How do you deal with stress? Part 3: Researcher Feedback & Pilot
[This part of the project was completed by Sarah Norman and Rumilla Uddin, in collaboration with Dr Iona Beange and Dr Pippa Thomson of The University of Edinburgh and the Community Wellbeing Collective.
This post follows on from How do you deal with stress? Part 2: Designing Questions ]
Feedback from researchers
Last week [30th Aug 23] we met with researchers to discuss our projects. These are some questions that were asked during the Q&A:
Are you sticking to Wester Hailes?
For this pilot, yes.
How has your work affected your participants?
This is yet to be seen, but we hope it will have a positive impact on their lives.
We are interested to know how you focus on stress? What’s your direction?
Participants self define their stressors and how severe they understand them to be, before exploring how they manage them. So the direction will be largely participant-led, with an overall structure from us.
How do we do this in a non clinical way that also gives us viable data?
We want to do what we can to provide an informal environment and deliver the research questions in a conversational way. We intend to encourage them to open up about their lived experiences by using a personable approach that centers participants as human beings, not just anonymous sources of data.
We will collect the majority of our data through a combination of individual reflection and group conversation and observe if common themes or trends arise. In order to both provide hard data and to encourage reflection on their lived experiences, we will also invite participants to choose a number from 1-100 to describe the severity of their stress. We feel that providing this large range rather than, for example, a range of 1-10, will encourage people to really reflect on their stress and give us a more precise idea of what they are experiencing. Both forms of data are equally valuable, as we believe that lived experience will contextualise those numbers.
With this approach in mind, we have revised our questions:
What causes you stress?
How stressed does it make you feel from 1-100?
How do you deal with stress?
We will conduct this research in the Community Wellbeing Space in one of Rumilla’s Voicing Moments activity sessions, where people already feel safe and comfortable to share, and where participants will have access to refreshments and additional emotional support if needed. Rumilla will use her next Voicing Moments session on the 22nd September as a pilot.
Rumilla’s Reflections from a pilot session on 22nd September
- Time should be given to think of and consider the answers given; answers started with fine detail but became more vague as time pressure kicked in.
- One person wrote “HUSBAND: 1000” and continued to add zeros as the session went on.
- I think it’s interesting that “medical professionals” got a rating of 70 from one person, because another person doesn’t trust them at all.
- I like that it was a small group, I think that makes people feel more at ease; being around a chatty participant encouraged a more quiet one to be more vocal.
Reflections from session with Pippa (researcher) and Iona (Public Engagement Professional)
- Participants will benefit from a more relaxed atmosphere if we give them plenty of time to consider their answers and take in what others are saying, so we want to use the full hour.
- When it comes to the data collection, we want our data to be individual and not influenced by others, but we also want to allow participants to share and feel validated and supported by the others. With this in mind, we will give participants the opportunity to write down their answers on paper before discussing as a group to allow for both individual and collective reflection.
- Part 3 is particularly important, not only because it was the original research question before we split it into parts, but also because it serves as aftercare; people will feel supported and leave with practical tools to help them to manage their stress after they have left the session. We can write all of the suggestions up on the blackboard and invite people to take a photograph if they’d like to.
- We want to allow the most amount of time for this final question, so we will split the session like this: 5 minutes for the introduction, 15 minutes for part 1, 15 minutes for part 2, and 25 minutes for part 3.
- We will stick to small groups of up to 5; if more people wish to participate, then we will split into smaller groups.
Related Blog Posts
How Do You Deal With Stress? Part 1: Selecting the question
How do you deal with stress? Part 2: Designing Questions
How do you deal with stress? Part 4: Results
