Children's Credibility - a Multidisciplinary Approach

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Last week Dr. Zoe Given-Wilson presented her chapter in the second multidisciplinary training manual of the Credo project, at the joint launch at No. 5 Chambers with Asylum Aid and UNHCR London. Thanks to the Credo project Zoe has been able to complete a thorough review of the psychology literature on issues facing young people seeking asylum, including the development of autobiographical memory (some aspects don’t develop until as late as our 20s!), the effects of trauma on children, and how depression and anxiety can affect how they present in the asylum procedure.  This work underpinned her contributions to UNHCR’s final report of the project and her chapter in the training manual.

Pink Sherbert, Creative Commons

CSEL’s research initially focused only on adults seeking asylum, but over the years we often had requests for equally sound research about children. Thanks to the Credo project we were able to engage Zoe, a specialist in children and young people, to allow us to cover this less well understood group.

Zoe’s re-appearance from her maternity leave last week also marked our successful bid for funding for Zoe to write up and submit her work for peer-review and publication in the scientific literature.  Once her two papers have been published in high-impact scientific journals they will be available for citing and using in decision-making, case-work, training, and support work for young people in need of protection from persecution.

As with our adult research, through the Evidence into Practice training workshops and other presentations and ad hoc training, it will be crucial for us to be able to disseminate this work on unaccompanied children seeking asylum as widely as possible - to ensure that decision making for them is also based on the best quality evidence available. We will need to secure support to maintain our capacity to do this. If you can help us undertake and maintain this work, please get in touch.

Meaningful and Credible: Researching *With* Refugee Women

At CSEL we're not only interested in conducting and disseminating research, to improve the fairness of decision making, but also in exploring ways to ensure the quality of research findings, and the integrity of research processes. As part of this enquiry, the Evidence into Practice project is exploring the issue of participation of refugee women in research projects.

How can researchers involve refugee women more in the development, design and delivery of research into refugee women’s experience? Why should they? What challenges do participatory approaches pose to the need to balance meaningful involvement by marginalised stakeholders, with the production of reliable, credible research findings? What can be learned from the community sector to help find answers to these questions? These are some of the questions that have emerged through the preparation for our roundtable on Researching With Refugee Women, to be held later this year.

Photo from Participate2015

To explore these questions I’ve been reading some of the literature evaluating the vast experience of participation in the community sector, the user involvement movement, and the international development field. Grassroots community activists have been using participatory methodologies for many decades to support marginalised people to be meaningfully involved in decision making and research that affects their lives. What can more conventional academic researchers learn from this literature?

In May I presented these questions and some of this learning from the community sector at a conference in Paris on Producing Knowledge on Migration. It was an exciting chance to raise these issues with migration researchers, and hear their concerns about ‘participation’ and participatory approaches. These included worries about the integrity of the 'participation'; differences in objectives of researchers and stakeholders; and a loss of objectivity and quality of findings. Many of these concerns have been explored in depth in the community sector - it seems to me there’s a real need to share the knowledge gained outside academia with those working within.

The questions we are exploring in this strand of work raise exciting challenges for conventional researchers. They also open up space to suggest possibilities for new ways of working, and opportunities to support the empowerment of refugee women. This is an important objective for those working on refugee women’s issues, whether as practitioners or researchers, and I’m looking forward to convening the roundtable in October to discuss it further. To find out where we get to, watch this space! c.cochrane@csel.org.uk