Author: Rinske Vermeij

In this intimate and interactive session Rodrigo González Álvarez was our guest, and kindly offered to reflect on his untypical PhD path with us. Rodrigo, originally from Mexico, completed his master’s and PhD at the RUG. He defended his dissertation titled ‘Resilience among LGBTQIA+ youth in out-of-home care: A multidimensional exploration of their resilience resources’ in February. He is currently a lecturer at the University College Groningen. By sharing his personal story, the challenges he faced and the joys he found along his PhD journey, he offered us a unique opportunity to reflect on what we think is most important to us in academic life.

Rodrigo started his PhD at the UMCG in the area of Health Psychology. After two years, however, he came to the conclusion that this PhD did not suit him. Beyond the regular adversities associated with doing a PhD, such as becoming an independent researcher while maintaining a good work-life balance, he faced additional stressors. He had a complicated relationship with his supervisor and research team, and he did not feel passionate about the topic and the methods used in his research. He took the decision to abandon his project, his supervisors and the faculty, and to begin with a new PhD and a new supervisor, researching the LGBTQIA+ community and young people at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Changing PhD, however, was not a smooth process, it presented Rodrigo with new challenges. His previous supervisor was not much enthusiastic about the idea of Rodrigo dropping his PhD and taking on another one in a different faculty. He succeeded in transitioning to his new PhD with the help of his new supervisor. Since his funding for PhD lasted for four years, after having spent two years in his new PhD position, there was no money left. During the last months of his PhD he worked in a bar to make ends meet.

During the session, Rodrigo also talked about the many aspects he appreciated in his second PhD. He worked in a culturally diverse team, with like-minded people who were all members of the LGBTQIA+ community or other marginalized groups. They all stood for social justice. This made building relationships within the team more easy. He started to supervise master students and because his supervisor introduced him to a lot of people, he built a professional network. By the end of his second PhD, he did not define himself as Psychologist but, rather, as a Social Scientist.

Rodrigo reflected on the differences between his first and second PhD. His first PhD had a positivist approach to knowledge production, it was monodisciplinary with a culturally homogenous and straight environment, where the team members had a lot of independence and a wide work-life gap. In contrast, his second PhD had an interpretivist approach, it was interdisciplinary with a multicultural and queer environment, where Rodrigo received closer guidance and he experienced a narrower work-life gap. Because he felt personally involved in the research project that aligned with his personal identity, this PhD suited him better.

At the end of the session, Rodrigo suggested us to reflect on some of these questions regarding our academic life: What is the role of the research topic and my personal relation to it? What is the role of the supervisors and team, and my relationships with them? And of particular interest to this group, what is the relevance of the research methodologies and epistemic approaches? How much do I personally align with my work? How emotionally involved am I with my research project? Is personal involvement in the research topic important for me? How important the research is for my personal identity? Is the social climate of the work environment important for me?

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On Tuesday we had an introductory workshop on Conversation Analysis led by Ole Gmelin from the Theory and History of Psychology Unit. Ole is the incoming assistant professor for qualitative research methods at the faculty. In this workshop, he illustrated how to systematically study conversation in the context of everyday interactions. This type of analysis is interesting for social scientists who are interested in studying social interaction and communication. By analyzing how people talk and interact in real-life situations, researchers can gain insights into the organization and the construction of social reality. It allows researchers to uncover the implicit rules and norms that govern social interactions and to examine the interplay between individual agency and social structures.

Fifteen attendees from different departments and units at the faculty, ranging from Bachelor’s students to faculty staff, participated in the workshop. Together, we delved into the basic concepts used in conversation analysis, and explored how it approaches the study of everyday talk. In the first part of the workshop Ole gave a lecture introducing the key concepts. He used example data from a gay speed-dating study to demonstrate how consistencies and changes in the way that an individual speaker talks about himself may arise across conversations, and how such patterns can reveal something about the social rules that underlie individual development. The second part of the lecture involved an exercise in which we jointly analyzed a video-recording of a young gay man coming out to his mother.

Through this workshop Ole demonstrated how an analysis of conversations can illustrate how social organization may unfold over time. We also learned how multi-layered conversations can be, and that a careful study of interactions can reveal something about the interplay between individuals and society. This is of particular interest to social scientists who would like to know more about how contexts affect the development of individuals. We would like to thank both Ole a well as all the attendees for their questions and enthusiasm. 

On Monday we had a discussion session with Maurits Masselink from Open Science Community Groningen on what Open Science might mean from a qualitative research perspective. The two share many goals, such as transparency, promoting knowledge exchange and participation. However, the two often depart from different perspectives and epistemologies, which sometimes leads to a clash in views on why these shared goals are important to pursue.

An important motivator in the open science movement has been the replication crisis and exposure of fraud cases various scientific fields. From this perspective, a logical reason to pursue openness and transparency is to allow for the ‘checking’ of data and procedure in order to prevent these practices from perpetuating – to prevent fraud in science and increase the reproducibility of results. While some participants of our discussion agreed that a certain level quality assurance is a good thing, the ‘checking’ philosophy didn’t sit well them because this motivation seems to be largely driven by distrust. Some qualitative researchers believed that, alternatively, the openness could be driven by the notion that fellow researchers and the public could benefit from better access to the ideas, methods and decisions taken during the research process. Such a motive fitted better with their epistemological stance, because from this perspective the value of pursuing openness would not rely on the assumption that other researchers should necessarily be able to replicate the findings.

Towards the end of the session, we looked at two qualitative research projects that were celebrated by the open science community. During the Open Research Awards of 2022, two out of the three winners were qualitative projects. Elske Hogendoorn was present to tell about and show the ‘rolling’ preregistration that she and her team had developed (which you can find here). The other ORA prize we discussed concerned a dissemination project, focusing on ‘the postcolonial present’ as experienced by Indo-Europeans (Indonesian-Dutch ancestry) in the Netherlands. In this project, the families themselves were involved in the creation of an open-access, illustrated booklet reflecting their family histories. 

In the end, this discussion session initiated an interesting exchange of perspectives that will doubtless be continued in the future. For a more nuanced and detailed discussion of open science’s aims and philosophy, we highly recommend this excellent dissertation on the not exactly synonymous but definitely related science reform movement.

We had a very interesting and inspiring session with our guests from Uganda, Robert Jjuuko and Zula Namubiru, who gave a lecture about participatory action research in the Ugandan context. Robert defended his PhD in 2021 at the RUG on Youth transition, agricultural education and employment in Uganda: Freeing Individual Agency. Zula is currently working on her dissertation titled Harnessing Fishers’ Perspectives for Sustainable Conservation of the Natural Fishery Resource on Lake Victoria: A case of Wakiso District Kigungu Fishing ground.

Zula gave a presentation about her research, offering us an insight into the lives and everyday struggles of fishers in Uganda. We were also introduced to the unique challenges of carrying out participatory research in that context. We learned about how the fishers need to navigate between survival and the government’s fishery regulations, and about the patient perseverance of the researchers to build trusting relationships with the fishing community. Zula stressed the necessity of developing trust, especially when researchers want to build knowledge that is informed by the community. In this study, the fishers were considered as co-researchers who took part in the co-design of the methods. Since most of the fishers did never learn how to read and write, visualisation and informal conversations were important methods for this research project.

For Robert and Zula, participatory action research is part of a bigger vision: to bring about social change! Their aim is to encourage people to think about all the possible ways to change their lives for the better and address structural injustices. As one example on how to achieve this, Zula showed a drawing that the fishers created during the research. This drawing helped them to envision and discuss their goals to one day possess their own legal fishing boats and obtain better accommodation. The question we were left with at the end of the session: Does qualitative research, in particular participatory action research, has the potential to change oppressive social structures?  

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