Carmel Capewell

My research interests are focused on putting the participant at the centre of the research process. This does not matter whether they are adults or children. This philosophical position places the people as experts in their own lives and they can provide the professionals, with whom they interact with, valuable insights into their perspective. As people do not live in one context, my work is interdisciplinary and collaborative with a range of health, education and psychology colleagues.

This focus on the participant has led me to explore data collection and analysis methods which is participant-led following the issues that the participants identify rather than answering specific researcher-constructed questions. I have used Photovoice extensively in diverse contexts. These have included exploring the lived experience of mothers and children with long-term glue ear, a common childhood condition that usually causes temporary hearing loss. The group of children and mothers with whom I have worked continued to have the condition after it usually resolves at about the age of 7 years old. The participants highlighted the educational implications of intermittent hearing loss and how it impacted psycho-social development long-term. Following the methodological pathway led me to a project aimed at providing healthcare professionals with training into the patients’ experience of cancer. For this project a group of women were recruited who had a diagnosis of breast cancer in which they explored their experience of treatment and the messages they had for those involved in their treatment and support. The output of this project was the development of teaching materials for student nurses as well as a public exhibition which provided the public with insight into how cancer can affect a woman’s life. This was supported by the Macmillan Cancer trust. I am currently developing a project to understand the experience of learning by HE students in the COVID-19 situation. Interest has also been shown in this approach by the Unicorn School in Oxford. O am also supporting the implantation of a school-led project based on her research.

In many instances younger children are omitted from the research arena not because of their lack of insight but due to the research methods being inappropriate. This led me to explore a way of accessing how children aged 3-8 years were disadvantaged by environmental conditions in understanding speech in their daily lives. Hearing Maps were developed as a diary type format for young children and the adults around them to analyse the conditions which both supported and disabled their ability to interpret what was being said to them. Currently I am supporting Riverside School in Birmingham to help their students with Autism to explore their ability to process and understand speech.

See my Research Gate profile for further details.

My wider outreach work involves being a Convenor for the Educational Methodologies in Research BERA Special Interest Group. With my co-convenor, Alison Fox, we have put on a range of events which can be accessed via the BERA website (click here). In addition to workshops, we have edited a special edition of Research Intelligence and created Blog materials and a Podcast on methodologies (click here). We are currently co-editing a book , along with Hugh Busher from Leicester University, in which researchers reflect on their critical review of approaching participants in research. I have also developed workshops for the European Research in Education Conference involving colleagues from within the UK and across the world.