two - Understanding impact and its enabling conditions: learning from people engaged in collaborative research

Summary

Introduction

This chapter speaks to several of the key questions outlined in this book, such as what are the lessons and challenges of collaborative research? What do we mean by impact? What does it look like on the ground? Can what we learn from people's experience of being involved in collaborative social research, the ways they describe impact, and what they value about their involvement and the outcomes help us to articulate the positive impacts of collaborative social research? The increasing emphasis on research impact, the way it is being variously defined by research councils across the globe, and the influence of this agenda on institutional structures and research funding underlines the importance of examining in more detail the theory, practice and impacts of collaborative social research. This examination can draw from the extensive body of theoretical work on social, participatory and activist research, community engagement and development practice, and the ongoing critique of these endeavours. Equally this examination can be informed by the direct experiences of people engaging in collaborative social research and the impact and value they identify. As with much community development practice, collaborative social research seeks to make a positive difference in people's lives, generate change or support social action so the drive for impact is embedded in the research intent. In this context research impact may be described as understanding, influence and action for positive social change.

Banks (2001: 119) suggests that ‘all first hand research of any kind, must be collaborative to some extent … the researcher's very presence amongst a group of people is the result of a series of social negotiations’. While these negotiations vary between projects, in some cases the process of negotiation becomes fundamental to the research methodology. This negotiation also offers opportunities for the researcher to understand existing group protocols, rules and social norms or local cultures (Holcome, 2008; Davis and Holcombe, 2010). Engagement, negotiation and compromise are particular features of collaborative research that may make it well placed to deliver individual and collective impact.

Collaborative research in practice

This chapter draws from an Australian research study exploring how people make their lives in new places. The study is focused in an area of northern Melbourne (Australia) that is a mixture of suburbs established in the 1950s and 1960s and new housing estates.