Collecting data from young people

Scholars working on children/youth and development have raised concerns on the difficulty to gather data from young people. Several methods have been devised with the bias on using fun-based methods. Creativity is expected to help young people tell their stories. In this blog post, I wish to share some insights on some methods I’ve tried during my thesis, and with my teammates in implementing the infomediary campaign. 

• Mobility mapping. When I was doing my thesis, I thought it would be smart to show an example so my research participants can just take off from it. It did facilitate the process. Many of them creatively drew their own mobility maps. For some, however, they ended up copying my example. All of the items I listed were the same stuff that appeared in their mobility maps. During our data collection for the infomediary campaign, we again encountered the same issue. There are several ways to deal with it. First, you can ask the participant to redraw. To some, this will be very easy. But I have to admit that this requires a lot of skills so the participant does not get offended. Second, you can just make do with what s/he has, but make sure to ask many probing questions. Remember that this method is just a prop for your data collection. It will just aid you in collecting data from your research participants. So once the participants are done making their drawings, ask them to present their outputs in a group so you and other members of the group can ask questions that will enable you to gather rich and high quality data.

 

• Time transect. This is a good method to peek on the activities of the research participants for a given time period. We did have a lot of “A-ha!” moments when we did this in our data collection. Instantly, you can see which activities eat up most of their time, which will help you come up with follow on questions. Once the participants are done doing their time transects, divide them into smaller groups and ask them to present their respective outputs. Data validation also happens during group presentation. The facilitator must be very good at asking follow on questions as the data can be limitless once the participants start to present their outputs. New themes can actually emerge in this process.

• Photovoice. In my thesis, I asked my research participants (high school and university students) to take photos of something that will help represent their dreams. I lent them digital cameras. They went out of the venue. I just asked them to go back after 20-30 minutes. I loaded their photos in my laptop. I asked them several questions while we were reviewing the photos together. I think that this method is good in gathering data that may be glossed over if one will just do plain interviewing (well I can also say this with the other methods). In another research, not with young people, I used this method to document the activities of my research participants. It went well. I had the chance to get a detailed account of their activities. 

•  Peer interviewing. We did this in our data gathering in Tacurong. We suspected that the students might not be very comfortable sharing their stories with us. What we did was to pick some students whom we thought can serve as interviewers. We gave them a list of questions and briefed them on the aims of the activity. We also lent them digital recorders to document the process. One of us in the team clandestinely took photos of the process. It went well! The students did enjoy sharing a lot of stories, many unedited stories! They also had so much fun in the process. A lot of giggles were noted. 

Alright, as I pointed out earlier these methods will just aid you in collecting data with young people. You may drop them when your research participants are already comfortable sharing their stories with you. The quality and beauty of the data you will collect will largely depend on how creative you are as a facilitator in gaining their trust so they will share their narratives with you.