Each year, in conjunction with the annual rural policy conference, CRRF organizers a New Researcher Forum. The forum is an opportunity for new researchers, community development practitioners, and seasoned research veterans to create new networks, discuss issues of methodology, and build skills and capacities.
2011 New Researcher Forum
October 14, 2011 from 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Concurrent Board Room B, Delta Hotel in St John’s, Newfoundland
As part of the upcoming Culture, Place and Identity at the Heart of Regional Development conference, CRRF will host a roundtable discussion for new researchers focusing on methods used in rural research. The session offers a venue for an exchange of ideas and research practices. Participants will have the opportunity to share their research method challenges and breakthroughs, and learn from others about the range of methods used in rural research.
Rural research methods topics identified at during the New Researcher Forum included:
- Interviews – to tape or not to tape
- Place and community-based research versus consistency, reliability, replicability, rigour, etc.?
- Balancing needs of communities and researchers
- Why can’t people move forward using their own methods?
- Narrow versus generalizable/more widely applicable
- Partnerships – with organizations such as Statistics Canada, Alberta Rural Development Network
- How do ethics limit us? Types of research we do, voices heard or not heard
- Pulling together and sharing information from personal documents, our elders’ experiences
- Identifying the right topic, questions – purpose, questions lead to methods
- Defending social science methods
- How to best use internet tech to collate and organize data, documents
- Knowledge transfer – how to engage community, policy makers
- Modes of representation, e.g. use of drawing – a way of seeing
- Active learning, service learning – time requirements, not recognized in Promotion and Tenure (P&T)
- How to disengage (from communities where we are working)?
- Longitudinal case studies (new people + repeat people & questions)
- Valuing and learning/using a range of methods and approaches