Welcome to our guests and thank you for coming to listen to and talk about this really interesting and really timely topic.
So on is an interest interdisciplinary researcher in the medical, Sociology and Health Experiences Research Group at the Primary Care Department.
And we have loads of experience of diverse topics and qualitative studies.
So she's going to talk about the opportunities and challenges related to rapid qualitative research.
And obviously this is and then you think about rapid qualitative research.
There's been decades of people using and developing the methods around qualitative research,
but still there's a lot of controversy around the topic and some people thinking it's a bit or is it just fast and sloppy?
And is other people thinking about the opportunities that it gives researchers to provide perhaps a more timely time and findings?
So Anna is going to go into the details based on her experience and her knowledge of qualitative research.
So over to you. Thank you. Thanks for coming in. Oh, no, thank you.
Thank you for inviting me. So I'm on it.
I it's the end of the day. What day is it?
Tuesday. Is it already? I feel like it's Friday.
So we're all we're all here for a good time, you know, rather than a kind of, like, deep, intense, like theoretical exploration.
So there's lots of examples. And I'm going to more try and just talk through.
You know, I've done like a few different types of this,
some which has gone well and some which has gone very badly and for different kinds of reasons.
So I'll spend a few yarns and tell you some of my stories and then also try and show you
where you can find more information when maybe when you're feeling a bit more like a week.
Considering those of you who've been on the course, you've probably had quite a long day.
And then also we can we can make it a bit chatty.
If you want to talk as we go through, you can ask questions and I can either answer them,
then I can tell you it's coming up so you don't need to worry. So basically we can do we can try and be that interactive about it.
And what else I'll try and do like maybe like 30 minutes.
You wanna listen to me talk for an hour, something like that.
And then we can maybe have more of a discussion because I imagine, well, actually, let's do a bit of a poll.
Like has anyone who has done like any qualitative research before.
Okay, most people who has done any rapid qualitative research before.
Okay, A few. And who's interested in it? Who's that kind of feeling out there?
Most people. Right, Right. So everyone you hadn't seen here, so.
Oh, you're just here to, like, be like, you know, like put a stop to it.
Okay, so this is good.
So there's like a bit of extra and obviously, like, a lot of you have been on the course anyway, so you're getting to grips with it.
So I think this is going to be hopefully at the end of this, you're going to come away thinking like it's not one or the other.
And I think the main purpose for me is to kind of give away the ending.
It's more about the questions that you're asking and what methods suit the questions rather than
like some people are like everything has to be done quickly now or rapids better or slow is better.
And I think that's not the case to sit on the fence anyway.
So we'll be talking about, well, what it is, because actually that's a bit vague.
It's not always easy to identify that as some reasons why you might want to do
it and then some thinking about how you could do it well if you did want to.
And then also, I think it's important to discuss why you might not want to and then, you know,
a bit of kind of like motivational speaking at the end about why it might be for you.
Oh, no. Okay.
So this is just a bit about me, a bit of context. So yes.
So now I work currently in the Department for Primary Care Health Sciences in a medical sociology research group.
But I was not always a researcher. I had a life before research like my previous life.
And I. I never even wanted to be a researcher because I thought it all takes too long and it's too, too laborious.
So I like started out more like the policy advocacy kind of charity sector.
So like the first job I had, I worked for this breast cancer charity and I did rapid evaluations of breast cancer services.
So I would kind of work with and work with different hospitals around the country and then kind of like lead them through service evaluations.
So you kind of see aside it was called the service pledge, and then that was that was fraught with problems,
but that was like a good kind of start into that's what, you know, what rapid projects can look like outside of an academic setting.
And then I worked for a dementia charity called Alzheimer's Society, and that was a lot more policy research focussed.
So again, that tended to be quite rough. PID studies, but that was kind of rapid projects with a view to informing policy that was happening,
which I think is a lot of why people might want to do rapid stuff.
And then I got sick of doing everything really quickly because I felt like I was doing a bad job.
And then I did a very long winded kind of ethnographic PHC where I was looking at like primary care, the primary care response to domestic violence.
So again, it was like a lot of work and with kind of the third sector. But looking at the collaboration between the third sector and primary care.
So that was, you know, like the classic like two years of field work,
really like immersive, which was good, but also kind of brought out some different things.
But even during that time. So the project called Iris, I was doing shorter projects then kind of like,
I suppose more kind of like evaluation or consultancy pieces for the charities I was working with.
And then more recently I got my kind of baptism of fire through like official and
official rapid research in a in like a formal setting through a lot of a big project,
like a big covered project. Basically that was the first time I'd really kind of gone like full immersion in rapid methods.
And I learned a lot of what I know about this from from the people I met during that project.
So basically I've done it in a lot of different ways and I can kind of from different perspective.
So from both the kind of people who use that kind of evidence or are trying to use evidence to make change and also from the production side.
So I think I, I can see a lot of different angles of it, basically.
So what is it? So sometimes we talk about rapid, it gets a bit mixed up with urgency.
So say in the context of the pandemic, of course it was edge and we didn't know what was happening.
And in the previous pandemics or epidemics or in natural disasters or things like that,
there's a sense of urgency about getting research done, which doesn't necessarily translate to it being done quickly.
But there can be a sense of like, we should do it quickly and then this rapid as just quick, like it's just happens more.
It's like you take your normal research methods and there's this sense of
you're just pressing kind of like times to speed or something more than that.
But then I think the slightly more nuanced way to think about it is it's timely rather than just quick,
because that kind of orients it towards, Well, what are you trying to do?
Like who you trying to speak to? If research is for a purpose, you've probably got an audience in mind.
And actually, what's a good time?
Like how you thinking up these like slow research processes with what might actually be happening in the real world other way?
And then also I think it's just like rapid can just be relatively quicker because, you know, actually in a in a policy research sense,
a rapid project would literally be like two weeks, whereas like rapid research, academic research might be like six months rather than two years.
So I think rapid is also relative to what you're kind of starting framework was.
So who's looking? And so they said they like very generally the features of rapid research tend to have this more kind of iterative design.
So it's kind of changing as you go through and you're collecting data and you're analysing it and then maybe you're reframing the research questions,
it's all a bit more flexible and there's usually some element of participatory research.
Usually if it's like if you've got a focus fixed focus of like a decision making process,
you want to be involved and you've probably involved those people in the design of the research to some degree.
Otherwise you wouldn't know exactly how you wanted to inform them. There's often multiple methods of data collection.
You might be doing interviews and some observations or looking at documents or getting data off social media or Oh yeah,
just like, like basically it's not just one qualitative method.
It's like the whole host of qualitative methods because you're maybe just trying to like maximise the data you can get in a short space
of time and it almost exclusively involves team based research because you kind of need more person power to get all of this done.
And then this short time frame, it's either a short time frame, so a few weeks or a few months or it might be a long time frame,
but with kind of like multiple cycles of data collection that inform a project as it goes through.
We can talk about that a bit more. And why does time even matter?
Well, well, these are where the debates about time come in because there's that big question of rigour.
But you know, and everyone's always like, well, is it rigorous? And then there is a sense of like, what does it matter what message you do?
And that there's like an amount of time that is appropriate for that method.
Have you got enough time to do the research? Well, and that's this kind of nebulous.
It's difficult to set the time on. Like we need this amount of time to do an ethnography or something like that.
I think some of that people don't talk about as much as kind of practicality of like, well, some things just don't have to.
Take a long time. You know, you could watch the scale of the project that you're doing.
Like what are the methods that you're using? Do you need a really long time to do that or can you do that a bit quick, bit more quickly, bit quicker?
And also, I think there's the practicality of like what else have you got on in your life?
Like, is it worth doing it quickly because you've got something else coming up or you're finishing something else off?
Or like the things that aren't anything to do with work that you might be like,
I just would like to get this project out my head because I've got another life event that's happening.
So I think those things actually are really important.
But then there's this point about timeliness of how do we make, how do we produce right research at the right time for it to be useful?
Which I imagine a lot of us are motivated to some degree by the sense that we'd like our work to be impactful.
We'd like it to. We like thinking about something in a lot of depth.
We'd probably like it to be to contribute to the issue that we're looking at.
So but this is also, again, quite like a philosophical question, like what does it mean to be useful?
Useful to who? And then this idea about informing decision making as well, that can be a bit.
What exactly does that mean?
Like, is it just that like there's another document on the table in front of a group of people around a table making a decision?
Or does it mean that, like you're considered an expert and you get to be involved in that decision as well?
I think these so these are all important questions, but I think it's still it's not yet kind of fixed what timeliness means either.
And I mentioned this, but like people have actually been using rapid methods for very, very, very, very long time.
And these I just want to illustrate this with like, um, often it's like it's considered that it's the anthropologist or people who do like really,
really long in-depth fieldwork, and they're the ones who are like, Well,
you couldn't possibly do rapid methods that would be completely inappropriate.
So these two people, some of like the founding members of a of European anthropology.
So Maria Lipsky, she was actually the first female anthropology lecturer at Oxford University who was French and then did a lot of his work.
So she did a lot of her work in Siberia, and he did a lot of his work in in the Amazon.
And they both basically did what we would now call like rapid ethnography.
They spent like a few days in lots of different places. So admittedly they did do quite a lot of fieldwork, but they really didn't spend much time.
And they they more like their vision of studying.
They were almost like canvassing, like a whole range of different situations,
which I think is actually then pretty much what we've come round to back around to today with rapid research.
It's like trying to get like snapshots of different things that were happening and then build up a bigger picture.
So I think these is also just the sense of trends, right? People don't really talk about the fact that they they did their research like this,
but actually it's kind of it's not a it wasn't controversial then.
And I think it kind of comes back around to. So it's kind of like different different questions of what ends up being useful.
And I think this again, this was in the eighties, people were talking about this scrimshaw and Hittite.
And these these guys did a lot of work on like rapid assessment processes, which I'll talk about later.
So they ask this question, it's quite provocative question, which I think still stuns, is like how long do we need to spend in the field?
Really, How long, how much data do we need to collect to be able to say something useful?
And um, and then I guess for me this means like, well, it depends what question you're trying to answer.
Maybe a year is useful, maybe five years is useful, but maybe you could do something over the course of a few weeks.
And so I think this ends up coming down to this is my first of a self made me the business
sense that like it's actually a lot of it's actually just like a bit of like a turf war,
you know, when we're like we're fighting ourselves within the field.
You know, there's some people who are like, I'm really, I really believe in like long term methods because like,
enables you to do this kind of critical, in-depth research and build these relationships.
And then there's this other people who are like, But we're trying to be really relevant and like,
we're trying to be, you know, say in the context of like emergency situations.
We want people to think like, let's get the qualitative researchers in as well.
And actually, I think it's like it's a fight over it.
It's a it's because qualitative methods in general are sometimes downgraded relative to quantitative methods,
which are always seen as useful, no matter kind of what time scale it's done on or what kind of breath is.
So I think it's like we're trying to almost like fighting for scraps when actually we could just be like, Well, everything's got its place.
And yeah, like I said, the people I kind of met at the start of the pandemic.
So Cecilia and Ginger, like they, they were also kind of leading this work.
So they run something called the Rapid Research and Evaluation and Appraisal Lab at UCL, and they would have kind of already scoped out a lot of.
This territory just before the COVID pandemic started, because they've been working on other health emergencies.
They'd done this big review like this. They actually tell a really good story about this paper.
This paper is now like so highly cited, and it took them years to get this published.
And they went to so many different journals because everyone was like, oh, rapid methods.
Like, it's not worth it. Like, they're not all of these questions.
They're not rigorous. Like, no one cares about this. And then like, as soon as then the COVID pandemic started, everyone was like, All is forgiven.
Oh, please, teachers. Well, you know, and then I feel really lucky that I basically I kind of fell into working with them.
Remember when everyone was just like, I must do something useful at the start of the pandemic?
And I knew someone who knew Cecilia, who was doing a project, and I was like, I'll do anything like, please let me come and work with you for free.
I'll just try and be helpful to you.
But yeah, they've actually done a lot of the groundwork of the kind of like, I suppose, like they'd brought it up to date, like where was the fields?
Because obviously people also do this all the time, particularly in development, which I think is where Ginger did more of her work.
It's actually like a lot of the time is just in development and aid programs,
rapid methods are there was actually a lot of expertise that had been developed,
but then it hadn't necessarily been synthesised for like an academic audience and people were just being kind of snobby about it, I think.
But then there's been lots of like for ages,
there's been lots of situations where it has been used and people have been happy with it and thought it's been productive.
So it seems to be good for and I've got some examples coming up for like short term,
like decisions are coming up and like we want to be able to inform these kinds
of decisions about like whether to invest more in a service or less or oh,
so that would be the main example for that one. And then it's like, what does a particular group of people think about an issue?
Like whether that's like a novel issue or like often this,
this idea about are they willing to engage in something like is there a new intervention or approach or treatment?
And I can actually it can just be very useful to get a snapshot again of what people think about it or a snapshot of how like a Yeah,
how a service is working like across a number of different actors. And then I guess there's the sense that sometimes services,
sometimes things have already started being implemented and so you want to actually see what's happening live,
you know, because as much as we'd like to think that, you know, policy is led by evidence,
it often isn't and things just happen and then actually evidence and then research can step in at that point to kind of join the party a bit later.
And then I think the one that we've been most familiar with recently is this idea of things that change or disappear rapidly.
So you kind of have to get in there quick because they won't be around for a long time.
So some examples.
This was a very successful rapid project with this is the idea that like rapid methods can inform public health messages and in an emerging crisis.
And so this is during Zika in the British Virgin Islands, basically in this area, the US Virgin Islands.
Basically they were just telling everyone to the public health messaging was all just about avoiding mosquitoes when actually in the context of Zika,
which was having a affected related, one of the consequences is birth defects.
Mostly what people were interested in or were concerned about was kind of family planning,
like contraception and avoiding unwanted pregnancies, which actually was a general issue.
So they did this rapid research, this research team,
and then they found out actually kind of the way in which people wanted to be informed in the things they wanted information about.
And then they worked with the Red Cross,
and then they actually developed a hugely they rapidly developed a hugely successful public health kind of strategy around Zika.
So that was that one went very well. And again, they did this over like, Oh, this is a few weeks.
This was a really short they just did two to groups of two focus groups, while two like a men and women focus groups.
They did a few different they probably spoke to about 40 of each and then they managed to get yeah,
they managed to kind of actually do something that seemed to be useful for people.
Another one that's really popular and again has been going on for quite a long time is to do with trials.
And so trials cost so much money and then if they can't recruit, everyone is really annoyed.
And so often qualitative methods are used as a bit of a handmaiden in trials to actually make sure all I could do do interventions work for patients,
and then they can kind of and then you can kind of build it's often a little bit more formally staged.
You know, you get things like a stepped wedge trial where you can change things at different points.
But generally it means that if something's not working, you can use qualitative methods to see like,
is it the intervention, Is it the recruitment methods?
Is it something to do with the patients? Is it something to do with the staff, whatever.
And so in this one they basically found that. And so I thought this was interesting because, like, if they hadn't have done this qualitative study,
they might have just thought that this intervention and this kind of flu therapy intervention was not acceptable or was not,
you know, good for patients, but the patients actually hadn't.
They were finding it really hard to recruit patients, were finding it like very difficult.
And so the team were finding it very difficult to do the route to get the kind of recruitment figures.
But that was mostly I mean, it's not really a surprise. They just didn't have the right number of staff.
And like the staff when like kind of, well, integrate all this stuff hadn't integrated the trial very well into the workflows.
So actually then they did that and then it all worked a lot better and it was totally acceptable to patients and patients who were up for it.
And, you know, just anyway, it made the trial work a lot better. So I think that's I mean, I think you could have found that out before.
Sometimes I'm like, you're using qualitative research for things that kind of obvious, but still it still helped.
So and then so you can basically you can build this in at different stages of trials to see to kind of like help with trial processes.
And this one was also interesting because this is I think this one's a bit more about this kind of like snapshot and also this one.
This one was pretty clever because it was it was comparative, which I have found tricky,
which I'll talk about later, how you compare things across different countries.
But basically they did like a system mapping of these like perioperative care pathway.
So there's often this big pressure to that.
There's goals around access to surgical treatments in low and middle income countries, but there isn't the same infrastructure around.
Well, actually, what's the care that happens kind of before, during, after surgery?
And so this study was like mapping out the kind of perioperative care pathway.
So they did like stakeholder interviews, ethnographic observations and system mapping.
And it did just bring up a picture. But it really showed kind of how lots of things that I wouldn't have necessarily even thought about.
Like one of the big problems was not even the quality of care, but was actually about the indirect,
the unexpected costs that patients had to have to like access services.
So like, how much would it cost them to get to the hospital or to like, have food while they were there or, you know, stuff like that.
So I think that this one and again, it was all done quickly.
But I think what it really did was it started a lot of different conversations
about what were the what resources are needed around having a whole pathway.
So it was more like a kind of a bird's eye view of a pathway. Um, and this one, again, this is very, really common.
You get a lot of like barriers and facilitators type of studies like this.
And so and again, this is happening like way before the pandemic. Talk about kind of whether if they're going to introduce and if so,
this was the idea that they were going to introduce these mobile health units for anti-retroviral treatments in Mozambique.
And then they just kind of they were just scoping out, well, would you use this?
Would this be useful to you? And then they basically said, again, it's not that surprising, like it would be really useful.
Can we get other health care services in the mobile units at the same time?
You know, because like to do with other things too. So then that kind of would have increased the acceptability of the use of it in general.
So I guess it's like I mean, it doesn't seem like rocket science, right?
It's like quite like simple questions, things that can be immediately useful.
A lot of this was done in partnership with with kind of like people who are a lot more actively involved in the issues as well as the researchers.
But then I guess the big question is how we speed things up or what any questions as we go through how we do holographic.
And so yeah, yeah. You do studies that. Yeah.
Yeah. Was it intended that the qualitative research would run in parallel right from the beginning?
Yeah. You're an emergency service that's drafted in to find out what's going on when something is working.
I think it's they all of them. Well, particularly the trial.
It was there from the beginning,
but I think trials have just learned that it's just saves them time and money and gets them better results if they like pop, fine.
And then the other ones were all planned, as I suppose they were thinking about like the the like mobile.
I imagine it does something about reporting standards which we can also come to later.
But they don't always say what the impetus was like, who decided it.
But I think generally it tends to be like someone saying, We want to do this intervention or this this emergency.
Like how do we know what's going to work or not?
It's because, again, it's often driven by cost, right?
People want to know if it's going to be if people are going to use something before they invest in it,
before they roll out in a big in a big way or with the public health thing, it wasn't really working.
Like there were a lot of Zika infections in the US Virgin Islands, so I guess they were like,
We need to do something about this, like this, a global like this, the eyes of the globe on us.
And so they were doing worse than other places.
So I guess it's a bit it's a bit like joining the emergency services when they're like, we need to work out what's happening.
Yeah, I, I'm just wondering about ethical approval.
So, yeah, this is like an American service company. Kind of get this.
Yeah. Okay. Well, great segway directly into the next.
Exactly the next point. So thank you. It's like we planned it The so these are the different ways that you can kind of speed things up.
And so I've just broken this down into like different research stages and this is
kind of taken from the literature and just from some of my own experiences too.
And also they'll probably be definitely things on here that I haven't thought about. So if you want to add anything.
That's right. So the funding between like approvals, ethical approvals is like is very tricky.
I don't know how many people. It's difficult to get around that. So you can sometimes fund this rapid calls.
So through COVID, there was a lot of like, we'll get back,
we'll make a decision within a few weeks type of thing and you can go sometimes get rapid ethical approval
fast tracked or you can actually start applying for ethics like before the project's been funded.
You can also do it unfunded. So then you don't need to worry about actually, if you've got if you can move money around in other ways.
But like it really is, my reflection on that is pretty much impossible to get people to do anything fast track unless it's considered urgent,
like it's a global pandemic. If it's one of these like snapshot, how is the service working?
There's not much reason why an ethics board should prioritise you.
So that bit is really that's a bit which I find quite kind of.
That's the snail path of it. It's really hard to, to speed up the external bureaucracy with a reset.
You know, the next step is really the kind of research questions like what you asking and it does work
well to have like very specific questions like will this mobile health service be acceptable?
Like, do people find this trial recruitment procedure acceptable?
You know, if you've got like a really focussed question and a limited scope of inquiry, that helps too,
and this kind of engaging with stakeholders to find out what's useful to them, that that is like a really good way to do it.
But then that's really tricky when not I mean, most things are more complicated than that,
and particularly like an emergent issue which you're trying to even in the context of the pandemic,
most recent pandemic, you know, it's like it's an evolving you might ask one question one day,
but then two weeks later, the question that is useful might be different.
And if you like, I don't know how much scoping work you've ever done with stakes.
Holders of stakeholder engagement. They've always got a lot of different opinions.
So actually, it doesn't necessarily help to do a lot of kind of that work at the beginning.
Whilst it's important, it doesn't necessarily help you to narrow down. One of the main ways, like I said earlier,
that you can speed up speed things up is by having this larger distributing the labour across like a large research team.
And this seems to work best when you've got like a few very experienced researchers and then quite a lot of inexperienced researchers.
And then it's kind of like a lot more.
I think often research is a bit more like you just go out and you do your own thing and everyone is left to their own devices.
But this operates on a more of a kind of like the experienced researchers really like hands on directing the kind of fieldwork is, as it were.
And that's like challenging if you haven't got like a team that works well,
As with any of these things, researchers are often really bad at team work as well.
I find unless they've had like other professional experience and then like having these like more junior researchers,
I think it's a how are they going to get the right support and development and stuff like that.
Because like you're kind of thrown in, it's quite intense process.
And then in recruitment actually does I mean, I remember before I started doing any of this,
I was like, Oh, you're never going to be able to recruit, get like a good, diverse sample.
But then it's really I think in these kind of projects, it only works when the researchers are embedded in the community of interest,
because otherwise you just haven't got the time to like access people if they if you've got no relationship with the with the community,
whether that's like professionals or kind of patients or things like that.
So you can actually do really great like reach very like hard to access people, but you can only reach those people.
You can only reach the people that you've got like a close connection to or like your contacts have got a close connection to.
And obviously the online recruitment really helps with that in the context of the pandemic.
But in low and middle income countries, that just hasn't been a good way to access people stuff just because of digital access and things like that.
So you can really like a kind of the constraint there is that you can pretty much only do convenient sampling or a kind of
a purposive sample where you're just looking at like a particular group and this idea of like a maximum variation sample,
we are trying to get as wide a range of different people as possible is just it's super challenging.
And in the data collection, you can do all these things like have standardised tools that everyone uses,
remote data collection, you know, so remote interviewing, stuff like that.
Like I said earlier, you can use like lots of different types of data and kind of triangulate within that.
Also use of existing data. So like secondary analysis of data that you already have and data that you can just get in the real world,
you know, documents and things like that data you don't have to collect.
And then this has all of the usual considerations around any methods issue around like, well, who does that include?
What is the breadth of the research? Like how, how responsive can like standard approaches be to change?
Like if you need to change your study procedure, things like that?
Um. For me, as I suppose.
I think the thing that sets kind of academic research, aside from other forms of research, is the like analytical stage.
And because that's what we spend a long time learning how to do and that's what you've been doing, those of you on the course and stuff like that.
And that's where I'll talk a bit more about this later.
This is where I think you have to make the quickest gains because like this is what the people want to hear.
Like if you're trying to inform any decision making processes, it's off the back of your analysis.
And so you need to be able to do this quickly and come up with some good ideas quickly.
And so that can be facilitated by team based analysis and use of these kind of team based analysis tools, which I'll talk about.
But it also is hard, like I found this really hard when I was doing it.
It's very iterative. You have to keep on top of that.
And then like again, this idea if there's an emergent problem or an emergent phenomena that you're looking at,
it's going to like change in the direction of of your interest might change.
So that is hard. I found that it's challenging.
It's a whole different set of skills to keep on top of that.
And I guess I suppose it kind of relates to one of the earlier points about engaging stakeholders is the way to speed things up too.
And really having the people you want to speak to involved from the get go
just means that you can make sure what you're doing is as useful as possible.
And then the same things about how to navigate contradictory advice.
And then the other thing that's always slow is that reporting, because this is just another stage of bureaucracy, like how you write.
It depends what we mean by reporting. You know, often in academic stuff, we want to have it peer reviewed.
We want to have like these kind of independent verifications of it. So how do you get writing done quickly?
Like who's responsible for writing in teams? How do you do team based, like group writing and things like that?
Preprints like have been really useful, I think, and got a lot more acceptable during the pandemic, so you can at least get it out there quickly.
And also the alternative doesn't always have to be a paper, you know, like these Cecilia and Ginger,
they do loads of infographics, they do lots of much more accessible,
They do little videos, stuff that's just much more accessible for the people that they might be trying to get the get research to.
But again, like team dynamics, we're involved there.
And again, you really need to think about who you're trying to speak to in order to be able to get that reporting done quickly and.
Oh, so this is the analysis section. So I'm going to play you a video because I think this is the get out of here.
I'll go back. Um, because I think this is like, this was the thing that I learned the most from.
I think about the analysis methods. We do have an afternoon to use in rapid assessment procedures around deposit data collection and analysis of data.
Iraqi Policy. Rap sheets are a table, including two main categories of information collected in the study.
These categories are based on the research questions, theoretical framework, or the collection instruments.
As an interview is carried out, the researcher takes notes.
Even if they only record the interview. The researcher then summarises the key findings from the notes that add them to the rap sheet.
When she carries out an observation or another interview, she asks that you find the same rap sheet.
The researcher will do this for each data source using the rap sheet as a translation tool.
The rap sheet will start growing in length. Some topics will repeat themselves, but gaps will also appear.
These gaps can be addressed as data collection is ongoing.
Different types of rap sheets and maybe one for each researcher, Each study size, population or two captured changes over time.
The rap sheet can be used to discuss emerging findings and obtain feedback on matters of the team or stakeholders,
prompting changes near the study design.
If changes are made in the rap sheet, all the researchers should make the same changes to maintain consistency.
Rap sheets help create a quick summary of findings, but they also guide researchers as they set out to have that more in-depth analysis.
There are many creative ways to use rap sheets. Visit our website for more information.
All right. So I would say that these rap sheets were the thing that brought it together because they and I'd never used anything like this before.
And this is a preprint also, you know, like research and action and rapid method in action.
They because usually I'd just been like, well,
you collect your data and then you kind of go through your use kind of either you're
just doing it like old fashioned and you're just thinking about it and you coming
up with your kind of analysis frames or you're using your kind of enviro software
and you load all the data in each of the transcripts and you load it all in,
and you might have written a few notes, but this was really like, you do the interview.
As you're doing the interview, you're writing some notes. As soon as you finished an interview, you fill in the sheets,
which has got like a few key categories that maybe the research team has decided are important or inform in the early stages of the research.
And then like they're all shared and stored in one place.
So you read each other's like in this team, everyone's collecting different bits of data and then so then you're kind of learning.
It's just it's essentially a way of sharing notes and ideas quickly. And yeah, it was like it was very helpful.
It was quite chaotic. It's kind of hard to keep on top of. Everyone really needs to be very involved all the time, reading each other's stuff.
And then the video said it's kind of if you make a change, it then has to be consistent across the whole project.
But they are. I actually think we could do more of that. It's very some of this stuff we should maybe just bring in to like routine qualitative work.
Even if it's not, it doesn't have to be rapid because it's actually just like a good way to inform everyone about what's happening.
But I would recommend kind of looking at some of this like this paper and things like that,
because I think this is probably the way this is one of the hardest things to get on top of.
I think this is actually one of the quickest ways. This is where the speed comes from for me.
But yeah, it's not that straightforward because, you know, this this question of determining the scope and focus is is tricky.
Like, you know, sometimes you might want to ask a bigger question about like, you know,
not just like for instance with the mobile antiretroviral treatment units, it's not just like, oh, well, are they acceptable?
But it's like, you know, why are some people getting more like more exposed to HIV than other people?
That's a very different type of question, which might require different types of methods.
And this idea about who's setting the agenda, if it's very kind of like outcome focussed research,
then you're really kind of are you actually, I suppose I'll go on to this.
So you're going to be kind of as the as the researcher setting the agenda is like a kind of policy actor,
setting the agenda and like, do you need to ask questions of that process?
And I've discussed the kind of bureaucratic delays, particularly with funding and publishing stuff.
I like getting in the way as in like I mean, with rapid methods,
it's really full on because it's going to be done quickly and you know, you reach a kind of like on site rocket powered.
And so if you've just got other things going on, you know, if you've got like, you know, it could be anything.
Anything else happening in your life, that just means you have to slow down in general.
There isn't a lot of scope in a rapid project to kind of take time out.
So that is it requires a lot of the research, I think.
And then this question about who ends up participating like this, this kind of low hanging fruit issue.
And then yeah, the thing that really like kind of I'm always thinking about is like,
what's research do and is it meant to be informing a change that's already happening?
Is it meant to be critiquing it and on trying to offer, you know, as a kind of constructive criticism or as like a, you know,
as a as a more active one or actually sometimes are we trying to re-imagine things that we're trying
to reframe processes and we're trying to say that's not the question that we should be asking.
We should be asking this one. So I think rapid stuff can do all of those things, but I think you just need to be be thoughtful about kind of how.
Okay, then this is just. How long have we got?
I'll just do like, a bit of a tour through three projects that I was involved in and what went well and what didn't.
So this one was the one that did technically go well and that like we, you know, so this was like,
you can see this was, um, interviewing health care workers at the very start of the pandemic.
This was the one where I was like, Please, let me help you. I'll do anything.
And we managed to get things through really quickly because, like I knew the person on the ethics board and like the hospital I was associated with.
So that got through really quickly. And I also knew people who worked in the hospital.
So we were able to recruit them really quickly. So we actually did the data collection very quickly and that would have that would have been in April.
And then we did actually write this paper in like a month, you know, So it was received in May, but then it didn't get published until November,
you know, so through all the review process, but it did technically go well, but I was like really knackered.
This was like old times a day and night, and then multiple interviews with people who were having a really traumatic time.
Like, you know, I wouldn't usually recommend doing many not more than one interview in a day, and I would stay in like several.
So that was it came with some costs, but I was like this. I could see how it worked in that setting.
Three sources that you teased at the end, the three sources, data from three.
So it was social media policy documents and interviews with the three sources.
Yes, sorry, that was like a little sneak preview there.
And then I actually then spent, like absolutely much longer asking slightly more like critical questions in a different paper,
which was really about like how how these like why people were so traumatised a
bit and and kind of what that meant about kind of patient clinician relationships.
So obviously this happened so much later, still in some ways timely for research,
considering that was still kind of like less than a less than a year.
But then for me I felt like everything else had gone so quickly and this was much slower.
So again, it's like this sense of like how how quick are we talking is like rapid research.
So this is another project I was involved in which was about kind of how lockdowns
affected access to domestic violence services and like studying primary care.
And so this one kind of started quickly. Everyone was really up for it and it was meant to be a year and it was a rapid research fund.
But then the grant process, it was really slow decision process. And then naturally it was really difficult to recruit people because like
primary care was everyone was knackered and delivering the vaccine programme.
And also we had like we were using all of these rapid methods,
but everyone was doing it like one day a week and we had all of these other projects and actually it was,
it was really tricky, this idea of having a focus research question, It was really difficult to to decide exactly what we were looking at.
On peer review took ages, but actually in some ways this is the work in that I'm involved in, in the kind of domestic violence sphere.
It's very much co-produced. We work with all the uses of the knowledge.
They were involved in the study, in the research that one of the authors is kind of she works for one of the big domestic violence charities.
So even though we weren't able to report quickly, we were like sharing the findings of the research,
even at the, you know, the points where it was going slowly and then this one.
So this one was interesting because there's like, you know,
lots of these lots of different countries were kind of which, you know, we're in a collaboration.
We're all collecting these patient interviews about COVID.
And we were like, We've already got the data. We'll just analyse it. We'll just compare these different experiences across countries.
And it's taken like three years to do that work because it's been so complicated trying to like unpick the one paper,
which is about kind of how race and racism and inequality was expressed like in relation to the pandemic.
And this one is about stigma.
And these are actually like thinking about these issues in different kind, like cross-cultural context, just talk like stages and stages of analysis.
So you cannot do this kind of very rapid. But there so that was slow but learned a lot through this process.
Okay so to finish off showed we speed of course, slow down because being slow is good too.
So for instance, if you want to see how an issue is evolving and just be with it as it changes and
this idea when you actually don't know what the question is like a lot of the time,
I don't know what the question is that I'm trying to ask of something when I get started on a research project.
And also if you're kind of going to take a critical position,
you might want to take a bit longer so you can get to know and understand how you're going to it might be easier to easier to give advice,
but it's harder to give criticism to the kind of stakeholders and decision makers.
And also, if you're trying to do this work, you want to know how it works instead of if it works.
Because, you know, like with the trial recruitment processes, you might be like, okay. Those work, people find it acceptable.
But you want to know why they do or how like how that fits in with their conception of kind of treatment or something else.
Then that's that's a different kind of question. And also, if you like, don't know what you're doing, like I often don't do, you know,
new things like the things that I can do, you know, I've done 100 times, I can do them really easily.
But if it's something that's new to me, then go and slower is a bit better, I think.
And this idea about when it's like heavy,
like those I should not have just been doing those traumatic interviews with all those beleaguered health care researchers so quickly.
But, you know, there was that sense of urgency. But actually, I also needed time to be able to process that, too.
And then the sense of like just because we could go quicker, like should we?
So I love Tricia her. So she runs this thing called the not ministry anyway,
but she's like a big political person around like rest and rest does kind of life is always trying to grind us down,
you know, it's a bit kind of anti-capitalist, but ultimately, just because we could go quicker, it doesn't mean that we should.
Like there are increasingly unrealistic expectations from funders and from
universities that like because someone else did it quickly means that you should too.
And we are only human. And it doesn't mean, you know, I think hopefully you would see from this that speedy doesn't necessarily mean it's sloppy.
There's ways to be rigorous with it, but it also doesn't mean it's going to be impactful.
You know, actually, you could do slow, impactful work. You can do quick, impactful work.
That is like a separate issue. So it's not guaranteed you're going to have impact from doing it quicker.
And this idea that, like hopefully the research that we do brings us some element of joy or like even if it's not like the happiest topic,
it's like actually, you know, we're getting we're growing from it. We're like contributing something.
And it also takes a lot from us and particularly qualitative work. You have to put yourself into it.
And so that kind of balance of of kind of what time means for you.
And I think I like to think the contribution I could make from doing research is like imagining how systems could work differently or how an
issue could be approached differently or like people could be involved in something differently and you can't really do or maybe you can.
I can't do that quickly. That takes me quite a lot of time and kind of thought and conversation and interaction.
So I think that that is it depends again on the kind of questions that we're asking.
Yeah. And this is the sense of like I think like this whole thing is motivated by the idea that qualitative research to be taken seriously,
to be involved in these big decisions needs to be done quickly.
Otherwise we haven't got anything to bring. It's like we need to get these findings in quickly.
But I feel like it's that actually like how could we consider how could we be considered expert and credible on that?
Like the knowledge about qualitative research and qualitative research processes
would get us a seat at the table rather than having to deliver things quickly,
because I just think it's not equivalent. The things you can do crunching numbers versus kind of like understanding experiences of the world.
So to conclude, our rapid methods, right for the job, these are the things that hopefully might give you a bit of advice about how to approach it.
This question of timeliness, what are you actually trying to achieve? When do you want to achieve that?
Like, when does it matter? Like, what can you influenced by doing that scale?
Like if you don't have that massive, it's hard to do that quickly.
If you want to do something a bit smaller, then that's going to work and kind of iteration,
can you do a few different small things and build up from them in these kind of rapid cycles of questions and analysis?
And you don't have to do rapid, you could do participatory instead.
That participatory gets to the same kind of influence, if that's what you're interested in.
And then I think what's really important, like I said, is about like your position at the like how close are you to the communities,
the people, the issues that you want to do the research with? Like if you don't have access to them, you're not going to be able to do it quickly.
And who is excluded from that approach to and what experience do you and the other people you're working with have?
Can they speed things up? You know, because it feels rubbish to do things badly.
So so it's like all people are actually kind of equipped to do things quickly and then,
oh, I think this is also important to like, are they actually right for you?
Does anyone know who this horse is? This famous horse is to the left of the picture three times Grand National.
A bedroom is a Liverpool legend, and yet the only horse to win the Grand National three times.
Loved running quickly. Absolutely loved it, built for it.
I feel like I'm more like your kind of tiny little pony with that short legs.
I actually can't go that quickly. And I think as well as it's like our other method for the project is like, does it like what kind of person are you?
I hate agency. It actually stresses me out.
One of the reasons why I moved from those policy jobs.
There's kind of like a charity job, as I described at the beginning with Kevin.
That was a bit too quick for me. I wanted to be able to think about it.
So actually rapid methods, while out there, sometimes important, are actually the person that I am.
So I think you don't have to do rapid methods if they aren't like your thing.
They're not like better than other methods. They're just suited to different types of questions.
So it's okay to be the little fluffy pony. And if you want to find out more, I would really mostly recommend that you go to the people at Real.
They do these really cheap rapid courses. It's like £65.
I don't know if you've ever been on any of them, but they're they're really cheap. They're really good.
It's with your main woman, Cecilia,
and they also just have loads of resources and they've got all of like the papers that they've published and stuff.
And also I've got some inside Intel and there's going to be reporting guidance which
will help also because I almost just like puts out the stages of what you need to do.
So there's going to be rough on methods in general from real.
And then the W.H.O. are going to be putting out some specific guidance about how you respond, how you do rapid methods in epidemics.
And then you can ask me, but I think I've given you everything that I know,
though I could tell you more about the things where it's, you know, gone right and gone wrong other times and that's it.
If you've got any questions and if.