Reflections on a process model for international research collaboration in social work

Establishing a team

The initial envisioning of the project emanated from networking between the Department of Social and Community Studies, Coventry University (UK) and the Department of Social Work, Stellenbosch University (RSA) both of whom obtained modest research funding and delivered joint publications. The scope of the research topic, which focused on neoliberalism, public health and social work was developed further and directed by Coventry University who had sought to establish international partnerships with a number of EU and non-EU countries and engaged them in the development of an EU Marie Curie IRSES bid. Through additional international EU staff exchange funding, relationships were developed with Calabria University (Italy) and Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland), which in turn fostered new links with Saint Petersburg State University (Russia) and Loyola University (India). These institutions and individual research members were representative of different geographical, economic, cultural and professional contexts, diverse research experiences and expertise, and were committed to a partnership of equals – qualities that provided the catalyst to bring together different fields of knowledge and skills, drawing together best practices and varied socio-political and ideological frameworks. The team whilst consisting mostly of social work academics also included academics in economics and education at various stages in their careers, adding to the diversity and varying perspectives.

One of the main determinants for inclusion in the research team was a shared passion and interest in the research topic. In this regard Gardner et al. (2012) suggest that enthusiasm for the subject matter is an all-important criterion for inclusion in a collaborative team. This is substantiated by the fact that international research is costly, time-consuming and complicated – all aspects that may foster frustration and anxiety in the participants, their home institutions, faculties, departments and colleagues alike. Dedication to the research topic was thus a key determinant to enhance the productivity of the research team, but we soon learned that the success of the project was dependent not only on the capabilities of the participating research team, but also on the efficacy of broader university administration systems and structures (for example, the timely payment of allowances and expenses), posing numerous challenges to the sustainability of the project.

In order to fit the requirements of the funder, we also discovered that the work arrangements for this project were complex; countries were paired in work packages and participants had to undertake a large proportion of their work in these groupings before coming together at symposiums to share the work done to date. In reality though, the individuals in the work packages could not always work as a group, and tasks were divided. Occasionally members of a work package would meet with members from other work packages to complete their work. This means that there were numerous groupings taking place throughout the duration of the project in addition to individual tasks yielding a complex matrix of amassed knowledge that had to be managed.

Compiling an inventory of individual team members

In the course of establishing the team, the proper recognition and valuing of differences and diversity in academic experiences and contributions was important. The involvement of various academics from six different countries, with their different cultures, styles of working and research experience and traditions, highlighted the divergence in the team and the different approaches to power, bureaucracy, decision-making and legacies such as colonialization. This is certainly not the first cross-cultural and cross-national research team to have to clear such hurdles, but the manner in which the differences become evident, seems to be unique to every project. The characteristics of this particular team which had to be accommodated, included: historical legacies and stereotypes; power imbalances caused by being a ‘leading’ country responsible for project management, and differences arising from whether a country had initially one or more researchers involved in the project; varying motivations and levels of commitment to the project; and differing parameters of support from the researchers’ institutions of employment. These were in addition to the assorted attributes and styles of the individual researchers.

In response to Gardner et al.’s (2012) emphasis on the importance of an inventory of individual researchers’ methodological strengths and epistemological positioning, the team had to present their CVs and also had the opportunity to complete a template mapping their methodological strengths and epistemological positioning and challenges. However, echoing Gardner et al.’s (2012) observation, the team’s enthusiasm and commitment to equal participation by all members hampered the utilization of the completed skills inventories, which lessened capitalizing on members’ strengths and made the team more vulnerable to epistemological differences during the course of the research process.

Establishing a project goal and research objectives

The aim of the project was to explore the impact of neoliberalism on public health, social work practice and vulnerable population groups. Neoliberalism within the ambit of the project refers to international economic frameworks that support social, cultural and political policies and practices that promote the management of services through the belief in free markets (Harvey, 2010). This research goal was to be reached by seeking to understand social work practices and training in each of the six consortium countries. Of critical importance to the formulation of the project’s research goal was the fit with the research objectives of team members’ home universities, faculties, departments and individual research areas, as a poor fit on any level could be detrimental to the sustainability of the project. This could prevent team members’ complete participation and had to be verified specifically before the commencement of the project and the signing of contractual agreements.

Establishing a research methodology

A relatively straightforward research methodology was introduced, which would not add to the complexity of the collaboration process. Therefore an inductive exploration of academic and social welfare agency perspectives on the topic was employed, without having to collect primary data directly from vulnerable groups (this would be undertaken in subsequent research bids accompanied by appropriate ethical clearance procedures). Secondary analyses were thus used as an approach for data collection, involving a reworking of already analysed data over which the present researchers had no direct control or involvement (De Vos et al., 2005). This methodology to make cross-national comparisons allowed for richness of data (Teagarden et al., 1995) but posed a dilemma of how to develop robust and rigorous systems for the actual development and analysis of knowledge. Therefore the research was undertaken through the use of individual researcher visits and team symposium events, with funding made available for participants from EU countries to visit non-EU countries and vice versa for the 36-month duration of the project. Observational visits, documentary exploration and critical discussions during these visits and events provided the contexts and insights that were necessary to assess the findings in terms of validity, credibility, conformability, transferability and reliability (De Vos et al., 2005).

However, one of the challenges of working as a team was how to move forward simultaneously in the same direction while working apart in different countries, and ensuring that all members of the team have a shared knowledge and understanding of the same data and findings of the project as these emerged. This challenge is relatively simple when working with quantitative data but not so within a collaborative research process where iterative processes cannot be replicated. A linear positivistic approach (Teagarden et al., 1995) does not take account of contexts which can be a key factor in international comparative research and which play a decisive role in the analyses of data. Therefore face-to-face meetings, where all members of the research team could be present, were deemed necessary.

Launching the project at a first team meeting

The project’s successful funding bid resulted in the start-up of the project at which all partners were in attendance. This was the first time that most participants had met one another and as a result the initial stage required the sharing and understanding of cross-cultural and cross-national perspectives and the exploration of the research concepts in different languages. This was undertaken through a series of presentations, discussions, and structured and unstructured activities.

As was to be expected from a diverse group of academics from a variety of institutions everybody approached the first meeting with a personal agenda, revealing differences in commitment and understanding of the proposed research topic. This was exacerbated by the fact that funding extended only to providing the researchers’ home institution with a set amount to enable travel. Therefore the home institutions of the research team had to be convinced that the release of their staff for the time spent on the project would constitute an investment in staff and research development, and that an additional spin-off could be that other research networks might be developed which could provide benefits to both the researcher and the home institution.

Already at the first meeting in the form of a symposium, it was evident that the strengths of the project in terms of diversity were also potentially its greatest challenge. The diversity of the researchers brought together a wealth of experience and knowledge. Mirroring the experience of Gardner et al. (2012) it however also presented a challenge to find common ground on which to establish an effective working team. Whilst the first symposium had been a successful introduction to the project it gradually became clear in the months following that as the group had dispersed to begin working in smaller work package groups, divergent practices (owing to researchers’ main assignments at their home universities) could threaten the drive and coherence of the project. These individual and institutional obligations also needed to be balanced against the promises made to the funder (EU) in respect of the funding and project outcomes expected and to the research team. Hence, the team learned that an initial incubation period was needed, during which individual researchers had to seek a new research identity within a common destiny for the project, which could be shared with all and to which all were committed. This was reinforced through the use of publicity surrounding the research in the home institutions.

Creating communication tools and technology

Working towards a common destiny, the team found one of the biggest challenges to be the creation of user friendly communication tools and technology. Initially all electronic communication was done via email and Skype, but the need for a repository to store and share documents such as reports, agendas and minutes, literature, and travel plans arose. Various platforms were explored and Microsoft SkyDrive was found usable as it offers free cloud storage that is accessible everywhere. Another platform, Mendeley, was also found useful as it is a free reference manager and academic social network with applications such as automatically generated bibliographies and the importation of papers from other research software. These platforms were deemed vital and a prerequisite for any international research collaboration, especially as tools to synchronize and display dates for individual research visits and symposiums, provide time gaps for online communication and to distribute and preserve documents important for the sustainability of the project. However, these technological communication tools have less value, if all research contacts, especially meetings, are not guided by an agenda and captured in applicable minutes. The research team soon learned that these formed the backbone of the process, something that should be managed with precision and care.

Whilst these communication strategies and tools were useful in the project, setting up such processes was an ongoing challenge in collaborations amongst the project partners owing to the instability of internet access. The team experienced that internet access is not always simply insufficient in developing countries, but some internet service providers of universities in developed countries were also unreliable. The use of private internet service providers for team members’ own expense was sometimes the only option in order to sustain the project communication and to share information.

Establishing values, ground rules and team building

Recognition of differences in strategies, goals and ambitions of team members’ universities, of their home faculty and/or departments, and of their own as well as those of the funder, required a fine balancing act by individual team members, specifically in terms of their normal daily academic programmes. Moreover, team members had to understand one another’s work culture, practices and expectations while seeking to offset those against knowledge and skill development, project delivery and dissemination. Therefore, ground rules had to be established before the team could start to develop positive working relationships. However, initially the focus was on tasks: what the researchers needed to do and how they were going to do it, rather than on the processes. In this way, the group initially skipped the norming phase of the process, revealing their anxiety to show tangible results. It could be argued that this also reflected a shift towards greater accountability and outputs, ironically the very issues that the project was funded to investigate. As a result the project team had to retrace their steps, ensuring a much deeper understanding of one another’s experiences and expectations.

This reconsideration was undertaken expressly by the group before the end of the first symposium in which members expressed commitment to the principles of equity, equality, shared destiny and to the project. Team members also committed themselves to social work virtues (Pullen-Sansfaçon and Cowden, 2012), such as respect for each other’s’ values and views, even when these differed from individual beliefs or personal experiences of similar situations; trustworthiness, which includes honesty, reliability, responsibility and credibility in the execution of research assignments and which is necessary for open communication; criticality, which entails a constant engagement in reflection, and the ability to reassess own judgments, in particular the structural analysis of observations; and courage to carry through the project tasks and team decisions, as the unresponsiveness of one team member could potentially affect the rest of the team. These virtues could be operationalized only if team members were taking ownership of the project, combined with the sharing of creative initiatives.

However, similar to Gardner et al.’s (2012) report was the experience that it is easy for an individual in collaborating teams to assume that someone else is taking the lead and to feel less pressured by upcoming deadlines. When face-to-face meetings were not possible, there was a tendency to compromise more and challenge less. Therefore, the affirmation of the project’s values was a continuous endeavour. Part of the team building process was therefore to obtain group permission on technical and personal aspects of the project. This process was similar to what political scientists might call delegated power (Lupia, 2001) although in a team of equals this delegation is not so much about researchers being asked to undertake tasks on behalf of others, but about the process of seeking mutual understanding of boundaries, group processes, requirements and deliverables.

Determining theoretical perspectives

Every helping profession needs a frame of reference to view situations and contexts they are concerned with. Based on the seminal postulations of Pincus and Minahan (1973: 8), Bronfenbrenner (1977) and Germain and Gitterman (1995, 1996), an ecological perspective provides a framework for the analyses of interactions on a global level, between nations, organizations and individuals. Human ecology is considered as the mutual accommodation of the person and his/her immediate changing environment for the duration of his/her life.

The ecological perspective thus offered a useful cognitive framework for the research team within which to understand the realities of social work practice. Moreover, the ecological perspective offers the language, holistic view and concepts to understand the complex relationships between people and their environments (Germain and Gitterman, 1995); and provides the opportunity for collaborative knowledge building across nations to view people and their environments as a unit within their unique cultural and historical context. The analyses of research data in terms of the ecological systems (exo, macro, meso and micro) (Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Germain and Gitterman, 1996) were specifically helpful towards the understanding of the research matter and to ultimately map the research data.

Developing a framework for integrative collaborative knowledge building

The team’s acceptance of the ecological systems perspective as theoretical point of departure also created the awareness of a theoretically founded framework for collaborative knowledge building, which undergirds the research project. The work of Singh et al. (2007) on Collaborative Knowledge Building (CKB) (see also Stahl, 2000), was particularly useful in this regard. The authors constructed a process to address the problems inherent in moving from individual understanding to group understanding. It recognizes that an individual’s personal understanding is a reflection of his/her own beliefs, knowledge and experience which are translated into statements made in public. By working collaboratively a shared understanding in the team could emerge which in turn impacted on the individual’s understanding. Key to this process are the changes that take place in order to move from individual to shared understanding (Whymark and Hawkins, 2006). This process was captured and its components preserved as artefacts (conceptual and/or written) that can be examined and improved through public discourse (Singh et al., 2007). The artefacts are the result of reflective thinking, which can be described as an active thinking process for monitoring one’s own learning process in order to instil conceptual change. Engaging in reflective thinking within the context of the project, implies explicating tacit knowledge, internalizing newly acquired knowledge, and facilitating knowledge construction. Similarly, as Singh et al. (2007: 92) described in an exposition of a case study on CKB, the engagement in reflective thinking also guides the research team towards ‘writing questions’. These questions were based on the distinct systems of the ecological perspective and helped the research team to demarcate the research topic within each work package.

Concept analysis

According to Rodgers (1989) concepts play an important part in the development of knowledge as concepts promote the organization of experience, facilitate communication among individuals and enable the cognitive recall thereof. For this reason the research team deemed it necessary to construct a concept analysis according to a specific process; it has been argued that concept analysis is the first stage of theory development (Walker and Avant, 1995). Social constructionism has been used more extensively in social work and shows some similarities with concept analysis, such as analysis of the discourses which have contributed to the current accepted way to approach a phenomenon (Burr, 2003).

Rodgers (1989) points to two established views of what constitutes a concept. The entity school of thought is that a concept is a thing, a form or an element that exists, while the dispositional view is that it is a habit or ability to perform certain behaviours. The research team found neither approach to be the ideal as the entity approach is reductionist in nature and once defined the concept remains fixed within that definition, unable to change through time or across contexts, while the dispositional approach has been criticized for being vague and ambiguous, lacking the scientific certainty of the entity view. This impasse was addressed by members of the research team by adopting Rodgers’s (1989) third view of concepts, namely the evolutionary view, which holds that concepts do change and whatever influences their development is significant. This third approach allowed the team members to view neoliberalism as remaining static at certain points in history, as well as evolving, as it is adopted within different contexts.

As suggested by Chinn and Kramer (1999) one of the important aspects of concept analysis is to identify what the concept is not. This is of critical importance to ensure clarity and avoid confusion with similar and related concepts. Identifying references, antecedents and consequences is also a means of clarification by considering the scope of the concept, what has led to the concept’s emergence and what has happened as a consequence of its existence.

Integrative review

The process of concept analysis directed the research team to review applicable sources for data, and specifically to an integrative review as grounded methodological strategy, in order to enhance the rigour of the research process. This was an effort to synthesize findings from discrete primary studies and to increase the generalizability of data about neoliberalism as phenomenon. As this research approach was defined as secondary analysis (De Vos et al., 2005), the literature review may be considered as research into research and should therefore meet the same rigorous methodological standards as primary research. The integrative review of neoliberalism suited the project best and was employed according to an adapted five-stage process as expounded by Whittemore and Knafl (2005):

Producing artefacts

An essential aspect of collaborative knowledge building is the recording of the process. Singh et al.’s (2007) CKB model recognizes the importance of artefacts to make the knowledge public and this has been adopted by the project team through a commitment by each work package to produce a journal and/or conference paper at each symposium and for individual team members to report according to a specific format after each international visit. The written word is however a one-dimensional record, and is open to different interpretations, particularly within a cross-cultural context (Mangen, 1999). Therefore, the project team was tasked with implementing a wider range of recording mechanisms such as photographic and video artefacts.

Dissemination

Dissemination is an ongoing process and includes journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, feedback and sharing of experiences to home institutions and teams of learning, press releases and the use of material in student teaching. The hosting of project webinars (interactive web-based seminars, which can be accessed in real time) by the participating team members and invited audiences was found to be a cost-effective and exceptionally powerful tool for dissemination of research findings. However, the creation of a unique project web site, hosting all the various dissemination efforts, would be the ultimate goal. Unfortunately the funding of this project did not cover dissemination costs. Nevertheless, the added value of disseminating this process model for international research collaboration was demonstrated in that the team members were empowered to work deliberately towards future international research collaborations and to share their gained knowledge and skills such as bid writing and project management with colleagues at their home institutions.