Children as co-researchers and confessional research tales: Researcher positionality and the (dis)comforts of research

Introduction

This paper reflects on a multi-methods approach which incorporates in-home child and family interviews and the use of visual images – photos and videos – captured by primary-school aged children about family food activities. The aim is to consider how these multi-methods, visual data, home visits and family interviews, impacted on and developed our relationship with, and to, the child co-researchers and their families. We discuss the ways in which the use of an iPad to take photos and videos offered creative access for children’s participation in qualitative research and placed them at the centre of the research. This approach sought to privilege children’s points of view in both the visual data and their interviews and enable better access to the effect of public health messages aimed at children in primary school, while they were in familiar surrounds of their homes. However, this approach created complexities and (dis)comforts for the researchers that illuminated the ways in which researchers are drawn into, impacted by and challenged by research processes.

This research was undertaken for an ARC funded project Children as Health Advocates in Families: Assessing the Consequences. The study had two research objectives: to explore how children experience the public health call in schools to become advocates for healthy eating in their families, an obesity prevention strategy. The second was to explore family responses to this strategy, including physical education messages brought home by children, and how family relationships and interactions are impacted.

A primary aim of the study methodology was to reduce the power differential between children and researchers by placing children at the centre of data gathering, across visual data and interviews. We sought to privilege children’s images and voices by listening to and involving them as co-researchers. Children were written into the design of the study and were central to the overall research question: are children positioned by schools to be health advocates in their families and what impact does this have on family food practices? To answer this question, we asked children what they learnt about food at school and asked them to represent through their own eyes their everyday family food experiences. Following Nyberg (2019: 1), and others, we see children as ‘active individual(s) rather than a passive object (Qvortrup and others, 1994), which also implies that children have a right to be listened to and be involved in decisions that concern them in everyday life’ (cf. Khoja, 2016; Lomax, 2012, 2015; Mauthner, 1997; O’Connell, 2013). Further, and as a direct result of one of the research questions of the study we acknowledge that ‘children’s actions can shape as well as change social life’ (Nyberg, 2019: 1).

From this vantage point we wanted to explore, using iPads for children to record images and videos, how children as ‘co-researchers’ would visually represent family food activities. As researchers, we are aware that public health messages suggest food can be governed by knowledge about inputs and outputs (Warin et al., 2008), but that food in family life is relational and complex (Lindsay and Maher, 2013; Maher et al., 2019). Our data gathering decisions aimed to offer space for this ‘messy’ commensality: to recognise that emotions, food, tastes and ideas of ‘health’ are experienced differentially. As we became more immersed in our fieldwork and analysis with our sample children and their families (n = 50), and our data began to coalesce, the random and messy attributes of family food activities and school food messages were mirrored in our data processes. We thought carefully about what we were doing, and how we were going about data collection and analysis, just as all these families did about their children’s food, health and wellbeing. Yet, the research process and spaces, much like the family homes and family food practices and preferences, were not readily regulated. They were all messily governed by norms of love, nurture and pragmatism.

We borrow Pillow’s (2003: 183) phrase to think through the ‘messiness of representation’ in relation to this messy data, to reflexively consider the relationships created throughout the research process – between children (families) and researchers, intra-family relationships and visual and interview data. In particular, we examine the processes of data collection which necessarily built relationships from the project outset: we negotiated family homes, interview timings, family screen rules already in place, our own presence in family homes and in the research interviews. We consider the distinctions between visual data and family interviews, where we were clearly interpolated and where images, familial interactions and school food rules appeared and intermingled. This intermingling meant our interpretations were consistently disrupted and re-oriented: sometimes ‘tidy’ interviews had ‘messy’ visuals, sometimes the reverse or a variation of both. These data collection processes underpinned what happened in the data analysis – our privileged access to families enabled a rich sense of the messiness of family life (and the messy interpolation of ‘healthy’ food discourses), often in ways that we had not foreseen. The children provided us with the opportunity to share their family eating, especially meals and presented us with intimate snapshots of family life via fridges, cupboards and pantries through their visuals, which revealed a whole other picture of quotidian familial food practices.

In drawing on Pillow (2003), we also explore her notion of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’. As we discuss below, there were moments of discomfort throughout the research process which we contend helped us to ‘see’ and ‘listen’ differently. Pillow (2003: 188) suggests that thinking through such reflexivity, what she terms ‘uncomfortable reflexivity – a reflexivity that seeks to know while at the same time situates this knowing as tenuous’ – provides us with an opportunity to interrogate our own understandings of what children learn/know about food in schools as well our own (dis)comforts in the research process. We seek to ‘use reflexivity in a way that would continue to challenge the representations we come to while at the same time acknowledging the political need to represent and find meaning’ (Pillow 2003: 192). This is emphasised by Simovska et al. (2019: 127) too, where they acknowledge the generative mo(ve)ments of research can generate tensions: ‘The cognitive and analytical work characterized as systematic, planned and intentional, … and work that consists of situated, embodied, affective and aesthetic experiences that are unpredictable, messy and confusing’ work simultaneously in the research moment (and later in data analysis).

We intentionally use (dis)comfort as a bracketed term to indicate the interplay between our co-existent experience of comfort and discomfort throughout the interviews. We experienced (dis)comfort in multiple ways, when first entering a family’s life and sharing intimate moments of food practices, often enveloped in love and care, but mired in the messiness of the everyday necessity of school lunches, evening meals after long school/work days and joy in moments of celebration. We drew comfort from our own abilities as researchers and the generosity of families, but recognised multiple (dis)comforts; acknowledging our privileged position as researchers, our status as ‘visitors’ with a purpose, and our own emotional and social histories in food and families. We mobilise Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’ when we are ‘going visiting’ in which researchers are always negotiating the co-mingling of (dis)comfort which ‘requires learning to be truly present … entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’ (2016: 1). This ‘staying with the trouble’ has informed and influenced our data interpretation and thinking throughout the project.

We focus on privileging children’s visual (and spoken) stories because, as Nyberg (2019: 5) suggests: ‘children’s talk about pictures [photos/videos] can give more than a formal, visual analysis of the pictures themselves as they can help us understand their meanings’. However, in privileging children’s voices and perspectives one unforeseen outcome was how explicitly relational this process became, highlighted in four specific ways:

researcher (dis)comfort, as we were in people’s homes/spaces;

As a result of this relational and layered research process we were presented with data and were implicated in the research in ways that we had not anticipated. These unplanned views into family life, what Hillier and Aurini (2018: 497) term ‘fortuitous accidents’, were often creatively captured by the children and provided us with rich data. Simultaneously, the relationality of our research relationships – with the children, with their families and with each other – highlighted the complexities of this immersive methods approach. At times we felt very comfortable with children and families and at other moments our discomfort was visceral (and not always intelligible until we left the research site) (Simovska et al., 2019).

These research ‘conundrums’ led us to identify four key values/challenges in an immersive methods approach and positioning children as co-researchers – power and privacy, the intimacy of visual methods, researcher (dis)comfort and the messiness of commensality and data gathering, which we discuss below. We begin first with our methodology.

Building a methodology – the Victorian study

A central aim of the research was to build a methodology underpinned by a relational consumption paradigm (Lindsay and Maher, 2013). Relational consumption practices of home and family acknowledge the myriad ways that families undertake care and nourishment – where the exchange of food extends beyond nutrition, and reflects love, nurturance, preferences, rituals, habits, deep knowledge and pleasure. We wanted to listen to what children could tell us about their experiences of food at home and school. As Nyberg (2019: 2) contends,

there are essential ethical arguments for listening to and including children’s voices in research as well as practice, however there are also major knowledge gains in working with methods that aim at strengthening insight into children’s perspectives based on the conviction that children are the experts on their own lives (Clark, 2010) also in relation to food and eating.

It was with these central tenets – relational consumption and children as ‘experts’ in their own lives – that we undertook our fieldwork.

The sample size for this study was 50 families. We focused on families with primary-school aged children, 5–12 years in Victoria, Australia. In Victoria, children begin primary school in Prep aged 5 years and continue until Year 6, 12 years. We had 67 child participants, 36 girls and 30 boys, and one child who identified as non-binary. The average age of child co-researchers was 8 years. We interviewed 34 families living in urban areas and 16 in rural areas.

We conducted two interviews with each family, a total of 100 interviews. Each interview had a varying number of people participating. In most cases, there was one child who undertook the study, but there were a number of families who had two or three children as co-researchers, including three families with twins. In most cases, one parent, usually mothers, participated in the parent interview, although a number of fathers did take sole responsibility for the interview. There were some families where both parents participated, or one parent participated in the first interview but due to other commitments, another parent completed the second interview. The time span between interviews varied from three to 7 days, allowing children to have adequate time to take photos/videos and to accommodate parents’ schedules.

We employed a social marketing recruitment company to locate suitable family participants. Our only purposeful criterion was families with primary-school aged children. People who enroll into social marketing ‘panels’ are generally paid for their time with goods or gift vouchers. Each family received shopping vouchers (3 x $50) in recognition of their time and participation. Our objective in using the company was to find a broad cross-section of families, across ethnicity, location, diverse family structure and income, rather than only families who would be interested in participating in a study about school food messages.

We initially encountered limited uptake through the social marketing company, and mobilised a snowball technique in which the project researchers drew upon their networks to find additional families. Throughout the recruitment process, we relied upon both methods to ensure diversity across the selection categories identified above. At the time of recruitment, the Research Fellow asked questions regarding residential location and suitable times for interviews. Interview appointments were scheduled according to family availability, mostly after school hours and in the early evening. Interviews with rural families were conducted after school hours and on weekends.

We recruited families of diverse ethnic, sexual, and family makeup, including single, same-sex, and heterosexual parents. Families represented a cross-section of socio-economic status across urban and rural Victoria. In rural areas, we interviewed families in central, eastern and southern Victoria. These areas have a mix of industrial and agricultural activity, with most families living and working near major rural towns. It was important for the research programme to explore the differences between food education in urban and rural families. We wondered if rural families, who often have greater access to land and produce, might be experiencing a different kind of food education.

At the end of the second interview we gathered more in-depth demographic details (beyond those asked at recruitment that confirmed eligibility for participation). We asked parents’ year of birth, family background which might influence home cooking, language other than English spoken at home, number of children, ages of children, country of birth, occupation and employment status. The study included family backgrounds from France, Greece, Iraq, Syria, Malta, Canada, Germany, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Egypt as well as Australia, including Indigenous Australians and those with British heritage. The age range of parents was 29–58 years. Parents had diverse working arrangements. In most cases, fathers continue to undertake fulltime work and mothers worked in multiple ways, at home, casual, part- and fulltime employment. In a number of cases, parents were studying for further qualifications. Occupations included information technology, law, digital technologies and design, telemarketing, finance, education (all levels), accountancy, marketing, healthcare, building and landscape, construction, engineering and private business (photography, personal training, supermarket and home maintenance). A number of parents devoted considerable time to volunteer services (community housing, gardening, child safety and refugee services).

We conducted interviews in family homes. This ensured a level of comfort and ease for families, and especially for younger children who needed attention and support from parents. Child co-researchers were in familiar surroundings thereby reducing anxiety about the research. This was particularly important for younger children who were often unsure about a ‘stranger’ being in their home. This comfort for them however created a level of (dis)comfort for researchers entering family homes at busy, and often, stressful times.

The first interview was introductory and typically brief, lasting 20–30 min. The researcher(s) met the family and invited the family to ask any questions they had about the research. At the first interview, each family was given a plain English statement outlining the purpose of the study and parents were asked to sign a consent form. Children were asked to sign an assent form, used with children as they are not able to legally give consent, outlining what they were being asked to do – that is, participate in interviews and take videos/photos of any family food related activities using an iPad (provided by the researchers). The assent form explicitly stated that if children changed their mind and no longer wished to participate they could withdraw at any time without consequences. In most cases, children were very familiar with iPad technology and could operate the photo/video applications easily. The iPads did not have SIM cards, nor games or other activities for children to access. We only encountered a few families where children had strict ‘screen time’ (e.g. limited to an hour a day) and only one family, which rarely allowed children access to screens. In these families, we were often privy to parent–child conversations where children understood that they were participating in a research project and that their parents regarded the data gathering as outside their daily ‘screen limits’. Further, in the initial recruitment phone conversation, parents were made aware that children would be actively participating as co-researchers through using iPads; as such they provisionally consented to the screen use before we arrived for the interviews.

The second interview was in-depth and highly interactive, with parents joining in during children’s interviews and children ‘helping’ parents answer questions about what happens at school. These interviews had two parts: one set of questions was directed to children and another set to parents. First, we watched the videos/photos taken by the children on the iPad and asked them to describe the pictured family food related activity – breakfast, dinner, lunchbox for school, baking, and so on. At the beginning of data collection, we did not advise children about the number of videos/photos we wanted them to take. However, we revised this due to a small number of families in the first group of 10 taking hundreds of photos/videos, which became potentially unmanageable in terms of data storage and analysis (all data from these families was used in the project, except in one case where the data was so extensive that it was edited by the researchers to remove repetitious photos/videos). From Family 11 onwards we asked children to take 10 photos and/or 10 videos. Second, we asked a series of questions about what the children learnt at school about food and health, for example, do you learn about food/health at school and if so, in which subject? What types of things have you learnt about food/health? Are there any policies around food which have impacted you, such as party food, food allergies and packaging; where do you eat your lunch? Do you discuss what you learn with your parents/siblings? Parents were asked what information their children were sharing about food education, how the school communicated food and health policies, whether specific food/health policies impacted on the family, were there any food/health programmes that had been particularly effective, and if an older sibling had been at the same school, had the parent noticed changes over time? This interview lasted between 40–60 min.

Our interactions with children varied. We often found that younger children needed more encouragement from their parents to answer questions and discuss the videos/photos. Mostly, by the time we returned for the second interview children were more relaxed with the researcher, had generally enjoyed taking photos/videos, and were more willing and happier to discuss what they had recorded for us. By the second interview, we had built rapport with children and families and often we were greeted as family friends by parents, which helped children relax. Most of the children we interviewed were confident and well-spoken, and with increased age, had firm opinions on what they learnt about food at school. They were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about their family food practices – showing delight, joy and pride.

The visual data was coded by the research team based first on a set of key terms that emerged from frequently occurring images, such as lunchboxes, tables, refrigerators and cupboards. These images were then filtered further by a specialist researcher with visual data coded into categories (e.g. full plates, cupboards, branded products, eating surfaces and lunchboxes). ‘Movies’ of the images were created across themes and categories, as well as a ‘movie’ for each family, to enable contextual analysis of the visual material with family interview data. This contextualisation process was enabled by,

the use of elicitation interviews around the images created in the visual data production stage to centralise the meaning making of and interpretations of participants, the image-creators. In this way, images and narratives are seen as part of a conversation where interpretation needs to be embedded in the contextualised process of the interview, rather than an analysis of de-contextualised and silenced images and stories (Mannay 2016: 7).

The interviews were analysed using the software analysis package Nvivo. Researchers read a number of interviews and over a number of team meetings identified themes and developed a coding framework. Interview data were entered into Nvivo where further refinement of themes was undertaken. While complex to analyse (Harden et al., 2010), the child and family interviews offered rich data about family dynamics and family food practices.

Ethics approval was granted from the host university Ethics Committee. Participants were given pseudonyms in order to protect confidentiality and safeguard anonymity. We ensured that parents gave consent for images of children to be used in academic presentations. In the next section, we move to our discussion of our four key themes. We first examine some concerns about power and inequalities in research with children.

Power and privacy – Consent and the inequalities of the research

This research privileged children as key ‘knowers’. The basis of the study ‘children as health advocates’ acknowledged that children were being ‘responsibilised’ to carry out particular roles in their families – that is, to be the bearers of health knowledge from school back to their family. The mobilisation of children as agents for importing knowledge and education into families is a well-developed public health strategy in a range of contexts, with primary-school aged children having attracted particular attention (Burrows and Wright, 2007; Department of Health, 2018; Watne et al., 2011). In conceiving the study, we were aware that children were already being tasked with ‘healthy food’ projects within their families. A significant factor in our choice of visual methods was to ensure that we were not further entrenching an unequal power relation or ‘responsibilisation’ when asking children about family food activities. As Nyberg (2019: 12) suggests, ‘even though power inequality never can be completely erased, the use of visual methods might help building in capacity in children’.

Bearing this in mind, when we asked children to sign the assent form we explained carefully to them (in the presence of their parents) that they did not have to participate if they did not want to and they could withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. None of the children (or parents) we interviewed withdrew from the research. On the contrary, as the photos and videos attest, the children were very excited about participating and captured intimate and evocative images for the project.

We do, however, acknowledge that working with children as co-researchers does explicitly raise questions about the power relationship between children and researchers (cf. Khoja, 2016). Mannay (2016: 16) observes that, ‘although participatory techniques offer an opportunity to disrupt power relations … they are unable to transcend these hierarchies’. One way we tried to counter this power relation was to ask children to tell us about the photos and videos they took, in their own words, at their own pace. We asked them to tell us ‘why’ they had chosen to take a particular photo/video, ‘what’ was special about it, and in doing so, they explained to us why it was important or meaningful to them (Mauthner, 1997). For example, Tenille took a photo of a family picnic in the backyard (Figure 1). When asked what was happening in the photo, she said: ‘We had it in the garden. It was a surprise for mama because she was really, really tired’.OPEN IN VIEWER

We agree with Mannay (2016: 6) when she contends that ‘(p)articipatory research projects have not resolved the goal of ‘giving voice’ … a recurring issue for researchers is whose voice is (speaking) and, simultaneously, whose voice is being heard’. We hoped that in doing interviews with children first, and then with parents (although often this was messier in practice, especially with younger children) it would enhance the children’s opportunity to tell us about their photos/videos. In this way, the ‘giving voice’ to children’s family food activities would be framed first by how the children understood, for example, what they were eating, the purpose of the meal, what they thought about the food they were eating and if they liked the contents of their lunchbox. Josh, a 12 year old boy, included photos in his selection because: ‘it shows what food the family consumes. And the effects it has on them. Like if you eat bad foods you get irritable, but if you eat good foods you’re happier’.

The intimacy of visual methods

When we asked children to take photos/videos of family food activities, we invited them to make their own choices about what to include. In this way, they were instrumental in selecting what would be photographed and filmed and in turn, discussed with the researchers. We were often provided with (unexpected) intimate views of food storage (e.g. fridges and cupboards) and preparation (e.g. baking cakes, packing lunchboxes and preparing traditional Greek Easter eggs). This follows O’Connell (2013: 36) where ‘(p)articipant photography gave children an observer research role in contexts not accessible to the researchers and encouraged them to describe taken for granted aspects of their everyday realities’.

The photos and videos provide an ‘insider’ view of family relational dynamics in a more immediate way than words alone – that is, the children show rather than describe their family food practices. Not only was the choice of what to photograph and film their decision, the stories they told us about the photos/videos and their interpretation of why they had chosen particular meals/foods enabled ‘an analytic approach which encompasses the intentions of the child-photographer [and] makes visible children’s lives from their perspectives, rendering meaningful what might otherwise be invisible to adult viewers and co-researchers’ (Lomax, 2012: 227). Thus, children were co-researchers in the sense that they created the datasets for analysis – making decisions on what to photograph, when to photograph, how to film or photograph and what to delete before we returned. Their recording of the visual allowed researchers to gain a window into everyday family life, as the children saw it, without the direct presence and influence of researchers (cf. Salazar et al., 1997).

O’Connell (2013: 32) contends that visual data ‘may be particularly appropriate for studies of food practices, not only because the latter are often carried out unreflectively but also because the visual and sensory nature of food may be better captured through visual approaches’. Our visual data proved to be a ‘treasure chest of jewels’ which we have been able to utilise in various ways. The ability to observe everyday family life through the children’s videos/photos has been a great privilege, and illuminates the meaning and centrality of often taken-for-granted food practices.

One of the surprises in the children’s presentation of their family food activities was how they interpreted the invitation. Children understood ‘family food activities’ in very broad and imaginative ways – their representations encompassed a child’s-eye view of family. As we have mentioned they took images of pantries, fridges and drawers, but they also took photos of their chickens, their vegetable gardens at home (and at school) and they showed us full plates and empty plates after meals were finished. They were creative in their photography and filmmaking, often cooking a meal accompanied by music, their dance moves incorporated with mixing pancake batter. The influence of the proliferation of cooking programs on TV was reflected in their filmmaking, often with running commentary on how to cook particular dishes.

These intimate views of family life show that children took great pleasure (and responsibility) in their role as co-researchers in documenting their family’s food activities. This pleasure was in stark contrast to some of the stories about school food rules, which often shamed and/or stigmatised children for the contents of their lunchboxes. Overwhelmingly, we were shown family food images and were told stories which indicated that children were proud of their family foodwork and confident their families were the source of best information about healthy food.

Such intimate views of food practices and family life provided meaningful data for our project but took us into territory that was not always comfortable. Entering family homes, meeting children and parents and sometimes sharing family hospitality located researchers firmly in the centre of family dynamics producing both comfort and discomfort. Their confidence in their family food practices was at times discordant with our own unease and awkwardness in their homes. In this data gathering process, as we discuss below, we often had to negotiate our own (dis)comfort.

‘Come and say goodbye to the old ladies’ – Researcher (dis)comfort

Pillow (2003) discusses the multiple ways in which reflexivity can be integrated into qualitative research. She (2003: 180) draws on Williams (1990) and Van Maanen (1989/2011) to elaborate the relationship between qualitative research, fieldnotes and (self)-reflexivity and a type of ‘confessional tale’ that can emerge in doing fieldwork. This tale is characterised by Van Maanen (1989/2011) as ‘confessions [that] may take place around oneself, others, the field, or the data’ (Pillow 2003: 180). We contend that this type of reflexivity and ‘confessional’ work was evident in our relationships with the families in our study. In some cases, it produced comfort, and built rapport, but it mobilised (dis)comfort too for us as researchers. Below we outline reverberating (dis)comforts which we only came to recognise after the interviews, and in discussion with each other. We then discuss two interviews where it was explicit from the outset that (dis)comfort in all its viscerality – joy, ease, anxiety and disquiet – was shaping and influencing the data-gathering process.

Reverberations of (dis)comfort occurred in a number of interviews. One of us felt the (dis)comfort of being witness to intense and seemingly combative family interactions. A mother and daughter (11 years old) spent much of each interview asking the other to ‘stop interrupting’ or the daughter saying to her mother, ‘you aren’t giving me time to talk’. In these interviews, the researcher felt concerned, but also included – both Mum and daughter engaged in a highly interactive way and were friendly to the researcher. However, at times the parent–child interaction seemed to call for adjudication by the researcher, particularly in deciding who to listen to when both were speaking at once. On another occasion, a mother had proudly described the family antipathy to junk food and one of us asked the child about their favourite take-away food. When the child answered ‘McDonalds’ without hesitation, there were awkward ensuing silences that permeated the rest of the interviews. These instances reveal that children and parents were not always comfortably positioned in relation to each other and/or to the research. The multi-layered process of visits to the homes, children’s production of images, and interactive interview structures meant these tensions had to be integrated into our research process, as they could not be hidden or avoided.

In other interviews while discussing the photos/videos with children, we found ourselves disclosing our favourite foods, agreeing about the deliciousness of ‘treats’, admiring dinners, but simultaneously in the process feeling confessional and questioning our ‘right’ to be commenting on family food. We sometimes felt that children were ‘asking’ us for support when discussing family food choices. In another interview when the children were showing videos/photos, one of us felt compelled to make comment about the value of ‘2 min noodles’:

Lisa (Mum): No, not the 2-minute noodles. We did the good, the bad, the ugly week.

On the whole, we felt that our comments did build rapport, especially with children, because as we have noted, they were confident in their representations of family food activities and their family’s food knowledge. As Pezalla et al. (2012: 167) have observed: ‘It is through the researcher’s facilitative interaction that a conversational space is created – that is, an arena where respondents feel safe to share stories on their experiences and life worlds’. Further, Haraway (2016) in ‘staying with the trouble’ reminds us that participants are creating narratives in their interviews, they are not just ‘telling us’ and again this shows the children (and families) as co-researchers. They are co-creating their own stories of family food practices. But, we worried that these interventions did at times change the emphasis of the discussions – were we influencing the children to tell us particular stories? Were we condoning ‘good’ foods and ‘bad’ foods? Did we communicate judgements about their lunchboxes or breakfasts? A comment by a member of the research team about how ‘chatty’ one of us was in interviews, and the raft of unconformable ensuing feelings, deepened the sense of worry about such issues. We have had to ‘stay with trouble’ as we have worked to analyse and reflect on our findings. In our view, our (dis)comforts have been integral to the reflexivity and authenticity of the study. Another form of (dis)comfort was in relation to writing fieldnotes. Fieldnotes, following Thompson (2014: 253), have an emotional dimension which ‘offers a valuable site to interrogate research practice’. We had a standard form that listed a number of sections we filled out after each interview, including ‘observational notes’, ‘methodological notes’, ‘theoretical notes’ and ‘personal notes’. The ‘personal notes’ for one of us felt the most challenging, because they were confessional (Van Maanen, 1989/2011). The guide read:

Below is an example of the range of emotions experienced across the two interviews conducted with a Muslim family. The notes for this family are chosen because the researcher felt very welcomed by the family but struggled with feeling as if she was interrupting a special moment of the family’s day and worship. The notes are confessional and diaristic:

Interview 1

These notes represent the joy and fulfilment (bodily as well as theoretical and methodological) experienced in undertaking the fieldwork for this project (cf. Simovska et al., 2019). There is also discomfort present – ‘not sure if I should stay [for dinner]’, ‘I left the house so full!’; but also feeling as if the researcher is intruding ‘I was not going to stay’. Thus, the researcher is implicated/imbricated into the family. This is the ‘messiness’ of qualitative research.

A less joyful example is included below where the complex family relationships to food expressed in the interview, a mother’s weight and worries about chips the family ate while watching movies, became a critical part of the fieldwork experience.

Interview 2

The fieldnotes were integral to our research process and induced reflexivity especially in relation to how we experienced families, but tellingly how we experienced the children as co-researchers. The fieldnotes explored our emotions around family food practices and highlighted areas where, as researchers we felt comfortable with children and their families and how we experienced our own discomfort. During the research process, as we experienced the children’s creativity in representing their family food practices, we too became more skilled at acknowledging the emotionality of writing fieldnotes. The fieldnotes provided a ‘safe’ enough space to articulate our joys, discomforts, as and how we were negotiating our role as co-researcher with the children in the messiness of data gathering.

Discussion – The messiness of commensality and data gathering

The practice of commensality – eating together – was a major theme emphasised by the children in their photos/videos. Children took photos of their families eating breakfast, having dinner, eating at the kitchen bench, in the lounge room on the couch and at the coffee table, having backyard picnics, celebrating birthdays, and so on. However, commensality is a practice that is denied at school – sharing of food at recess and lunch is forbidden, although many children told us stories of sharing and swapping contents with their friends, which we called ‘lunchbox envy’. In interviews, the children told us of not sharing at school, the foods they liked to eat at home and those they refused to eat – one child whispering to one of us (so his mother couldn’t hear!) a very long list of foods he did not like and one family photographing the list of foods that children ‘should not be fed’ (Figure 3).OPEN IN VIEWER

The ‘messiness’ of commensality was reflected in the messiness of data gathering. The visual data often reinforced the messiness of family food environments (children took pictures of family members rather than food in many cases) and their photos highlighted the sterility and atomisation of school food (partitions in lunchboxes, tiny containers and no mess ‘brain food’), in stark contrast to the commensality experienced in family food practices.

The story of ‘the old ladies’ for which the previous section is named comes from an interview early in the research project. At the end of the second visit, we were standing at the front door with the child’s parents when he called out to his younger sisters ‘come and say goodbye to the old ladies’! The interviews had gone extremely well, the visual data was rich and we felt comfortable with the family and with the child co-researcher. We laughed; the parents smiled – it was a perfect moment of recognition. We were welcomed by the family, but we were also interlopers. We had built rapport over our two visits and the child knew that we would not return to visit – his call to his sisters (unprompted by his parents) was a recognition that we had entered his family’s life, but now we were leaving it. It was time to say goodbye – and he wanted them to say goodbye to us. It highlighted for us the messiness of commensality – we had shared in their family life, if only briefly, and of data gathering – we were researchers, asking something of the family and he as our co-researcher had played an integral role. We did however spend the journey home uncomfortably navigating his vision of us as ‘old ladies’.

The privileging of children as co-researchers through their stories, photos and videos has in a distinct way highlighted the relational consumption practices of home/family. The children’s confidence in their parents’ expertise reinforces that family exchanges of food extend beyond dietary concerns: they reflect love, care, family identity, preferences, routines, practices, profound understanding, enjoyment, and importantly, nourishment. While we asked for photos of family food, the images produced and presented by the children pushed well beyond the brief. They offered unplanned insights into family life and food practices that were often intimate, generative, and at times discomforting. For us, the research process was saturated with feelings, which we often experienced in bodily ways (cf. fieldnotes ‘feeling full’; witnessing parent anxiety and navigating our own). There were also joyous moments of recognition, as with the ‘old ladies’ story, which acknowledged the agency (and insights) of the child co-researcher. This experience was a timely reminder for us, early in our research, about how we ‘appear’ as researchers and about the limits of our control and power. It reminded us that our relationship with our child co-researchers depended on their willing participation, and we would argue their exercise of agency (and possibly power), is foregrounded in the ‘messiness’ and depth of the creative endeavour of the research (cf. Mannay, 2016). The discomforts of the process – of our own bodies in others’ houses, silences and awkwardness, circulating emotions and tensions, and even our ages – became critical in developing and refining our analysis: the necessity of ‘staying with the trouble’ to follow Haraway, pushed us to better see the messy interactions of children’s agency, family, school, food and health that were at the centre of our study.

The shared messy value of this immersive research process has provided us with an intimate and invaluable snapshot into family food practices at home (and school). We have experienced great joy and palpable discomfort. Our privilege in doing this research has been to work with creative child co-researchers who were willing to share their family food life with us and direct us in how to understand and interpret those stories. This relational experience highlights the importance of how food practices, care and nourishment are enacted in families and can be valuably aligned with a research process guided by an ethic of care. These interactions brought about generative and transformative research moments, often unpredictable and uncomfortable, that came to underpin our work as researchers in this project.