About the project
This research project aimed to investigate the relationships between care, inequalities and wellbeing among different generations of transnational families in the UK, Spain, France and Sweden. ‘Transnational families’ can be defined as familial groups where one or more family members spend all or most of their time geographically separated from each other across borders, but nevertheless share a collective sense of connection as a ‘family’. We worked with different generations of transnational families that encompassed, diverse ethnicities, care needs and legal status, including refugees and asylum-seekers and other displaced people.
Using a multi-sited, family-focused participatory action research methodology, we worked with partner organisations to train and support migrant community researchers to undertake research with transnational families, building trust and capacity within communities. Community researchers and academic teams conducted interviews, participatory diagramming and other activities with 122 transnational families (UK: 25, Sweden: 40, Spain: 23, France: 29 families). In most families, we engaged with two or three different generations, including children and members living in countries of origin/other countries.
Participatory approaches to data analysis and dissemination provide opportunities for marginalised groups to prioritise findings and engage in policy dialogue. Participatory workshops used a range of creative methods to discuss key themes, rank priorities and co-produce accessible outputs. For example:
- in the UK, we worked with families and with Rank and File Theatre performers with lived experience of forced displacement and disability to co-produce participatory theatre and films. Scenarios focused on the challenges families faced and the changes to policy and practice they would like to see to improve their lives.
- in France, researchers and filmmakers collaborated closely with two transnational families to co-produce ethnographic documentary films about their lives.
- in Spain, photovoice methods were used with five community researchers to capture transnational caring practices and co-produce a photovoice collage and video.
- in Sweden, short films were produced with community researchers about families’ experiences to inform practitioners.
Goals and benefits
Training and supporting refugees and other migrants to interview and do participatory activities their peers can provide access to rich ‘insider knowledge’ through refugee and minority ethnic community networks which may not be available to academic researchers who lack a shared cultural background or experience of migration/displacement. We wanted to ensure that the research was accessible to transnational families from diverse ethnicities who were able to participate in their first or preferred language. We therefore recruited community researchers who spoke one or more minority languages and were able to draw on their linguistic minority ethnic community networks to recruit potential participants.
Speaking in their first language put participants at ease. This enabled the project to reach a wider diversity of linguistic and cultural groups without the need to use interpreters in interview settings, which can disrupt the conversation and necessitate cultural mediation when academic researchers are from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Using qualitative approaches to research family lives also poses challenges due to the difficulty of gaining access to ‘private’ family spaces. Community researchers were successful in reaching family members of different generations which was a key requirement of our project, including children and those living in country of origin or third countries (who were interviewed in most cases via videocalls). They were able to navigate the sensitivities of the intimate sphere of families where there were particular care needs, given pre-existing relationships of trust and awareness of gender and other cultural norms.
Community researchers benefited personally in terms of developing their work experience and skills and enhancing their future employability. It was important to ensure they received certificates of the training and research tasks undertaken. Local refugee and other community organisations and the wider community also benefit from their knowledge and experience and the potential to involve them in future research and community action projects.
There were also many benefits for the research team of working with community researchers over a longer period, such as by employing them to transcribe and translate interviews into English/ French/ Spanish/Swedish. This gives a richer understanding of the data through shared meanings developed in the interview setting than would be produced by an external translator. Community researchers also supported families’ participation in prioritising findings and engaging with policy dialogue, thus counteracting marginalisation dynamics and enabling them to see how the research could help lead to social change.
Reflections and challenges
There are important issues to consider in the dynamics of establishing the research team and whether and how to involve community organisations. In the UK, community researchers were recruited and employed part-time through third sector organisations which also received a budget for practitioners’ time to support the community researchers’ involvement in the project. However, such arrangements may create tensions and hierarchies in line management between practitioners and academic researchers due to the fact that community researchers become ‘employees’ of third sector organisations. There may also complexities due to the way a group of community researchers may be ‘assembled’ because of a specific research project and due to sampling requirements, rather than being a pre-existing unified group with common goals, which may work better in terms of on-going peer support and team dynamics to sustain participation over the course of the project.
Conducting research with people of different ages, including children, and using with different participatory methods, adds complexity to the training that community researchers require, and the ongoing support needed throughout the fieldwork and beyond. Safeguarding training for working with children and vulnerable adults was provided by a national provider for community researchers and the academic team prior to undertaking fieldwork. Community researchers in the UK found it sometimes difficult to negotiate consent to interview three generations within families and it took a long time to find families who were happy for us to also interview a family member living in other countries, particularly where there were concerns about the political situation and the privacy of online calls. Some community researchers with less experience of working with children also found it challenging to interview the children in the family, but found using less talk-centred methods such as participatory diaries or drawings helped to understand their experiences.
Community researchers may also face situations of emotional distress when interviewing or collecting data from families facing significant difficulties due to chronic illness, disability, bereavement or forced displacement. Community researchers found it difficult to withdraw from families’ lives – after the interview, family participants often called and wanted emotional support or advice, having shared the challenges they faced in an intimate interview setting and remaining part of the family’s wider support network. Acknowledging the difficulty of separating the research role from community researchers’ roles as members of the community and the need to manage expectations is an important part of the ethical training and support that the research team should provide prior to fieldwork.
Furthermore, opportunities to debrief regularly with academic researchers, practitioners, peer community researchers and/or counsellors if required, is of utmost importance to ensure the wellbeing of participants, community researchers and academic researchers. An allowance for counselling sessions with culturally appropriate practitioners with experience of supporting clients with forced displacement backgrounds should be included in the budget from the outset.
There are also significant ethical issues that need to be considered when doing in-depth research with different family members, some of whom are not living locally but in countries of origin or other countries. Safeguarding protocols are normally based on local/national guidelines and systems. So, it may not be possible to support family members in other countries without similar legislation or infrastructure, or those living in refugee camps or areas of conflict.
Time and resource constraints are also significant considerations when using participatory action methods with marginalised groups. The considerable time investment needed from community researchers and family participants who are carers, as well as of theatre performers, practitioners and the research team needs to be acknowledged and allocated sufficient budget at the project design stage. This includes the training and ongoing support that may be needed, as well as resources to support participants’ and performers’ involvement across different stages of the project. Recognition is also needed of the financial, emotional and caring pressures that participants, community researchers and performers may face, which may make it difficult for them to sustain their involvement over a longer period.
The academic team often experienced tensions between the research requirements and a desire to facilitate a more fully participatory action research and creative process that was guided by the perspectives and concerns of family participants, community researchers and performers. Particular challenges were centred on:
- in the Theatre of the Oppressed approach in the UK, creating space for actors with lived experience and family participants to improvise and co-develop family scenarios and imagine solutions, while keeping the focus on the key research findings and policy realities, in order to produce outputs that had the potential to inform policy and practice;
- the need to recruit family participants of different generations and with family members in other countries in order to meet the requirements of the sample;
- the extent to which community researchers were involved in designing/ refining the interview questions and other research tools to gather data that would address the research questions.
Learn more
Website: https://research.reading.ac.uk/transnational-families/
Watch our films of key messages for policy and practice on our YouTube channel: @CAREWELLTransnational Families
This includes our film, Refugee Families Caring and Seeking Reunification: https://youtu.be/JKAcE-A6f6g?si=-u5nsprcN8x5ZJ0P
Summary and full report, Care, Inequalities and Wellbeing among Transnational Families in Europe, Report of the CareWell comparative, intergenerational study in France, Spain, Sweden and the UK (Evans, Mas Giralt et al., 2024)
Learning resources for English Language for Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) teachers on Transnational Families: Family Challenges, produced by Migrant English Support Hub (MESH), available at: https://learningenglishplus.org.uk/resource-hub/transnational-families/
Email: r.evans@reading.ac.uk and r.masgiralt@leeds.ac.uk
Ruth Evans (University of Reading), Rosa Mas Giralt (University of Leeds), Grady Walker (University of Reading)
The research project, Care, Inequality and Wellbeing in Transnational Families in Europe: a comparative, intergenerational study in Spain, France, Sweden and UK (2021-2024) was funded through the JPI More Years, Better Lives, Equality and Wellbeing across Generations, including Economic and Social Research Council [Grant Ref. ES/W001527/1].