2 Fieldwork – alone or with partners and co-researchers?
A researcher is not a solitary lighthouse keeper. When grappling with difficult decisions and complex data, rather than feeling ‘at sea’, you are likely to benefit from the fresh perspectives offered by others. This fits in with trying to think through your project from the many perspectives of those likely to be involved or affected.
Most of us will be involved in working in teams or communities at some stage in our professional or study lives. You might find such teamwork to be a source of inspiration, a constraint or perhaps a bit of both.
Whether a sole or team researcher, your conduct and decisions impact on others. All the researchers you have met so far have worked with partners and peers at some stage. In this section you will consider the opportunities and challenges this brings.
Activity 45.1 Activity 2 Comparing solo with team researching
Consider the following activities you might find yourself engaged in as a researcher. Think about the advantages and disadvantages of working alone or with a partner/co-researcher as part of a team for each activity. Decide whether you would prefer to be in a team or working alone in each situation, and make a note of your thoughts. It might be helpful to have a real or imaginary research project and context in mind.
| Research activity | Solo | Team |
| Interviewing close colleagues inside your own organisation | ||
| Deciding what to include and what to leave out of a survey | ||
| Making arrangements for field work in more than one site over a wide geographical area using a travel budget | ||
| Stopping field work when participants become upset and seek a debriefing | ||
| Making observational notes in a group setting | ||
| Using an unfamiliar software package for analysing data | ||
| Conducting field work where the language and culture is new to you | ||
| Coding and grouping of data for analysis | ||
| Responding to a senior person who wants to influence your research for a different agenda | ||
| Establishing trust in research relationships before collecting data on sensitive topics | ||
| Interrupting field work when the situation becomes physically or psychologically unsafe | ||
| Finding out something unexpected and exciting in your data | ||
| Identifying a concerning safeguarding issue during field work | ||
| Designing a poster to disseminate your emerging findings | ||
| Making a presentation about your research |
Discussion
You might have had a clear preference for some of the activities, depending on your imagined or real research context. For example, when creating new knowledge by interviewing colleagues, then as an insider you might prefer to introduce a new member of the team to avoid bias or to interview alone because colleagues trust you. If you are interviewing someone in a new context or in a language in which you are not sufficiently fluent, you will clearly need some element of teamwork for access and translation.
At the dissemination stage, a team of researchers might benefit from sharing out tasks and learning from others’ strengths as well as their viewpoints, even though this may involve additional time and potential compromise.
Research is never a truly solo enterprise due to the accountabilities at every stage. Be attentive to power imbalances between yourself and others. Sometimes you could hold power and influence over others about which you need to be mindful and mitigate against. In other cases, those with whom you wish to work may hold power over you and/or those you wish to approach and involve. Consider the influences they might have and how they might impact your research decisions and the way you build relationships with potential participants.
When working in partnership it is important to be clear about each researcher’s role and to acknowledge each person’s contribution accurately. Consider early how you are going to acknowledge other researchers in the dissemination. Conversely, if you are asked to participate in collaborative research, check what your role will be and how your contribution will be recognised.
It might be useful to refer to the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) framework of 14 roles in research, which can be used to agree the recognition of contributions. The following roles, all of which may not be relevant to a particular project, listed alphabetically are:
- Conceptualization
- Data curation
- Formal analysis
- Funding acquisition
- Investigation
- Methodology
- Project administration
- Software
- Resources
- Supervision
- Validation
- Visualization
- Writing – original draft
- Writing – review & editing
These are important issues to be open and honest about in order to work collaboratively in research.