Caring for participants and yourself during user research, Pt2
To help me, as a research facilitator, take care of the people I include in research I’ve been applying a few different methods. Until now it’s been little bits of practice here and there. I’ve been reflecting on how to fit them all together in a whole research project, and arrived at four ingredients to add to your research recipe:
1 — Assess power and incentives using a co-production framework
2 — Identify positionality and triggers using the wheel of power and privilege
3 — Put participant and collaborator care at the core of your method
4 — Care for your participants and audience when you’re communicating results
In this blog series I’m going to look at each one in turn. This is part 2 — identifying positionality and triggers using the wheel of power and privilege. I’ll link to the rest at the end of this post.
Most of my experience comes from a domestic, UK, charity sector position; I’m sure I’ve missed things, and I’ll be glad to hear from you if you have more links, ideas or suggestions I can use to continue improving my craft!
Introducing the wheel of power and privilege
You may have come across this wheel as a tool to think about different experiences of marginalisation or privilege. When I first saw it (thanks to some of the Service Designers I worked with at Citizens Advice), I started thinking about using it to improve how I set up research projects in two ways:
- helping collaborators think about their own privilege and potential triggers
- spotting potential conflicts or issues between a facilitator and the intended audience we’re talking to
Research is a political activity: every choice you make is an exercise of power. Thinking about that before you set off is crucial if you want to use your power responsibly and take care of yourself and your collaborators.
Here’s how I’ve used the wheel in my work:
- Step 1: map yourselves onto the wheel
- Step 2: map research participants onto the wheel to discover your positionality
- Step 3: act on the results
Step 1: Map yourselves onto the wheel
At the start of a few projects, I’ve asked collaborators to map where they sit on the wheel, as well as doing this myself. This is a solo exercise: it’s just for you to check in with and learn about yourself.
One twist I like to add, following ideas from this paper on data for queer lives, is to think about your life right now and in the past. Some things do not remain static; focussing only on the present and treating things as fixed can mean you’re not considering your whole self.
At that point, I ask collaborators to tell me one-to-one (if they feel comfortable doing so) if there’s anything they’re worried about and if there’s anything I can do in my role as facilitator to support them. But also I emphasise at the beginning that this is mainly an exercise for an individual to do, to help them work out what kind of self-care options they might need throughout the project. No-one else on the team will see it, unless they wish to disclose.
You could also use this activity as an introduction to intersectionality. This concept, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, helps us understand “how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege” (see more here on Wikipedia). Rather than focussing on individual slices of the wheel, you can ask people to look at the whole picture and think about how your placement in every category might relate to each other.
Step 2: Map research participants onto the wheel
I have extended that activity a couple of times to think about the participants we might be talking with throughout a project, and our positionality in relation to them. As discussed in this podcast with Dr Lesley-Ann Noel, “It’s essential to see and understand what position are we looking *from* when we look *at* people and the problems we seek to solve for them.”
To map this out, I’d draw annotations on that diagram based on any criteria we were using to find people to research with, and use that to see the places where our positionality is going to be particularly different.
In this example, I’ve added some purple shading to represent the recruitment criteria for a fictional research project about the experiences of people who:
- are homeless or in temporary accommodation
- may be having issues providing documentation they need to access a service
- have English as an additional language
From that we can have three discussions as a team:
- how might our positionality affect the content of the project, the methods we use, the recruitment strategies, and how we introduce the project?
- how comfortable do we each feel about talking about these topics? Will they be distressing for us?
- how will any participants feel about discussing these topics with us, given our positionality?
I’ve also used it to help steer groups away from terms like ‘vulnerable groups’ when referring to research participants. Following the social model of disability (see an explanation here from Scope), vulnerability is produced by society and systems, structures and norms, some of which we’re not even conscious of. This wheel helps people think more deeply about what they think ‘vulnerability’ is: because often it’s a difference in power and privilege. Doing this helps people move away from thinking about ‘deficits’ (things that are wrong with a person to be corrected) to thinking about strengths and opportunities to make products, systems and processes more inclusive and accessible. This links closely with some ideas introduced in trauma-informed design as well: check out this video for more on that, which I shared in Part 1.
Step 2b: Another way to look at positionality
Dr Lesley-Ann Noel has created a template mural board to help you run this process as a team (though retaining anonymity). I’ve not done this myself yet but I’ll be adding this to my practice in the future; thanks Clare for sharing the link with me!
I also really like this quote from Dr Noel showing the importance of doing these kinds of activity before embarking on research, to improve the quality of your interactions and research.
If we are to pick on white men as we always do, right? If we are a group of white men, let’s say we are a group of six people working on this project. The idea was that after we went through this positionality exercise where we talk about race, gender, language, sexuality, ability status, social class, after we talk about all of this, we use the positionality wheel. It then becomes evident that, oh, our group actually does not have diversity in this area, or even if we’re not talking about not having the diversity, at least we could see. Oh, actually, we all speak English only. And we are all upper middle class and we’re doing this research with this group of people in New Orleans. How are we going to get a perspective? How are we going to be able to understand their perspective better when we are so different to them? From this podcast transcript
Step 3: What to do with the results
At this point, you (or a collaborator) should be able to decide whether to stop or carry on: the ultimate form of self care is to avoid harm! Your job shouldn’t make you unwell. If you are carrying on, hopefully this exercise also help identify where some self-care tools might be needed to help you throughout the project.
This is often the point where I ask collaborators if they want to add in specific forms of check-in (like the temperature check explained here) or research playbacks (I write more on that in my next post in this series) to the process. These tools make it easy and normalised to reflect on how you’re feeling and gives emotional wellbeing the space it deserves. Thanks again to Clare and some of the User Researchers at Citizens Advice who first introduced me to these really handy tools!
With all this information in hand you can start thinking about how you care for yourself, your collaborators and your participants when you’re actually applying your method. I explain more in Part 3, which is available for you to read here.
