Training Community Researchers

As mentioned elsewhere, the underlying drive to create Community Researchers was to create a cadre of ‘good listeners’ within the community – to gather stories of lived experiences. A lot of work done in this ‘real voices’ arena is based on interviewing – giving researchers the skills – and the questions to ask – to interview people to get answers. Interviews have a different energetic ‘feel’ to them. Most people’s experiences of interviewing, whether taking part or just seeing it happen in the media, holds a perceived power imbalance, and the potential of an overt or subtle covert agenda. We wanted to remove all of that.

The training was conducted in two three-hour sessions, one week apart, online and in person, depending on practicalities. Support material and reading resources were provided online, with practice required between sessions. A further one-hour session was made available two to three weeks afterwards for questions, reflections, reinforcement, and sharing learning from doing. Community Researchers were asked to only connect with people they knew – not canvass strangers.

The major elements of the training programme are:

• Creating context, safety, confidentiality, and informed consent
• Exploring the two key constituents of gathering stories
• How we listen to each other as human beings. Levels of listening (where we focus our attention); the different channels we use to listen; how we can get distracted, and what to do about it when we do
• How we use questions when in conversation. How we can unintentionally hijack, redirect, lead, project agendas or shut others down with questions. How, with thoughtful questions, we can encourage people to reach more deeply into their own experiences, how we can validate and support, how we can help (yet keep on track) the flow of a story.
• Recording the stories as they are told: Using dictaphones; getting them transcribed; checking the transcriptions for understanding
• Completing, and ending the session with their storyteller

A form of ‘supervision’ was introduced, whereby the trainers would listen to individual recordings, and hold feedback conversations with individual Community Researchers on how effectively they were gathering stories (listening) without creating bias or undue influence. We also created more ‘social’ events for them to come together as a group to share learning and experiences, and to show what was happening to the stories they had gathered through the rest of the process.

A “Train the Trainer” programme was later introduced, to hand responsibility for training more Community Researchers over to some existing/experienced ones.