Abstract
Over a decade ago, researchers in Roma studies shifted their approach, from an exclusionary stance to a more communicative one. Despite major positive changes since then, researchers still do not adequately reflect the voices of the majority of the world’s Roma. In this article, we draw on a communicative mixed methods case study, conducted within the INCLUD-ED project in one of Spain’s most underprivileged neighborhoods, to show how it was possible to engage in intersubjective dialogue with grassroots Roma throughout the entire research process. Through such engagement, it is possible to develop new knowledge that can transform local conditions, as they shift from diagnosing social exclusion to identifying the approaches that work best to reduce it.
On December 6, 2011, Rafael, a Roma father of three, did not go to the school to coach the boys on his basketball team. Instead he was a speaker at the INCLUD-ED 1 Final Conference at the European Parliament. Rafael’s life has changed profoundly in the last 5 years: he has left prison, overcome his drug addiction, and worked as a volunteer at the La Paz school. He is now a worker member of the recently created cooperative in the La Milagrosa neighborhood in Albacete, Spain. Speaking to an audience of policy makers, professionals, NGO representatives, researchers, and members of the Parliament, Rafael described how his involvement in the research project was the catalyst for all these changes. He vividly described transformations he experienced both in his community and at home; for example, the first time that Maria, his teenage daughter, asked him for help with her homework and how some years later she had given him a book to read on the plane to Brussels. As he spoke, Rafael was close to tears. His testimony had a social and political impact far greater than that of any discussion among academics, or between academics and policy makers.
The Roma are the most important nonmigrant ethnic minority in Europe. They have historically been object of multiple discriminations that have damned them at the margins of society: slavery, expulsions, persecutions, Nazi genocide, and criminalization, among others. The European Union has already alerted that the Roma are one of the groups with highest risk of suffering poverty in Europe and the group that suffers most segregation from the larger society (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2009).
This discriminatory pattern is also found in the way knowledge about the Roma has been produced. Although progress has been made in including Roma on research teams, we rarely find people like Rafael participating actively in studies. For decades, most research about the Roma has been conducted by non-Roma teams who have researched “on” the Roma rather than “with” them (Vargas & Gómez, 2003). In response, many Roma organizations have rejected this type of research as being exclusionary, because while appearing to be neutral and objective, it has ignored their voices, and the results have often continued to exclude them. The Roma are tired of opening their homes, and sharing their food and traditions with researchers who disappear once they get what they need. As a result, some Roma have developed strategies to either give these researchers “whatever they expect to get” or to just refuse to answer any question, as a means of resisting research they perceive as unequal, in which they are only the objects of study. Multiple efforts are being made to promote Roma scholars and to involve Roma in research teams, but still the challenge remains to include grassroots people like Rafael.
The Communicative Methodology (CM) framework, a mixed methods strategy, has addressed this kind of refusal by the Roma and other groups and creates venues for active participation in the entire research process (Macías & Redondo, 2012). CM makes it possible to include the voices of all social actors, especially those at the grassroots, who do not hold a university degree, and who have been traditionally excluded from the creation of scientific knowledge. An example is the “other women,” women who have no academic degree and whose voices have traditionally been silenced by the discourses of academic feminists (Puigvert, 2001; Puigvert & Muñoz, 2012). There is a long list of other underserved populations that have long been invisible in academia. CM frames research as a form of egalitarian dialogue that involves constructing knowledge on the basis of intersubjectivity and joint reflection to identify the actions that have helped reverse social exclusion. This approach is vital to provide solutions for social problems (Sosa Elízaga, 2012).
In this article, we explain how CM allows the most excluded people to be included throughout the research process by using both quantitative and qualitative methods, taking the specific case of grassroots Roma. We reflect on a longitudinal mixed methods case study of La Paz school, located in a predominantly Roma neighborhood, in which an ongoing intersubjective dialogue with grassroots Roma lasted for 5 years. We describe how we organized the research study and how we involved local Roma at each of its stages.
Including Grassroots People in Mixed Methods Research
The role that research participants play in constructing social science knowledge is a key issue in contemporary social research across many methodological boundaries (Torrance, 2012). Researchers using mixed methods have been concerned about how to deeply involve their subjects in the studies. Many have described the need to dismantle research organizations and traditions that perpetuate the old relationships between groups, based on power and colonial history (Sordé-Martí, Munté, Contreras, & Prieto-Flores, 2012; Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999). Like other social institutions, the academic community has been forced to review some of its structures and procedures, which were dominated by power-over relationships, perpetuating racism, and inequality. The need to produce socially relevant academic knowledge has moved many scholars to be inclusive at various levels and to raise many epistemological, methodological, and ethical questions.
Researchers are thus increasingly developing research teams that include end-users—those whose situation is being studied. Tashakkori and Teddlie (2003) argue that reasoned and ethically informed dialogues, or collaborative research partnerships between experts and community members, play key roles in educational research. Mertens (2010) describes how three deaf researchers helped evaluate a program to prepare teachers of deaf students. Such transformative research aims to benefit from involving members of the target community throughout the research process.
Mixed methods studies conducted with underserved communities such as indigenous peoples or ethnic minorities acquire a transformative potential when oriented toward social justice (Hesse-Biber, 2010; Mertens, 2011). Other accounts have come from the same communities whose voices have been largely ignored or colonized during research. In her landmark work, Tuhiwai-Smith (1999) reflected on how indigenous people have helped develop indigenous studies, bringing their concerns and practices to the research agenda. To improve the lives of such people, researchers have shifted from conducting “outsider research” to “insider research,” remaining aware that in becoming a researcher, the “insider” can also become an “outsider” in his original community.
At the methodological level, researchers have implemented several strategies in mixed methods research to address such concerns. One strategy is doing member checks. Among many examples, Jang, McDougall, Pollon, Herbert, and Russell (2008) analyzed schools with students with special needs and socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Her research team conducted interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, and parents and a quantitative survey with principals and teachers; they later shared preliminary results with the principals. Other studies have also involved stakeholders to validate the researchers’ interpretations (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2008). Another strategy is triangulating knowledge sources, while building a better link between the research problem, the research design, and efforts to inform social change (Hesse-Biber, 2012). Though these are important steps toward more ethical and useful way of producing knowledge, far more could be done to include the voices of the most silenced and marginalized. Like in the field of politics or social participation, the presence of grassroots people in the research community is very often at stake. In response, we aim to shed light on this process, helping to advance state-of-the-art in mixed methods research.
The INCLUD-ED Research Project
Overview
The INCLUD-ED project (2006-2011) is the only research project in the social sciences highlighted by the European Commission (2011) among the 10 most successful research initiatives in Europe. For 5 years, a diverse and interdisciplinary consortium of European researchers implemented a complex set of studies, both qualitative and quantitative, to identify successful educational actions that help promote social cohesion.
The overall INCLUD-ED project was developed using CM. In this methodology, researchers bring the academic knowledge and the “researched” bring interpretations based on their lived experiences (Schütz & Luckmann, 1973), breaking down what Habermas (1984) calls the methodological gap between the researchers and the researched. The CM was also key in the research project WORKALÓ, which aimed to create labor opportunities for the Roma. The study integrated grassroots Roma into the entire research process, which resulted into an unprecedented positive impact for the Roma throughout European society. 2
INCLUD-ED was structured into seven projects. One consisted of longitudinal case studies of schools with strong community involvement to study in depth educational actions that were promoting academic achievement, social inclusion, and empowerment, thus reducing marginalization. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected concurrently for 4 years into four rounds. Each round informed the following ones, so the research team could define new research questions as well as review and expand the questionnaires and interview protocols. The two methods were complementary, and the results were integrated during the analysis. This article is based on one longitudinal case study, conducted in La Paz Elementary School.
Context of This Case Study: La Paz Elementary School
Three criteria were used to select the schools. First, they had to have strong community involvement. Second, they had to be located in low socioeconomic status areas where most students were from minority backgrounds. Third, students needed to show annual progress on educational standards, as compared with other similar schools.
La Paz is located in one of Spain’s most deprived areas: the La Milagrosa neighborhood in the city of Albacete. In 2006, it had become so marginalized and conflict-ridden that life in the neighborhood was unbearable and the teachers felt threatened. Meanwhile, the media were portraying local Roma families as the source of all trouble, and they were also suffering. At that moment, the INCLUD-ED research team was asked for help (Brown, Gómez, & Munté, 2013). Discussions among family and community members, the school administration, the researchers, and other stakeholders led to a plan, endorsed by the Albacete City Council: shut down the existing school (San Juan) and open up another school (La Paz) in the same building with a totally different project. The decisions on the interventions to be implemented were not imposed top-down by the researchers or the policy makers; instead, they were presented to the community and recreated in that context based on participatory dialogue with local residents. In La Paz, student test scores improved substantially. In just 1 year the third-grade students had doubled their scores in almost all the school competences, and absenteeism fell from 30% to 10% (INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2011). As researchers, we were interested in exploring how they made such progress.
The Communicative Design
Pilar, an illiterate Roma mother, explained to our research team that her 12-year-old daughter spent the afternoons watching TV shows at the school. Arturo, a Roma leader who worked collecting scrap metal, shared how his children were placed in charge of the school garden as the teachers said that the Roma enjoy being outdoors, whereas the rest of the students were learning in the classroom. Juan, a Roma activist and a builder, explained that his daughter had trouble being accepted in the local high school because she is Roma. Many more Roma, and non-Roma families, were watching their offspring going through school and leaving illiterate; they felt powerless in the face of a system that was not offering equal opportunities to all students. Many teachers were also feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and asking what they could do to teach more efficiently, get satisfactory test results, and make their work more meaningful. Alongside, policy makers were also looking for solutions to these problems. In the dialogue, INCLUD-ED researchers shared evidences from the research on which educational actions had already been studied and proved to be successful. All together they decided to implement these actions in the school.
The conversations between the research team, local end-users, and the major stakeholders were crucial in designing the research questions for the case studies. Our research design had to show whether there was positive progress in exam scores, along with the levels of satisfaction and participation. We also needed qualitative insights into the process of school transformation. Finally, we aimed at exploring transferability across Europe. Everyone seemed to agree that the mixed method design was the best way to fulfill these needs.
These meetings allowed a wide range of participants to closely monitor both the research and the school’s progress. One of them was Ana, a Roma woman who left school at the age of 10, who sells clothes at Albacete’s outdoors market, and who has now become one of the leading mother volunteers at La Paz. Like other local Roma who were initially reluctant and skeptical, as they did not want to be “guinea pigs” for academics, she saw her children’s educational prospects being transformed. She soon became enthusiastic about collaborating with the research team. The INCLUD-ED researchers were bringing the scientific evidences of what works, increasing trust and involvement from community members. Through the involvement of people like Ana, for instance, the last round of the case study was focused on gathering information about how the community involvement in the school had also influenced other areas of society, such as health or employment. Ana, and the others, were aware that after volunteering at the school many people from the neighborhood had withdrawn from drugs or had found a job. The researchers then shared what the scientific community already knew about these connections. In this process, scientific knowledge was being contrasted with daily life experience. We updated our data collection tools every year, adapting them to each year’s specific focus and in the light of the discussions held (i.e., new indicators, questions, respondents, etc.). Tools were always piloted. For instance, Ana distributed them to older illiterate Roma women to make sure they could respond. We used the same procedure to annually redesign the qualitative protocol and add new items to the questionnaire.
The communicative approach institutionalizes this ongoing dialogue through the Advisory Council (AC). In the INCLUD-ED project, the AC members were selected according to three criteria: (a) they were among the most vulnerable within their particular group, (b) they did not hold a higher education degree, and (c) they had experience in overcoming inequalities through community participation or social and political involvement. At the AC meetings, researchers discussed project results, and designs for future stages with the members, collecting their views and perspectives.
Quantitative and Qualitative Data Collection
The annual data collection process involved two questionnaires to students and families and four qualitative techniques (INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2011). First, standardized open-ended interviews were conducted with community activists, school administrators, and professionals, in which the dialogue was focused on the professional experience of the person. Second, communicative daily life stories were gathered with family members and students which allowed personal reflection and interpretation of the researched’s daily life through conversation. Third, communicative focus groups emerge as a way to confront the individual subjectivity with the group intersubjectivity. They are organized with groups of people who share a given activity on a regular basis (natural group) to gather their opinions, needs, worries, and other feelings about a concrete topic in an intersubjective reflective manner. The researcher provides knowledge from the study (or from the scientific literature) to be reflected in the group, and adopts a listening attitude. Finally, several communicative observations on key participatory spaces were conducted in every round, in which researchers ask the people they observe and dialogically contrast information.
The two questionnaires shed light on the longitudinal nature of the process, gathering information on how satisfied the students and families were with their test results and their perceptions of improvement. They also asked about the ways family members participated at the school, and how both students and families saw these various activities as benefitting student learning. The questionnaires targeted the entire population of students and families. They were distributed collaboratively by grassroots Roma and members of the research team, sometimes working in pairs. One key person who became deeply involved in the data collection was Antonio, president of the Roma association. He had registered his children at La Paz again, once he realized it would offer them serious opportunities to succeed academically. Antonio was a great help in identifying potential respondents; he took on distributing them to local people, reaching out especially to those who had long experienced social exclusion. Other grassroots Roma distributed the questionnaires among illiterate families helping them to understand the questions and the project.
A similar procedure was followed to collect the qualitative data. Antonio, Ana, and many others provided the university researchers with valuable background information about the school, the neighborhood, the history of local socioeconomic problems, relationships with the local administration, and many other key issues. With them, the research team could then decide which situations were worth observing, and which neighbors they should ask for first-hand information. For instance, we interviewed members of the Sisters of Charity, a group active in the neighborhood that truly works at the grassroots level and had important insights for the project. Some participants who regularly attend the culto (the Evangelical worship service) urged us to contact the pastor and he immediately volunteered to introduce the research team at a church service. The public reaction was extremely positive, and the information on the project spread quickly. Other grassroots Roma also became key and outspoken voices on the project’s behalf. It would have been impossible to conduct the fieldwork without their direct involvement because they provided both technical support and enlightening contributions.
Data Analysis: Grassroots Roma Helping to Identify What Works
The quantitative data analysis provided an overview of the participants’ perceptions of student performance in core subjects (mathematics, ICT, languages), the school climate (inter-ethnic relationships), the school’s impact on the neighborhood, and a list of indicators related to the research questions. Hence, the two questionnaires provided a longitudinal view of the ongoing issues and of the project’s evolution: how was it helping to reduce or prevent inequalities and marginalization, and fostering social inclusion and empowerment? They also let the research team identify commonalities and differences among the different case studies across Europe (annual cross-case analysis).
To analyze the qualitative data, we created charts for each round. On the vertical axis, we placed the categories that responded to each research questions. For example, looking at participation, we created categories of decisive, evaluative, educational in children’s learning activities, and family education. We also analyzed the information contained in each vertical category based on the transformative and exclusionary dimensions (horizontal axis) that are specific to CM. The exclusionary dimensions are those barriers that keep certain individuals and groups from getting jobs, education, or health care. The transformative dimensions refer to those aspects that help remove the exclusionary ones. In this regard, the communicative perspective attempts to analyze reality in a broader way, taking into account both dimensions—transformative and exclusionary—and introducing the voices of the research subjects through bodies such as the before mentioned AC.
The AC played an important role in assuring that the project’s findings were oriented toward identifying solutions (transformative dimensions) instead of focusing only on the problems. In one meeting, AC members were discussing the findings about the benefits of family participation. One participant, a mother who was involved in a literacy course at her children’s school, suggested we analyze the side effects of such participation. For instance, many families were talking about the frequent transformations in their living rooms: when a mother who is attending school starts to work side-by-side with her children, they suddenly start to come to school with their homework completed. These were all small changes present in the data, but needed to be emphasized during the analysis. The discussions around family education turned out to be one of the most important empirical contributions of the entire project.
Synopsis of the Results
The case studies conducted in locations across Europe yielded rich and complex data on community participation in schools. In particular, the first round identified the educational strategies, based on community involvement, that improve social cohesion and academic results. The second round provided evidence about four primary forms of family and community participation. The third round connected the different types of community involvement and academic and nonacademic improvements in the selected schools. In the fourth year we examined whether family and community participation in the school had an impact beyond the school’s walls and back into the neighborhood, transforming it and the lives of the participants in the areas of housing, health, employment, social and political participation, and lifelong learning.
Quantitative Results
Our quantitative data analysis produced three key results. First, the different types of family participation at La Paz increased across the years. Second, the levels of student achievement rose in the instrumental areas of language and mathematics. The responses to the questionnaires showed that, overall, both families and children believed the students were making satisfactory progress in these areas. This improvement was confirmed when contrasted to school external evaluations (INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2011). Moreover, these improvements raised the expectations of both children and families about their future prospects: nearly 90% of those students, supported by family, were aspiring to go to college. Third, the quantitative data confirmed the perceived relationship between family members’ participation in the educational activities (for themselves and in the classroom) and both improvements in students’ test scores and the transformation of the school and the neighborhood (INCLUD-ED Consortium, 2009).
Qualitative Results
The qualitative results showed how family and community participation help students succeed, leading to identify successful educational actions. Three types of family and community participation—decisive, evaluative, and educative participation (through family education and students’ support)—were found to contribute to school success and social cohesion. Our analysis revealed that these forms of family and community participation have a positive impact on school success. Family education, for example, helps families transmit a positive view of school because of the educational and cultural interactions that emerge at home. In turn students learn more, and more easily, and have more academic motivation, while families develop higher expectations of their children. This participation also enabled family members to improve their skills in reading, writing, and talking about school issues with their children. Besides, when community members and stakeholders get involved in deciding on academic aspects and the school norms together, they take on more shared responsibility for school management and for tackling the school’s needs. Active participation in decision making helped make education more meaningful for the whole community. Our research also indicates that having families participate in evaluating and planning curricula is important to children’s instrumental learning. Through such collaboration, students felt supported, their self-esteem rose along with their expectations about what they can learn, and many learning problems were prevented. Indeed, in the cases we analyzed, family and community participation also improved conditions related to housing, health, employment, and social and political participation.
Conclusions
Qualitative findings identify decisive, evaluative, and educative participation of families and community as the ones that best reinforce school success. Quantitative data are consistent with this finding. When families’ voices seriously are taken into account in the decision-making and evaluative processes, they contribute to improved educational outcomes. The relation is even stronger when these families take part in learning activities in the school.
When family members with low academic degrees engaged in particular family education programs (e.g., literacy courses, dialogic literary gatherings), their children obtained excellent results in their achievement, thus challenging the stereotypical determinism that Roma children cannot learn academically. The qualitative findings have shed light on the fact that this type of educative participation promotes cultural and educational interactions between the families and their children, enhancing learning outcomes. This has also been shown when families are volunteering in the students’ classroom (i.e., interactive groups). Further research is needed to understand how the identified successful types of community participation can be more encouraged in European schools.
The current work has also contributed to advances in the inclusion of grassroots Roma into mixed methods research. Debates on methodology already recognize the vital importance of involving representatives of the studied community (Mertens, 2010; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2003) or to promote indigenous initiatives from within (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999). Here, it is taken a step forward by highlighting the importance of seeking venues where the most excluded within the excluded can now become involved in research, and not just those who have academic credentials or who are better off within the community.
Under the CM, the intersubjective dialogue between the researched (i.e., lifeworld interpretations) and the researchers (i.e., scientific accumulated knowledge) has provided a framework for grassroots Roma to equally participate in the dialogic creation of scientific knowledge about their realities and prospects. This intersubjective dialogue is possible because various methodological strategies were displayed in the study. We created institutionalized spaces like the AC, other spaces such as regular open meetings, and informal conversations; we also sought collaboration with key people from the community, like the pastor. Hence, multiple conversations with end-users informed the research design; they were also invaluable during the fieldwork phase in terms of contributing substantially and to actively conducting it. During the analysis, they helped validate the results through meetings at the school, involving all major actors. The AC discussed them at length, as it was specifically in charge of monitoring the research process and ensuring the project was addressing the end-users’ most pressing needs. Overall, this case study supports the idea that including grassroots people in meaningful ways not only greatly enriched both the project methodologically, but also made research findings far more useful to excluded communities, and to society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the Roma community in La Paz school of la Milagrosa (Albacete, Spain) for their committed participation.
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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The Integrated project INCLUD-ED. Strategies for Inclusion and Social Cohesion in Europe from Education was funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Program of Research between 2006 and 2011.