COVID-19 and Youth Living in Poverty: The Ethical Considerations of Moving From In-Person Interviews to a Photovoice Using Remote Methods

Abstract

COVID-19 hit and instantaneously research using in-person methods were paused. As feminist and critical social work scholars and researchers, we began to consider the implications of pausing our ongoing project exploring the provisioning and resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households. Reflexively, we wondered how the youth, families, and issues we were connected to would be impacted by the pandemic. We were pulled into both ethical and methodological questions. While the procedural ethics of maintaining safety were clear, what became less clear were the relational ethics. What was brought into question were our own social positions and our roles and responsibilities in our relationships with the youth. For both ethical and methodological reasons, we decided to expand the original research scope from in-person interviews to include a photovoice to be executed using online, remote methods. In this article, we discuss those ethical and methodological tensions. In the first part, we discuss the relational ethics that propelled us to commit to expanding our work, while in the second part, we discuss our move to combining photovoice and remote methods.

Keywords

COVID-19 pandemic photovoice poverty remote methods youth

The Issue: The In-Person Pause to the Remote and Virtual (But Real)

As the COVID-19 pandemic moved all major aspects of everyday life from in-person to online contact, approximately 68% of Canadians surveyed reported an increase in internet use in the early weeks (Statistics Canada, 2020). In a matter of days, universities, schools, businesses, social and health services, and most government services shifted to online delivery. Shopping and even family visits moved or expanded to online. COVID-19 also instantaneously paused research projects using in-person methods, and researchers were encouraged to reorganize their programs to continue with non, in-person activities or to consider online and remote methods. As feminist researchers, we considered the implications of pausing and suspending our ongoing research exploring the provisioning and resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households. As a concept, “provisioning” is theorized by feminist economists to refer to the formal and informal labor an individual undertakes to meet their own needs and those of others for whom they are responsible (Neysmith et al., 2005). Yet, as social justice–oriented scholars, under the weight of COVID-19 and the massive social and economic upheaval created uncertainties, “poverty,” “youth provisioning,” and “resilience” became that much more crucial to study.

Engaged in critical reflexive work, we challenged one another to think about the ethics of pausing our work and the implications for the youth already recruited and committed to participate in a series of in-person interviews. The interviews were to occur over a 1- to 2-year period. While the procedural ethics were clear that for safety, to control and stop the spread of the virus, the in-person interviews had to be suspended, what became less clear were the relational ethics. What was brought into question were our own social positions and our roles and responsibilities in our relationships with the youth. For both ethical and methodological reasons, we decided to expand the original interview work to include a photovoice component to be executed remotely using an online conferencing platform. In this brief article, we discuss these issues. In the first part, we discuss the relational ethics that propelled us to expand our work, while in the second part, we discuss our move to combining photovoice and remote methods.

Relational Ethics and Expanding Our Work

As feminist scholars, our program of research is currently focused on the dynamics of youth resilience, poverty, and provisioning in the Global North, with a particular focus on the provisioning and resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households. This focus is organized around two main premises about the nature of research and the roles and responsibilities of the researcher. First is the premise that research models and practices are deeply rooted in histories and traditions that are androcentric, classist, racist, and heteronormative, essentially organized around the social power and “epistemic privilege” of men—white, middle/upper class, heterosexual men—as a social group (Berry et al., 2017; Dei & Singh-Johal, 2005; Hammers & Brown, 2004; Harding, 2006). At the intersections of class, race, and gender, lone motherhood and lone mothers living in poverty are generally studied as social problems that threaten, for example, the sanctity of the nuclear family or the future well-being of children growing up in poverty (Atree, 2006; Caragata, 2012, 2009; Liegghio, 2015; Najman et al., 2004). Our scholarship is concerned with uncovering, revealing, and ultimately, challenging the ways in which mainstream research efforts can inadvertently misinterpret and misrepresent women, lone mothers living in poverty, and their children as acts of “epistemic injustice” (Glass & Newman, 2015).

“Epistemic injustice” (also referred to as “epistemic violence,” Liegghio, 2016, 2013) denotes the dehumanization of marginalized groups and peoples through the exclusion of their knowledges and ways of knowing from, for example, research or social service programs intended to serve their lives (Glass & Newman, 2015). Pausing our research about the realities of women, and in particular, lone mothers and their children amid a pandemic felt like such an exclusion. In the context of gender-neutralized rhetoric that “we are all in this together” and “helping all Canadians,” their experiences and the realities of their lives are stories that are more critical than ever to be told. In short, our considerations suggested that pausing the research was to invoke our epistemic privilege and risk excluding from public debate the realities of lone mothers and their children, the realities of families living in poverty. We were thus propelled to find ways to continue our work in spite of the pandemic.

The second premise is that in addition to advancing knowledge, the research, at the very least our research, should be action-oriented, specifically to improve social justice—to achieve epistemic justice. In other words, our work is guided by the principle that our research should address the epistemic subjugation enacted on lone mothers and their children. A feminist research praxis addressing epistemic injustices thus relies on the intentional use of methods and methodologies that are inclusive of marginalized knowledges and ways of knowing. This short article emerged from our reflections about whether or not “interviews” as a method were the now the “best fit” for studying youth provisioning and resilience, especially for achieving epistemic justice under the conditions of a global health pandemic. Our concerns centered on whether video interviews would be accessible and appropriate; might they feel too much like information extraction without the relational element conveyed in an in-person interview? As a consequence of these considerations, we began to think about other methods for studying the provisioning and resilience of youth living in poverty in the Global North.

In the Global South, the connection between poverty and children who must make significant economic and care contributions to family stability has received extensive scholarly attention (Dayioglu, 2006; Martin, 2013; Siddiqi, 2013); however, little is known about the similar experiences of young people in the Global North. As mentioned, as a concept, “provisioning” is theorized by feminist economists to refer to the formal and informal labor an individual undertakes to meet their own needs and those of others for whom they are responsible (Neysmith et al., 2005). Provisioning is an innovative theoretical orientation for making visible young people’s contributions to helping their families “make ends meet” as a demonstration of personal and family resilience.

Broadly, “resilience” refers to the personal, family, community, and structural characteristics, processes, and outcomes of responding to and/or interrupting the negative effects of adversity or hardship (Adegoke et al., 2017; Caragata et al., 2018). “Personal resilience” refers to a person’s psychological and interpersonal abilities, responses, and resources for facing and dealing with adversity and its associated stresses (Eshehl et al., 2018), while “family resilience” refers to a family’s characteristics or abilities for responding positively to adverse conditions (Simon et al., 2005). “Community resilience” (also referred to as “collective resilience”) denotes the strengths, dimensions, and/or activities of communities and community life for responding and interrupting the negative effects of adversity on both the community as a whole and its members (Sousa et al., 2013). Structural barriers and supporting factors to resilience relate to those large systemic issues (Caragata et al., 2018).

Feminist and critical social theorists argue the importance of acknowledging this structural dimension given that human well-being is inherently bound to and organized by social inequities around which society is organized (Bottrell, 2009), such as the inequities associated with poverty, sexism, or racism. These perspectives challenge the too frequently understood perspectives on resilience that see it as only an individual, psychological trait—the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of resilience. Other research demonstrates that community and instrumental factors can support resilience (Caragata et al., 2018). Well-understood barriers to resilience include family stress, illness, and loss of income, all factors made more acute amid our COVID-19 pandemic. And, as research is demonstrating, the impacts of the pandemic are disproportionately experienced by those who are living with low income. Immediately, we wondered about the hardships—the personal, interpersonal, family, social, and financial stresses—unique to pandemics (Brooks et al., 2020; Morganstein et al., 2017) that could pull the youth into unique provisioning roles, and their families, headed by lone mothers, into deeper levels of poverty and disparity.

“Positioning” (Socially) Our Roles and Responsibilities to the Youth

Under the purview of relational ethics, as feminist social justice–oriented researchers, we wondered about our relationships (Lester & Anders, 2018) and our roles and responsibilities to the youth, families, and communities to whom we were connected and to poverty, sexism, and heteronormativity as intersecting social issues to which we were committed to change. Knowing that lone mothers and their children would likely experience unprecedented adversity, we questioned the implications of pausing the in-person interviews while recognizing the necessity to do so. Critical and feminist scholars scrutinize the significance of the social positions and power differentials between “the researcher” and “the people” whose lives are under study, advocating a research praxis guided by the democratization of knowledge production, and ultimately, the democratization of social relations (Lester & Anders, 2018; Rice, 2009; Tamas, 2009). What greater demonstration of the privilege associated with our social positions (i.e. university-educated, middle class, financially secure) as researchers than to put on hold the production and advancement of knowledge about poverty, youth provisioning, and resilience at a time when such knowledge might shape public discourse and government policy. In other words, we could “afford” to suspend knowing about the impact of the pandemic on poverty, youth provisioning, and resilience, but at what cost to the youth living in low-income, lone mother households and to the possibilities of a positive policy impact?

In debating the above question, we considered other methodological options, such as adding questions to our “prepandemic” interview guide that, once the in-person interviews could resume, we could ask about their experiences retrospectively. As previously mentioned, we also considered moving to conduct the interviews remotely which seemed problematic in that even in-person interviews were challenging in terms of space, privacy, and privileging of participants’ knowledge. We questioned whether or not in a global pandemic with imposed measures for social isolation if individual interviews were the “best fit” for fostering the inclusion of a collective epistemic voice—youths’ collective knowledges and ways of knowing. We debated these questions in part because of a sense of responsibility to the youth to continue with our commitments. From the feedback provided during the first interviews, those involved valued the opportunity to have their experiences validated, to tell their stories, and we are sure that the honoraria provided also eased some financial stress. Thus, we decided that continuing the research was the appropriate response to the pandemic. After careful consideration, we turned to photovoice as a methodology.

Our Move to Combining Photovoice and Remote Methods

Aligned with a feminist and critical research praxis, photovoice is described as “a participatory method that puts cameras in the hands of individuals often excluded from decision-making processes in order to capture their voices and visions of their lives and their community” (Foster-Fisherman et al., 2010, p. 69). The method consists of three steps that can be executed in as many sessions as necessary at a pace flexible and adaptable to the needs of the participants. As an individual and also collective experience, the three steps can lead to both personal and collective conscientization of the issues under study, that is, moving from depoliticized (individualized) to the politicized (structural) understandings of the experiences and issues under study (e.g., refer to Liegghio, 2016, 2020).

Using remote interactive video conferencing methods, in the first phase, as a group and collective experience, the youth are trained on the approach and directed to take non-self-identifying photographs that represent responses or answers to the research questions.¹ The second phase consists of an individual experience of the youth taking the photographs and writing short explanations of how the images or group of images represent answers to the research questions. In the third phase, the youth come together again as a group and present their respective photographs and explanations to one another. Along with presenting their individual responses, as a group, the youth work together to support an analysis of the individual responses identifying similarities and differences between the group members in their considerations of the answers to the research questions. The outcome is the analyses of both an individual experience and a collective experience as a social group.

Together these three phases have the potential of creating a powerful experience for the youth of feeling valued and valuable, of being connected to a bigger cause, and of belonging to a collective experience (Liegghio, 2016, 2020)—all positive factors for fostering both personal and collective resilience (Caragata et al., 2018; Mullin & Arce, 2008; Ungar et al., 2005). In itself, the photovoice may represent an important community response for building the personal and collective resilience of youth living in low-income, lone mother households and for interrupting the negative effects of the pandemic in “real time.” With bans in place against meeting in person, remote methods make it possible for the youth to come together to meet using interactive video conferencing. The pandemic research is clear that one of the greatest risk factors to the personal and collective well-being of children is the prolonged exposure to fear-based messages about the pandemic and to the conditions of social isolation from others (Brooks et al., 2020; Morganstein et al., 2017). Thus, the opportunity for fostering the collective resilience of youth living in poverty cannot be understated, especially when personal resilience is understood as inherently bound to and organized by the structural.

Broadly, computer, online, or remote technologies have been used to overcome obstacles to the participation in research of underrepresented or underserved individuals, groups, and communities (Lopez et al., 2018). Online and remote methods have been used to connect isolated individuals and communities to one another. In studies on a range of health-related issues in rural, isolated, or fly-in communities, remote methods are considered a cost-efficient and effective way of engaging and supporting individual or citizen participation (Afzalan & Muller, 2018; Lopez et al., 2018; Mitchell et al., 2020; Underhill & Olmsted, 2003). Adapted from definitions of “telehealth” and “telemedicine” (Lopez et al., 2018), we define “remote methods” to refer to the use of interactive video and audio technologies through secure internet connections as a means and mode of carrying out in “real-time” (vs. in-person) research activities.

In our research, remote methods make it possible to continue our work in spite of the pandemic and the imposition of social distancing measures. Although remote methods have been used for focus groups, in particular, in marketing research (Underhill & Olmsted, 2003), as far as we know, our proposed work of conducting a remote methods’ photovoice with youth living in low-income, lone mother households is the first of its kind. The appeal of remote methods for critical scholars is the potential for the democratization of knowledge production by making it possible for underrepresented peoples to participate in research from which they have traditionally been excluded (Lopez et al., 2018). Through the use of a remote photovoice, we can foster democratic research conditions for youth to speak and be heard as individuals and a collective, for the privileging of their knowledges and ways of knowing during a time when their knowledge and ways of knowing the pandemic could have a positive influence on policy and service initiatives intended to support their lives.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maria Liegghio

Note

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