The Benefits and Limitations
of Community Based
Research With Migrant
Workers
Dr Geraldine Lee-Treweek
Interdisciplinary Studies
Manchester Metropolitan University (Cheshire)
g.leetreweek@mmu.ac.uk
0161 2472000
Monday, April 13, 2015
The impact of migrant workers on labour markets
ESRC Seminar,
Sheffield Hallam University February 2011
1
Key Features of Community Based
Research Approaches
• encourage active participation of communities
• Varying grades of research involvement
• Serving a community’s interests, ‘whose side are you
on?’ (Becker 1978)
• engagement and impact - key drivers for growth in
interest in CBR, PAR approaches.
• Access to funding – more diverse funders, based on
partnership working
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Impact of migrant workers on labour markets
ESRC Seminar
Sheffield Hallam University
2
Key Features of Community Based
Research Approaches (Continued)
• Community capacity building, research, networks,
understandings, reflexivity but also solutions
• Social change and social activism
• Qualitative and quantitative
Framing Factors in HE research
• “Stakeholder University”
• Drive for research funding
• Impact
Monday, April 13, 2015
The Impact of migrant workers on labour markets
ESRC Seminar
Sheffield Hallam University, Feb 2011
3
Community Based Research in
Crewe
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Fertile place for study of migration
Hefce funding to examine social regeneration
Background and skills of Uni researchers
Local competencies, co-researchers
Research agenda – shifted to being provided by
community themselves
• Racism at work, problems within and between
migrant groups, gender and work.
Monday, April 13, 2015
The impact of migrant workers on labour markets
,ESRC seminar, Sheffield Hallam University
February 2011
4
Benefits:
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Being able to access the so-called ‘hard to reach’
Ownership = engagement
Getting inside the traditional accounts,
Use of co-researchers benefits participants
Frees data collection from usual time/uni constraints.
Similar strengths to ethnographic inquiry
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
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Interconnections
• Work and community life
• The ‘community’ is key to choices about work,
knowledge of local labour market and to aspirations
• Likewise, employers have understandings of
communities
• Some aspects of work can be rooted in community
differentiation/s
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
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Benefits, Continued
• Facilitates trust relationships where trust has often
broken down, there is social exclusion and
generally liminal status of the study group
• E.g. Examining forms of forced labour, secretive
behaviour (anabolic steroid and illegal drug use),
health and safety breaches at work, racism and
sexism at work
• Working with a mandate (of some form).
• Sustainable research - Networking and
Collaborative potential
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
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Limitations:
• Mandate – can be a double-edged sword
• Who are ‘the community’, inclusion and exclusions
• Getting tangled up in red tape: obstacles to working
with communities due to stakeholders
• Logistics – living the work and risk
assessment/negotiation
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
8
Limitations, continued
• Burn-out of staff – translators, researchers who are
‘of’ the community
• “Atlas Effect” (DiPaolo and Lee-Treweek 2004 – paper
available from the authors
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Risk to full time researchers –
Community approaches as non-work/activism
red listing
Expectations and delivery of outcomes
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
9
Final Points
• Community based research - Is it worth it?
• Changing status
• Growing importance of impact, voice,
engagement
• Personal satisfaction
Monday, April 13, 2015
Event Name and Venue
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