Researching young people’s orientations to the future: the methodological challenges of using arts practice

‘It is easier to engage young people through creative methods’

Young people are perceived to be more responsive to visual-based research and the use of new media than text-based research methods. Buckingham (2009) draws on Gauntlett and Kitzinger to argue that the playful nature of these methods appeals to younger participants and puts them at ease with the researcher and within the research field (adults, in contrast, might be dismissive of the same ‘childish’ methods). Yet, Buckingham also notes that this assumption neglects the extent to which the encounter with visual and arts-based methods in formal education might affect the willingness of young people to participate in research projects using similar tools. Young people are aware of their ‘abilities’ from school assessments as expressed in the ways they portray themselves as ‘artistic’ or ‘not artistic’. The ‘not artistic’ may then be less inclined to participate in ‘creative’ research. Further, adolescents and young adults trying to establish themselves as beyond childhood might feel uncomfortable, even dismissive, about engaging with perceived children’s activities.

‘Creative methods empower young people and democratise fieldwork’

Arts-based methods are frequently used in participatory contexts to empower young people by facilitating their proactive engagement in the research, shaping the process at different levels. In terms of techniques, asking young people to keep a video-diary for instance has the potential to explore and account for areas of their daily experience that might be more difficult to capture through words during formal interviews (Bagnoli and Clark, 2010; Latham, 2003). Yet, capturing everyday practices or representing familiar spaces in photographs and video does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of young people’s lives. Rather, visual representations are, as much as written accounts, a way to tell a story, which is only one of the many that could be told (Pink, 2001). Instead, what becomes crucial is to investigate the social contexts that led to the formulation of a visual representation as it is offered to the viewer/researcher.

Participatory arts-based methods may facilitate negotiations within fieldwork and the establishment of more equal relationships between researchers (academic and non-academic) and participants. However, it is important to recognise how the operation of power in fieldwork also depends on the social, economic, and cultural backgrounds and dynamics of the participants and researchers. For instance, Allan (2012) conducted research in an elite English school asking her participants to make video diaries for discussion in interviews. On more than one occasion, young people were dismissive of her comments because they thought she did not know how to handle a camera, which significantly altered the researched–researcher power relationship. Allan’s participants were extremely self-confident young people empowered by their cultural, social, and economic capitals more than by ‘creative’ participatory methods.

In addition, the researcher and the participants are differentially bound to the fieldwork and, whereas the (academic) researcher will usually only temporarily inhabit certain social, economic and political spaces (that of the participants), those participating in the research will not benefit from the same type of freedom. As such, the relationships created during fieldwork and among different co-participants will also depend on their different levels of dependence and proximity to the issues under investigation.

Recruitment and participation

We started recruitment in spring 2014 with the help of teachers working in two educational institutions on Sheppey, contacts facilitated through our community partner. We also started networking with local community and youth centres by creating project spaces on Facebook and Twitter. We created a strong visual identity for Imagine Sheppey Fast Forward as we then called it, and distributed stickers, posters and flyers of our activities around the island.

Despite our critical discussion above, the belief that young people are interested in participating in arts-based research is backed up by a number of success stories (Gasman and Anderson-Thompkins, 2009; Larson and Walker, 2006; Wright et al., 2006). However, these projects were largely designed in collaboration with schools and youth centres, often in deprived areas, to create safe spaces of personal development and skills enhancement. Although recruitment is one of the main challenges of working with young people, working in partnership with existing organisations eases this process. For Imagine Sheppey we sought a middle ground of working with teachers to facilitate participation but retaining an independent space for experimentation outside of the curriculum. Despite the support of local schools, we struggled to gather a core group of six participants. Among them there were two young people who presented themselves as ‘artistic’, two ambitious students wanting to improve their academic-related records, and two young volunteers at the Blue Town Heritage Centre who found the group activity appealing. In addition we recruited 20 young people to three focus groups. We gave £10 vouchers to the workshop participants as a surprise gift to thank them for their contribution. We offered the focus group participants £10 vouchers as an explicit incentive to participation.

The challenge of securing participation prompts two reflections. First, young people might be more likely to collaborate in research involving the use of visual methods or with media components because these projects engage with means of communication that are closer to the ways young people communicate. Instead, arts-based research may attract only people interested in or practising art with the ‘right’ skills. Second, whilst we advertised our planned activities through existing youth networks on Sheppey, none especially promoted arts-based activities or interests for young people. The majority of organisations we networked with offered skills enhancement programmes, free advice for job seekers and health-related services.

However, in this context our workshops offered new kinds of temporary spaces for young people to explore their lives. Perhaps a lack of familiarity with such activities and our own positions as outsiders – despite our previous research and good relations with community organisations on the island – did not produce the levels of participation we hoped for. Those who did participate were nevertheless very positive about the experience and this may give them a bridge to future art-based community activities.

Web-based interactions with young people

Prior to and during the workshops, we attempted to reach potential participants by advertising on our Facebook and Twitter pages. Yet to establish web-based interactions with – rather than make announcements to – young people also proved challenging. Although our Facebook page became popular among people living on Sheppey and especially those working with young people, it took some time before our participants started interacting with us, for instance ‘liking’ or commenting on our project-related posts. Observing the format adopted by other Facebook pages popular on Sheppey, we started posting YouTube clips, photographs, and asking for viewers’ opinions on issues addressed by the research process. Even though the posted links were always able to gather a few ‘likes’, the virtual support came from other (older) people on Sheppey. It was only towards the end of the workshop programme that young people started leaving comments on our page and sharing project photographs with their friends – thus making their participation public among their social circles. For example, after the third workshop, one of the participants wrote on our Facebook wall: ‘thanks for an awesome day today the project is so worth doing’. This was an unexpectedly emotional statement that made us aware of the way the research touched our participants (Gasman and Anderson-Thompkins, 2003: 433).

Overall then social media became a valuable means for us to communicate with young people, elicit their curiosity, facilitate participatory projects, and disseminate the partial results of ongoing activities. Certainly the young participants needed time to test whether they could trust us (and by extension the project) before making public their support and participation. This suggests to us that monitoring the level of interaction between researchers and participants on social media can also become a resource to give an account of the process of establishing relations of trust in the research process.

Young people and power in fieldwork

As discussed earlier, one of the positive features of participatory arts-based methods is its potential to support the democratisation of the fieldwork. Overall, our project was successful in creating spaces in which young people operated autonomously.

At the beginning of our workshops, we encouraged participants to use all the available media equipment. Instructions were given on how to operate still and video cameras and we also suggested the use of smart phones to take additional photographs. As expected, young people’s levels of interaction and participation were strongly determined by how comfortable they felt in a specific situation and this developed over time. For instance, during the last workshop, participants took complete charge. Some of them recorded what we were doing with the available video and still cameras, often interrupting ongoing activities to choreograph different movements, including directing us. This was a long way from some of their earlier uncertainties asking us: ‘Is that right?’, ‘Is this what you want?’. On other occasions, the same participants carved out their own space of activity where they could do things at their own pace, according to what they knew, and without being challenged by the group. These moments of withdrawal may be evidence of the difficulties that participants encountered in establishing a dialogue with us and the other young people in order to negotiate their needs and expectations. However, they also demonstrate the young people’s capacity to remove or protect themselves or refuse the available roles and constructions of them (Milne, 2012).

The dynamics of participation and withdrawal are able to shed light on the process of negotiation within the fieldwork. Whilst we encouraged participants to engage in the workshop activities, we did not try to prevent them from doing what they wanted even when their actions distracted the rest of the group or inhibited ongoing performances. The workshops were deliberately loosely designed to stimulate young people’s participation in an experimental and exploratory environment where all ideas were taken in consideration equally. This freedom sometimes led to surprising new spells of engagement and interaction. Moments of proactive engagement are clear examples of the relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere that was created. That said, a reflection on the limits of democratisation must account for what research makes possible in relation to what participants wish for and feel able to do. Whereas making a video or taking photographs are generally activities that facilitate young people’s engagement, it is also true that the same activities allow only certain roles to be performed – the film director, the film-maker, the performer.

Interdisciplinary working

From the outset of Imagine Sheppey we sought to bring together the thinking and practice of performing arts and sociology such that the process of data collection and image-making for a potential video was one and the same. This was an attempt to privilege neither one disciplinary approach nor another in an experimental engagement that could take off from convergences and ‘productive irritants’ alike (Schneider and Wright, 2010: 5).

In practice this felt both more and less constraining than the more conventional mode of collaboration we had engaged in as part of the Living and Working on Sheppey project where the artists responded to the data the sociologists (in collaboration with community partners) had collected. We agreed at the outset of the Imagine Sheppey project that one of the outcomes should be a video, which meant that Tea were less free to respond to the space and the encounters of the project than usual, but were able to contribute to the direction and design of the project throughout. As sociologists, we benefitted from our exposure to artist-led practice for rethinking modes of data collection but this also meant giving up control over the type or quality of data they might produce. Whilst we had regular meetings and frequent email communications, we nevertheless encountered the difficulties of genuinely achieving a shared interdisciplinary understanding. Obstacles included the silences that accompanied our own taken for granted assumptions about different aspects of the research process, the different conceptual resources we were used to thinking with, and the ease of retreating into familiar roles.

However, there were powerful moments of synergy between the artists, sociologists and young people where what happened arose in a cumulative way, where one intervention and perspective enabled the next from someone else, and so on. As researchers the process led us to use our own imaginations to ‘feel with’ (Hollway, 2011: 56) the young project participants and explore the spaces created.

Ethics

There has been considerable attention devoted to ethics in research with young people, especially in relation to the promise of empowerment offered by audio-visual methods (Wiles et al., 2012). Whilst established text-based methods generally resort to anonymity as a safeguard for participants, this is not always an option with visual research, and may not always be perceived as the right option by participants who are sometimes glad of the identifiability and recognition that the research confers (Clark, 2013). Here we discuss three sets of ethical concerns.

First, asking our participants to share their imagined futures, or inviting them to engage in the process of imagining possible futures for the purposes of this research felt as if we were asking a great deal of them. There’s an intimate quality to hopes or dreams, which might not have been previously voiced out loud, or even fully articulated in ‘internal conversations’ (Archer, 2003). And the process of asking young people at this particular stage of their lives to share some cherished wishes, fears and insecurities made us aware of the invasive nature of our project. However, in addition to the process of imagining itself, this project makes these imagined futures publicly available through its outputs (web-based photographs and video). The unforeseeability and lack of control of the circulation of images – however apparently benign – are challenging for assuring informed consent and some scholars have discussed the possibility of assigning a ‘shelf-life’ to research materials (Brady and Brown, 2013: 107).

Second, we were clear at the outset of our collaborative work that the video-recording would provide material for a video to be put together by Tea. The format and content were open-ended but it was clear that the young people would be seen and in fact they took steps to negotiate their visibility and invisibility across different elements of the project. For instance, when we decided to use some of the workshop photographs to ‘think with’ (Pyyry, 2015) in the focus groups – something which was not part of the original plan – two of the young women were very decided that they did not want to be recognisable by their peers. They went on to specify that neither their faces nor their hair should be visible, and after some discussion, eventually agreed that it would not be a problem to show their shoes! Whilst they were willing to take part in the project activities in spontaneous and unguarded ways, they did not lose sight of the significance of public presentations of the self. Although they were quick to give their formal consent, most did not read the information sheets we provided which included our contact details and in one focus group for instance, all copies were left in the room once the discussion was over. Nevertheless, since we considered informed consent to be a practical ‘situationally attuned’ process (Clark, 2013) rather than a once-off agreement, we repeatedly clarified how we might use the material we were producing.

A third ‘ethically important moment’ (Clark, 2013) concerns the influence of health and safety on the project activities. Imagine Sheppey was approved by the University of Kent Ethics Panel in April 2014; each team member underwent Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks; and we carried out risk assessments for all the workshop locations. These checks and precautions felt appropriate at the time and the proposed activities seemed reasonably judged on paper. It was in practice however that we felt the weight of the risks taken and their influence on the development and dynamic of the project activities. For example, during a collaborative ‘game’ with a long piece of fabric in the wind during the workshop on leisure, there was a strong sense that a process was unfolding without any one of us having a certain idea of what would happen next. Two members of Tea were holding the fabric, one at each end, and we were watching it rise and fall and swing hammock-like in the wind. One of the young men was keen to climb aboard: ‘I can hold on to the sides’, he insisted. We refused reluctantly, conscious of the real danger of the situation and of the fear of an accident, but the cost of this was that a dynamic of authority and responsibility was asserted, along with an infantilisation of our participants.

Arts-based methods for doing fieldwork

In much visual research with young people, images produced by participants are used as a ‘means of reflection’ (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010: 256) often employed alongside formal or informal interviews which create opportunities for discussion amongst peers and researchers. These methods are valuable in the production of ‘unofficial truths and everyday insights’ (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010: 256) about themes such as ordinary routines, identity, and space. In the research presented here we were committed to making use of the visual in some form since, as discussed above, this project was conceived to overcome some of the limitations of text-based futures accounts. At the same time, the future focus of the research meant that our central topic of interest was too abstract to be directly visually documented: we needed to design a process and identify tools that would lead to the revelation and stimulation of future orientations of the young participants as well as one which we hoped would produce material for further reflection and talk.

Tea put together a primarily performative methodology which depended on the ‘doing of creative, artistic, performative practice for insights and understandings to emerge’ (Douglas and Carless, 2013: 55), based on ‘a commitment to corporeal experience and experiment’ (McCormack, 2010: 43). Although this meant planning different kinds of activities for each workshop site and context, the spirit of the activities was similar: to act in a space ‘as if’ (Hollway, 2011: 52), to collectively ‘propose, envision, suggest, demonstrate, or model how things could be different’ (Douglas and Carless, 2013: 59). This meant creating temporary installations using found or made objects, and doing some improvised performances. We sought to stimulate the imaginations of the young participants, to inspire them and give a ‘“push” to thinking’ (Pyyry, 2015: 150) so as ‘not [to be] limited by what one conceives as true’ (Lapum et al., 2012: 103), as well as to provide space for expressing and exploring their existing images and ideas about the future.

The freedom of the project for participants was, in retrospect, both a strength and a weakness in relation to a lack of future reference points, the problem of immediacy, and the absence of narrative, each of which we discuss here. First, we did not give the participants a specific temporal future reference point for the project activities since we wanted them to decide on their future ‘reach’ (Mische, 2009), for instance, next year or 20 years ahead. In practice, this produced a problem of indeterminacy about the temporal space in which we were working. This appeared to cause them to retreat into a familiar present in the expression of their ideas as the task was perhaps too abstract for them to handle otherwise. It felt to us (again, with the benefit of hindsight) that a specific future reference point might have paradoxically offered them greater freedom to develop scenarios and storylines that made connections between the present landscape of their lives and their future visions.

Second, the nature of the activities we proposed – making, doing, improvising in relation to spaces, objects and materials – generated a particular temporal character, an immediacy in their engagement, one that is similar to the absorption of adults in Lego-building noted by Gauntlett (2010). The young people had fun and found themselves acting in surprising ways; for instance, playing with fabric in the wind, and making cone-headed characters with mirror sheets on the street (see Figure 1). It was clear to us that the objects and materials of this context affected us all, and that the environmental conditions shaped – quite literally in the case of the fabric in the wind – how the activity took place and the visual images it generated (Pyyry, 2013: 150). However, this absorption in time and in the affective atmospheres of the workshops made it hard for young people to simultaneously project through time, both in the moment and in subsequent discussions. They acted to intervene in the spaces and experienced flashes of transformation which evidently gave them pleasure and amusement, but these activities did not generally elicit existing or produce new insights into their future orientations. They did talk spontaneously about themselves and their lives, however, which leads us to reflect that such activities may have a simpler fit with topics such as identity, belonging and community than about the future per se.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘Warped Future’ and ‘Cone People’, Workshop 3, Blue Town High Street, Isle of Sheppey.

Third, our lack of emphasis on narrative in order to avoid predictable biographical forms may also have contributed to the problem of expressing future orientations. Many projects that make use of arts practices as a means to answer sociologically-informed questions use mixed methods to do so and more often than not these include interviews. We certainly talked with the young participants throughout the workshops asking them to reflect on what they had done but did not undertake individual interviews. At times our dialogue produced greater clarity and some insights and at others the young people evaded our blunt questioning or responded with statements that seemed to diminish what we had witnessed them doing.

Still, our activities produced moving and still images and scenes full of interest and energy. However, this also left us with a problem of interpretation. As Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi argue, we need concepts to make sense of what we see in images produced by children, which do not ‘always yield to our theories and expectations’ (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010: 258). We paid attention to casual remarks, and to the non-verbal, for instance the roles the young people took and the forms of interaction they created together, as well as to the symbolic language of the performances themselves (Coad, 2007: 488). The images and scenes do suggest episodic ‘intimation[s] of possibility’ (Davies and Sarpong, 2013: 3) and we would add ‘curbs’ on what the future may offer. But whilst we can offer interpretations of some of them, we cannot make strong claims about the young people’s orientations from them alone. Whilst the collaborative nature of our activities produced surprising images of the future, there was a tension between our efforts to get away from individualised accounts and recognise that the social is produced through interaction, doing and making (Ingold, 2013; Pink, 2001) and the complex amalgam of different people’s ways of seeing and being that resulted from this process.

In an attempt to unpack what we had experienced, we organised a final collage-making workshop for the core group to work with a selection of 50 still images taken during the project. First, we wanted participants to reflect on the process of exploring the future though ‘creative’ methods in a form that ‘does not generally stimulate individual concerns about artistic ability’ (Leitch, 2008: 44), and which allows participants to disrupt the unity of time or aesthetics (Butler-Kisber, 2010). Second, we encouraged them to reflect on the storylines they might put together across the different activities which could contribute to the character and content of the video, to take it in their own directions (Bagnoli and Clark, 2010). This did help clarify their orientations especially when we asked them to talk us through what they had made, but it felt to us as if it could only go a small way to render intelligible their improvised performances.

Image elicitation in focus groups

With the conclusion of the artist-led workshops, despite some interesting discoveries and encounters, clarity about how young people on Sheppey imagine their futures was still limited! We therefore decided to undertake more formal and familiar forms of data collection in focus groups that explicitly asked a wider cohort of young people (which did not include our core workshop participants) about their futures. However, we sought to do this in a ‘linguistically flexible’ way (McKnight and Leonard, 2014: 4) using photographs from our workshops for image elicitation. We wanted to stimulate young people to voice and reflect on how they reproduce or are critical of everyday assumptions and public discourses about their futures. We also thought this process would make the focus group participants more central to the interpretive process in the project (Mitchell, 2011), and perhaps offer us confirmation or open new directions in our early readings of the workshop images (Bagnoli and Clark, 2010). Overall, this part of the research relied on talk rather than performance, but certainly also engaged the young people’s imagination.

We selected 12 photographs from the workshop archive, which we arranged thematically: what now? (reflecting on the present), what next? (pathways to the future), and collaboration and negotiation with others. We asked the young people to write down what each photograph suggested about the future. For the ‘warped pavement’ in Figure 1 (above), comments included ‘bending the rules’, ‘different perspectives of what is around us’, ‘heading in a different direction’ and ‘curve your imagination’. Clearly, the ambiguity of this photograph supported and facilitated the process of creatively thinking about the scope of possibility and potential of the future, retaining its openness and uncertainty. After the free-association exercise we asked a series of questions related to what we saw in the image. For instance, we prompted students to imagine that time was warped and to reflect on what they would like to ‘get next’ from the future or what they would like to ‘fast forward’. At this point the participants’ voices diversified. There were examples of seeing a better world, and of checking that the choices made earlier in life were successful (as in the quote at the very beginning of this article), for instance the choice to attend university rather than looking for a job after college, and someone else wanted to see whether close family members were still alive and happy.

Whilst the focus in this article is on the nature of data and processes of data collection (rather than analysis and findings), it is interesting to note how the same photograph generated very different narratives and orientations. As Pyyry (2013: 150) explains, photographs themselves are performative because they have the capacity to affect us, in this case, animating future-thinking and imagination in (and possibly beyond) the group. Responses to the free-associations exercises demonstrated high levels of reflexivity, imagination, and creativity whereas answers to given scenarios became more bound to familiar narratives and concerns.

Overall these focus groups revealed ‘the value of talking about the sensory’ (Mason and Davies, 2009: 595) for the multiplicity of narratives contained in visual materials which allow for different stories to be told. In addition, inspirational photographs can support imaginative engagements, capturing unprocessed thoughts and innovative intuitions.