Past meetings

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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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