Project Findings

Germany (Deutschland)

Tandem Interviews: Collaborative Research
Insights from Bochum and Giessen

Hannah Esther Bernstein & Laura Siebert

The German branch of the SMAPL research projects aims to implement collaborative research methods in its focus neighborhoods of Bochum and Giessen. In this way, research is carried out with, rather than about, the communities concerned, following the principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) (Betscher et al. 2024, Israel at al. 1998, 2012; MacKinnon 2018). In a first phase, in the spring and summer of 2023, we conducted personal narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic with members of the focus neighborhoods of Bochum and Giessen.

To broaden these perspectives, we additionally conducted qualitative interviews with a wide variety of stakeholders, including politicians, representatives of social facilities such as local schools, kindergartens and churches, as well as representatives of public authorities, such as the health department or the communal integration centre. Furthermore, additional community members that had not yet been interviewed were included in the second research phase. Our overarching research interest was to find out how the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the two focus neighbourhoods – for example, what was particularly challenging and might need improval and what, on the other hand, worked well.

Tandem Interviews: A Unique Research Design

One unique aspect of the research design was that the interviews were conducted in tandems of academicians and community researchers. This format helped to promote dialogue and establish contacts between community members and stakeholders who would normally not interact. Furthermore, the presence of a community researcher lowered the barriers for other members of the community to be interviewed.

The community members had been traineded in collaborative reserach methods and were introduced to the objectives of the SMAPL project beforehand. In Bochum, for example,
the team co-desigend an interview guide which enabled the community researchers to include community knowledge in the research-design .

Opportunities and Challenges of Collaborative Research

Reflecting on the collaborative interview design, we identify both opportunities and challenges in comparison to conventional research approaches. Many of these aspects are common in CBPR research processes (Israel et al. 1998).

The research process enabled partnerships between university academics and community members that go beyond the research context itself. For example, we sometimes shared meals, chatted about our lives and spent time together at different events that happened alongside the research process. The exchange of views these encounters facilitated would have been rather unlikely in consideration of our different positionalities. Whether community researchers and university academics can really
be considered ‘equal partners’ – a goal CBPR aims for – is questionable from a critical viewpoint (Israel et al. 1998). Given our positions as researchers based in academic institutions, the interviewees sometimes focused their attention primarily on us academics, and our interview time was longer than that of the community researchers.

Conversely, there were also situations where stakeholders preferred the dialogue with community researchers rather than with academics, particularly when discussing local issues of which we were unaware because of our limited local knowledge. Thus, the
tandem-procedure continuously confronted us with our own roles and challenged us to reflect on the relevance of the research for the community. This became particularly relevant regarding the distribution of power and privilege (MacKinnon 2018). For example, the university academics have the control over the interview material, as we are the ones who store and transcribe the data.

Also, we were the ones who chose the overarching theoretical frameworks of the research and analysed the findings. Consequently, the findings primarily reflect our interpretations of the material. With this in mind, it would be desirable to incorporate collaborative formats in the analysis of the collected data as well.

Furthermore, it was interesting to observe how in some cases the community researchers used the encounters with the interviewed stakeholders to voice their opinions. For example, one community researcher challenged a local politician as follows: “Yes, but you have contact with politics. I mean, such a neighbourhood, because okay, there are so many facilities, but as a politician one could perhaps also do one’s job of looking: What’s missing in this neighbourhood during the coronavirus crisis?” Such interventions show that the encounters facilitated by the tandem interviews meet a high demand from the community for direct engagement with politicians and other stakeholders.

It is also worth pointing out that some of the findings that emerged were only made visible by the collaborative format of the interviews. For example, in Bochum, some of the community members interviewed were only willing to participate in an interview because of the presence of a community researcher. The interviews with community members were particularly insightful as they revealed 3 many self-organised help infrastructures within the neighbourhoods that had not been previously identified in context of the COVID-19-pandemic.

Transfer

The results of the collaborative research process for Bochum were presented at a town hall meeting in July 2024 – a science communication format attended by the community researchers as well as politicians and local institutions. A similar format will be held in Giessen in November to present and discuss the research findings.

References

Betscher, S., Falge, C., Ahmad, I., Ahmed, N., Amin, D., Hussein, I., Hussein, D., Kolaßa, S., Sharif, B., Youssef, E., & Aref, J. (2024). Intervention-linked Community Research – An underestimated method of community organizing? . Community Organizing, 1.

Israel, B., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of Community-Based Research: Assessing Partnership Approaches to Improve Public Health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19(1), 173-202. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.19.1.173

Israel, B. A.; Eng, E.; Schulz, A. J. & Parker, E. A. (2012). Introduction to Methods for CBPR for Health. Id. (Eds.). Methods for Community-Based Participatory Research for Health, 3-38. John Wiley & Sons.