http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
impact of COVID-19 on fieldwork with hard-to-reach groups
the ups and wdowns of online focus groups
In January 2020, we began a 2-year research project to investigate the process and outcome effectiveness of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, which oversee the monitoring and management of sexual and violent offenders in the community. A large part of the research involved qualitative fieldwork with practitioners from groups that are notoriously "hard-to-reach" for the purposes of research; these included the Police, HM Prison Service, and the National Probation Service. The onset of the pandemic 3 months later seemingly made these "hard-to-reach" groups even more difficult to access. Exceptional working models scaled back services and simply operating amid the chaos created by the pandemic meant that participation in research was understandably not considered a priority by the agencies we sought to involve. This case discusses how, created by the global pandemic, the need for alternative research methods resulted in the adoption of Microsoft Teams as the primary method for research focus groups. Despite the perceived and real drawbacks of no physical communication with participants, Teams evolved into a highly effective way of conducting research with our hard-to-reach groups. Our experience suggests that this tool is an important one in the armoury of researchers, offering a convenient and more economical way of conducting large-scale fieldwork with "hard-to-reach" practitioners.
SAGE research methods: doing research online