Key steps for building successful collaborative research with hard-to-reach communities

Research that includes communities and individuals from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds provides opportunity and evidence for positive structural change. There are both methodological and ethical challenges regarding reaching the population concerned as well as ensuring a fair and equitable process. Researchers can take steps to reduce barriers to participation through ensuring effective communication about the research process, fostering trust among participating individuals and communities, addressing power differentials by developing respectful relationships, reducing the impact of language and cultural differentials, and managing tensions in research partnerships at an organisational level.
This mixed method, ARC funded project was a collaborative research project that included two large service organisations, two universities, and over 700 participants. Young people from refugee backgrounds in three world regions – Africa, the Middle East and South Asia – made up the bulk of this participant group. A comprehensive survey of youth aged 15-24 was conducted (n=635), followed by semi-structured interviews with a subset of these youth (n=46), their parents or caregivers (n=35) and educators (n=31) to provide context-rich data and deeper engagement with issues. The project’s focus was on education and employment pathways for young people from refugee backgrounds in South Australia.
This presentation will discuss the major contributing factors for the successful community partnerships and positive relationships that made up the process of this large-scale research project. Our experiences throughout this study highlight the importance of building rapport and trust, acknowledging and respecting the value of diversity, and ensuring open communication through flexibility. These strategies were vital for the research process but are also relevant to the broader life experiences and social interactions of participants. Key findings include themes of identity and belonging, and connections with service providers, education systems and employers. Our experiences throughout this project will be useful to cross-cultural and other researchers seeking to undertake cross-cultural research. It will also provide community professionals with a knowledge base from which to build organisational and worker capacity and cultural competency.

Sense of community and diversity: Exploring the role of the context.

The ethnic variety of territorial communities is a challenging theme for researchers and practitioners in the field of community psychology. In this regard, the community-diversity debate puts emphasis on the (seeming) irreducible tension between the promotion of sense of community [SOC] and respect for diversity. In particular, on the one side, there is evidence that community heterogeneity is likely to corrode the perception of similarity to others thus contrasting the progress of SOC; on the other side, some studies have advanced that there may be circumstances in which these two values can be positively associated.
The present investigation aims to contribute to the community-diversity debate exploring the role of the contextual conditions that determine the life in the community. Specifically, this research hypothesized that the relationship between SOC and respect for diversity might form depending on the fact that immigrants are perceived as a threat. Realistic threat in the domain of employment and symbolic threat in the domain of the perceived out-group size were tested as moderators of the association between territorial SOC and respect for ethnic diversity within territorial communities.
The moderating role of realistic and symbolic threat on the relationship between SOC and respect for diversity was tested in two Italian samples, a convenient sample of community residents of the Salento district (Study 1) and a convenient sample of students of the University of Salento (Study 2), in southern Italy. The preliminary results of the first study showed a positive direct relationship between SOC and respect for diversity and a moderating effect by the realistic threat on the association between these two variables; in specifics, when immigrants are perceived as competitors over material resources, SOC was negatively associated with respect for diversity. These preliminary findings suggest that the tension between SOC and respect for diversity is contextually defined.

Rootedness and participation in collective local environments

Rootedness, in Environmental Psychology (EP), is a polysemic term that generally refers to a search, through active and autonomous participation in an organised community, for an environment that allows for individual and collective identity support and a balanced time perspective (specially a sense of positive future). Studies that tried to relate feelings and cognitions regarding the environment and participation, however, did not obtain consistent results. EP may be treating “participation” too narrowly, relating it to values extrinsic to the groups surveyed, such as environmental protection. The present project sought to compare forms of participation, time perspective (positive future versus fatalism), affects, and cognitions to the environment, seeking both to contribute to a more rigorous definition of rootedness by EP and to reflect on the environmental basis of participation. To investigate this hypothesis, this paper analyses dwelling time, cultural capital, quality of residence, place identity, place attachment, community ties, time perspective, and forms of participation. On line scales (chosen among the most used in the EP) and semi-open questionnaires on participation were applied to 1000 participants of the State of São Paulo (Brazil). Scales were analysed through descriptive and inferential statistics. Questionnaires were analysed through content and discursive analysis techniques. Significant correlations (p<.05) were obtained between all variables, except for participation scales (which investigated, for example, environmental care and support for punitive campaigns against people who harm the local environment). Still, spontaneous responses to the questionnaires indicating high local participation had a significant impact on all variables and were related to lower levels of fatalism. Perhaps, local definitions of participation differ from the ones that base international scales. These findings support Paulo Freire’s conception of conscious participation as deeply related to local collective history, and rootedness, as constituted by active participation, strong collective ties, and positive feelings towards the local environment.