digital storytelling and a networked Paralympic Movement

Andrea Bundon and Brett Smith

Digital storytelling was developed in the mid-1990s as a workshop-based practice whereby ‘ordinary’ people were taught skills to tell personal stories through short videos (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Lambert, 2013). Originally conceptualised as a form of citizen media, digital storytelling has been recognised as a powerful tool for doing community-based narrative research (Gubrium, 2009; Gubrium & Turner, 2010). This recognition has led academics to take digital storytelling worldwide in order to explore multiple topics from the perspectives of community members. The popularity of digital storytelling as a research method has grown as web-based and mobile technologies become increasingly accessible and embedded in everyday practices. Participants in digital storytelling projects now take photos, videos and voice recordings using a single smartphone or tablet, and edit these stories using widely available and often free software. While researchers on the ground have been quick to capitalise on these technological advances and integrate them in creative ways into their research processes, the definition of ‘community’ in community-based digital storytelling research has remained remarkably static. Specifically, there is a gap in the literature addressing the practicalities and implications of doing digital storytelling with individuals and groups who are embedded in networked societies and who regularly and easily communicate with others using digital platforms. These networks challenge common understandings of communities as spatially and temporally bound and propose instead that communities be understood as networks of individuals who share identities and practices, and extend each other support – whether in ‘real life’ or in ‘virtual’ contexts (Rheingold, 2012).

In this chapter we explore how the rise of the digital age has expanded not only the tools available to scholars doing digital storytelling, but also how it can fundamentally challenge how we think of the communities we do research with and how we understand them as embedded in larger virtual networks. This chapter is empirically informed by our own experiences of doing narrative-based research with young disabled athletes, coaches, managers and parents from a local ‘inclusive football programme’. We discuss our original intention to use digital storytelling to interrogate popular dialogues of how the Paralympic Games ‘inspire’ young disabled people to pursue sport. We then describe how the individuals involved in the story circle shifted the focus of the research from telling stories of ‘being inspired’ to telling stories ‘to inspire’ others, leveraging their online networks to distribute the stories they created. Throughout the discussion, strands of narrative theory are brought together with emerging understandings of how local, offline groups use online spaces to circulate digital content, thus participating in globally dispersed virtual networks or communities. In particular, we draw on Frank’s (2010) conceptualisation of the agentic potential of stories to act upon others and Richardson’s (1988) writing on ‘collective stories’. It is our intent that this account of our own forays into digital storytelling, complete with stories of how the project evolved through dialogue with the story circle participants, will provide others with practical examples of how they might use digital storytelling as a research method. Further, we seek to encourage further theorising on how digital stories can move from the offline local story circles into online networks to become part of global collective stories.

Andrea’s interest in this project stems from her own involvement in the Paralympic Movement. While attempting to recruit members of the Canadian Paralympic Team to participate in a research project in 2008, Andrea found herself recruited. She was asked by an athlete with a visual impairment to temporarily fill in as a para-Nordic racing guide (a sighted skier who skis in front of the athlete and guides them around the race course using a two-way radio system). The position became a permanent one and Andrea went on to compete with the athlete at the 2010 Paralympic Games. She has since competed in two Paralympic Games and volunteered and coached for many para-sport programmes. Her involvement in para-sport has shaped her research interests and she has developed and led multiple projects exploring topics related to the Paralympic Movement, with a particular focus on how athletes with disabilities use online tools and online spaces to engage in advocacy and address discrimination in the sport system.

Brett has worked with disabled people, including athletes, for over 15 years. His interest in this project was animated by a long-standing curiosity about stories and what effect they might have on, for and with people. He has a passion for qualitative research and the possibilities of this craft not just for understanding lives but also for improving human relationships in communities and for challenging social oppression.

Background

Organised disability sport initiatives grew out of many people, communities, countries and organisations (Anderson, 2003; Brittain, 2009; Howe, 2008). This included sport organised by deaf communities in Germany in 1888 and, notably, by Sir Ludwig Guttmann and colleagues in England in 1948 for people with spinal cord injuries (Bailey, 2008). In 1989, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) was founded to organise multi-sport competitions for a range of disabled people. Today, we have the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games where athletes in ten different ‘impairment groups’ from over 170 nations compete in 29 sports.

The IPC calls itself ‘the global governing body of the Paralympic Movement’ (IPC website, n.d., Who We Are). Yet, despite this claim, the literature on social movements contends that organisations by definition cannot govern or own a ‘movement’. According to Melucci (1985), movements are ‘action systems’ (p. 793, italics in original) that are constructed in and through ongoing interactions and negotiations between social actors. While these actors might share some values, beliefs and practices, and do unite to undertake projects, they negotiate their allegiances on an ongoing basis. Della Port and Diani (2009) further explained that

the existence of a range of possible ways of becoming involved means that the membership of movements can never be reduced to a single act of adherence. It consists, rather, of a series of differentiated acts, which taken together reinforce the feeling of belonging or of identity.

(p. 26)

Thus, while the IPC might rightly claim to oversee the Paralympic Games and to govern a multitude of para-sport organisations and National Paralympic Committees, when we discuss the ‘Paralympic Movement’ in this chapter we are speaking much more broadly about the individuals and groups who demonstrate an allegiance to or feel a sense of belonging to a global network of actors who engage in para-sport. This Paralympic Movement includes the IPC and its partners, but also, for example, could extend to the young disabled person learning to play football at a local club, the community coach working with this young person, and the programme manager who watched the London Paralympic Games and was inspired to write the grant application to fund the disability football programme in the first place.

Our interest in exploring how young disabled people engage with and relate to the Paralympic Movement stemmed from the motto of the recent London Olympic and Paralympic Games: ‘Inspire a Generation.’ Much of the rhetoric employed when bidding on and preparing for the Games centred around the claim that London 2012 would be used to ‘reach young people’ and ‘connect them to sport’ (London 2012, n.d.), and there was a particular emphasis on reaching disabled young people who are frequently reported to be less active and less frequently engaged in sport than their able-bodied peers. Yet despite these early claims, it was our observation that many of the programmes and policies that were developed in the lead up to London 2012 failed to involve young disabled people directly. For example, the document London 2012: A Legacy for Disabled People (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2011) emphasised how able-bodied individuals could adopt more inclusive sport practices, rather than specifying how the Paralympics would inspire young disabled people to be more active. This situation, where there is an initial promise that hosting the Paralympic Games will have a direct and positive impact on the sport opportunities available to disabled people followed by a post-Games shift to measuring and reporting on the impact the Games has had on changing the perceptions of able-bodied people towards disability, has been seen before. For example, a report released after Vancouver 2010 focused on how awareness of the Paralympic Games had increased among the general Canadian population due to media coverage of the event (Zimmerman, 2010), but said very little about changes in the sport environment for disabled people themselves. Other literature has explored whether able-bodied children demonstrate more positive attitudes towards peers with disabilities after participating in the Paralympic School Day programme (Klimešová, 2011; Panagioutou, Kudláček & Evaggelinou, 2006; Xafopoulos, Kudláček & Evaggelinou, 2009).

While the literature cited above provides a foundation for understanding some of the factors that influence the sport participation of young disabled people (in as much as changing the perceptions of able-bodied people is a necessary step in creating a more inclusive sport system), there exists a blatant omission. Rather than asking able-bodied individuals whether or not the Paralympic Games promote more inclusive sport practise, we argue that what is needed are more opportunities for disabled people to share their own stories of the influence of the Paralympic Movement in their lives. The questions that we were most interested in were: (1) How do young disabled people engage with sport? (2) What can the stories young disabled people tell of their sport experiences teach us about ‘inspiration’ and the Paralympic Games? To start to answer these questions and to open up spaces for young disabled people to share their experiences of the legacies and impacts of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, we turned to digital storytelling.

Methodology: digital storytelling in community-based research

Digital storytelling is a workshop-based practice developed in the mid-1990s by Dana Atchley, Joe Lambert and Dina Mullen, the founders of the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkley, California (Lambert, 2013). Through this collaboration of multimedia artists, digital programmers, community activists and educators, the CDS has worked with thousands of organisations and individuals around the world to teach them digital storytelling techniques and to encourage them to create and share their stories (Lambert, 2013). Among the tenets of the CDS, and in line with narrative theories, are the beliefs that everyone has stories to tell and that sharing stories can lead to positive change (Lambert, 2013). Through their work, Atchley and colleagues claim to have ‘transformed the way that community activists, educators, health and human services agencies, business professionals, and artists think about the power of personal voice in creating change’ (Center for Digital Storytelling website, n.d., How it all began). The model for digital storytelling outlined by Lambert (2006) included a specific process for workshops in which community members, along with facilitators, work side-by-side to write story scripts and create the visual and audio content for their stories. The products of these workshops are typically short (3–5 minutes) vignettes that use photos, illustrations, videos, voice recordings and music to tell first-person tales created by a single author. A key aspect of the process is the ‘story circle’ in which the group comes together and where community members assist in further developing the stories by asking questions of the author, sharing suggestions, or simply showing their support by deeply listening to what is being shared (Hartley & McWilliams, 2009).

In research settings, digital storytelling increasingly is being employed in projects using community-based participatory research frameworks (Gubrium, 2009) and it has been used to explore topics including feminist approaches to public health (Gubrium & DiFulvio, 2011), peace-building projects (Higgins, 2011) and issues of gender justice (Hill, 2011), among others. In these contexts, digital storytelling practices are valued for ‘the grounded way the methods inserts indigenous empirical material into research endeavors’ (Gubrium, 2009, p. 186), resulting in findings that ‘take into account the experience, understandings, and agency of those to whom efforts will be directed’ (Gubrium, 2009, p. 186). Furthermore, the actual process of creating the digital stories has been recognised as a community-building activity with a value independent of the actual stories produced (Gubrium & DiFulvio, 2011).

Our decision to employ digital storytelling in this project was made after considering several factors. The first consideration was the age of the participants involved (we were targeting young people aged 12 to 24). In our previous experiences of carrying out qualitative interviews with diverse populations we had both observed that creating rapport with younger participants could be challenging and that the conversations flowed better when there were ‘prompts’ in the room such as photos and videos (see Mills & Hoeber, 2013, for a discussion of using photos in interviews with young people). We hoped that the young people would be more inclined to share their experiences if there was a task to perform (creating a story) and physical objects to start the dialogue. Second, as previously stated, participation in a movement is not something that happens in isolation, but rather through encounters and ongoing interactions with others. For this reason, we felt that digital storytelling, with its emphasis on the coconstruction of stories in story circles, was an appropriate methodology.

Design and process

The research entitled ‘Are We Inspired Yet? Digital Storytelling with Youth about Sport and Disability in the Wake of the London Paralympic Games’ was a one-year study funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and hosted by the Peter Harrison Centre for Disability Sport at Loughborough University (UK). This project used digital storytelling methods to explore how young disabled people in the UK engage in sport and, in particular, if and how they relate their involvement to London hosting the Games. It started in January 2014 and continued for 12 months, during which time the first author held digital storytelling workshops for young disabled people, their able-bodied classmates and teammates, and also some adults working in para-sport as educators, coaches and the team staff. These workshops were held in classrooms and at sport camps, and in total 25 youth (and a few adults) participated in digital storytelling workshops, with many more taking part in ‘taster sessions’. This chapter focuses particularly on storytelling workshops that were held at the clubhouse of a local county football association (FA) within an ‘inclusive football programme’.

Meeting the team

Contact was first made with the county FA by a message sent to the email listed on the association’s website for their inclusive football programme. It stated that we (the authors) were researchers exploring the sport practices of young disabled people in the UK following the hosting of the London Paralympic Games in 2012 and were looking for organisations interested in holding digital storytelling workshops where the youth would be asked to discuss their experiences of participating in sport. The programme’s manager replied with an invitation to meet with her and two of the coaches from the inclusive football programme. While the manager did not commit immediately to the research, she did schedule the meeting to precede a training session so that there would be an opportunity, if the meeting went well, to ‘pitch the story idea’ directly to potential participants and their parents later that evening.

The meeting with the team staff started with a casual conversation about their involvement in delivering inclusive football programmes in the region. The staff described how a small initiative to create an opportunity for young disabled people to participate in football had expanded into a much larger project. During the conversation, the team staff stated that they had been intrigued by the concept of digital storytelling as they saw that it had the potential to encourage individual athletes to reflect upon their own past and future sport pathways. After some discussion, the manager agreed to organise digital storytelling workshops at the club a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: showing and feeling community narratives
• 1 From inspired to inspiring: community-based research, digital storytelling and a networked Paralympic Movement
• 2 Our True Colours: a storytelling project with women from refugee backgrounds
• 3 Performing lived experience and autobiographical community narratives
• 4 Animal narrativity: lived experiences in the more than human world
• 5 ‘Transcending the limits of logic’: poetic inquiry as a qualitative research method for working with vulnerable communities
• 6 The listening ‘I’: children’s emotional and affective representations of place
• 7 Ripples and reflections: photovoice and community narratives of climate change
• 8 Sharing the visible and invisible domains of lived experiences with the Ambonwari of Papua New Guinea
• 9 Empathy and transformation in Organic Inquiry: sharing research in partnership with Spirit
• 10 Writing down your sorrow: a healing process after miscarriage, stillbirth and newborn losses
• 11 Writing ‘with’ not ‘about’: examples in Co-operative Inquiry
• 12 Amplified stories: digital technology and representations of lived experiences
• 13 Engaging the community as content creators: case study research in grassroots media production in the library sector
• 14 Sharing place-based stories using digital tools: locative literature and regional writing communities
• 15 Confronting methodological deficiency: a feminist quest for knowledge
• Conclusion: showing inspiring qualitative research? Over to readers
• Index