BLOG: ROB ELKINGTON, DIRECTOR – ARTS CONNECT
Researching through Creative Methods
Whilst we love collaborating with teachers and artists, we’ve also been applying our skills as researchers with colleagues at the University of Wolverhampton. We’ve previously worked with Dr Josh Blamire from the Institute for Community Research and Development (ICRD) on a research project that explored young people’s engagements with heritage, commissioned by Historic England.
This year, Josh and his colleague, Dr Rachel Hopley, were leading research into food inequalities in Wolverhampton and asked us to partner with them to run creative methods of data collection with different communities in the city.
The project explored the impacts of Community Shops, a food support initiative recently set up by City of Wolverhampton Council and community partners to provide more sustainable and affordable food options during the cost-of-living crisis. Our research was focused around three Community Shops.
We were interested in understanding more about the value of the Community Shops, the role that they played in supporting people’s families and their lives, and what they liked about the provision as well as changes that might improve their effectiveness.
We planned for two 90-minute sessions with up to 20 residents that would engage them with enjoyable creative activities, the chance to meet other residents and to receive shopping vouchers as a thank you for their time.
Our idea was to use a range of participatory and art techniques to produce a wealth of visual responses to our questions, leading to reflective conversation and valuable qualitative data.
We visited the community centres within which the three Community Shops are based – Stratton Street Community Centre, Gatis Community Space and Central Community Shop – to engage their managers and to recruit groups of users to our research sessions.
The participants included a South Asian Women’s Group, residents living in Whitmore Reans and a cross section of regular shoppers at the Central Shop. They told us they liked the chance to have their say and to know that their voice was contributing to a report to the local authority.
We tried and tested many approaches to data generation and collection: groups made and annotated collages about their experience of the food shops; they took polaroid images of products or aspects that they liked or did not like in the food shops; they designed clay tiles to illustrate what could be better; they made table top sculptures to illustrate the value of the Community Shop to their lives; and they shared and reflected on what they had made and why, leading to unexpected data about their community, the positive role of the shops and how they lived their lives.
We noticed their enjoyment in making and much evidence of artistic skills that rarely had an outlet and could be celebrated. The process positioned the residents as the experts on their own lives, and it was our role to enable and listen to that voice. The creative methods were particularly valuable for engaging those for whom English is not their first language.
We learned a huge amount about how these creative methods worked in different contexts and the kinds of data they produce, particularly in comparison to typical social research methods such as one-to-one interviews or focus groups. We are building on this learning and our identity as researchers working with ICRD and look forward to future projects working with the community.
Dr Josh Blamire said “We were delighted to lead this project that was funded by City of Wolverhampton Council. We know that our local communities have been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis; yet, at the same time, community partners are working hard to provide access to affordable and sustainable food options, improving food security and resilience in Wolverhampton. Working with Arts Connect provided valuable insight into engaging local communities in fun, creative, equitable, and empowering ways producing knowledge that will inform service provision across the city”.
