Caring for Youth Participants: A Rationale for Care-Based Research Methodologies

• In Event: Caring and Being There: Toward a Framework for Care-Based Research With Youth in Schools

Abstract

In this conceptual presentation, we offer a framework for caring as a critical methodological component of school-based qualitative and ethnographic research, particularly when researchers are working with students from nondominant communities. We begin by articulating a definition for care-based research that draws from a range of disciplines, methodologies, and theoretical conceptualizations of care as well our own empirical studies. Then, we locate the need for care by detailing some of the historical challenges in educational research particularly with young people from nondominant communities as well as the dehumanizing effects of schooling itself for these youth.

Care-based research is both a method and practice that centers how researchers can actively attend to relationships with youth with care -- responding to their needs, offering close attention, and treating them with consideration, regard, and affection. Care as a method is in the choices researchers make in what they choose to collect and how they collect data, how they cultivate relationships with participants (Paris & Winn, 2014), and how they respectfully and care-fully engage in producing research that can contribute to or improve participants’ lives (Duncan-Andrade, 2007; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014). In other words, a care-based stance means research should not be designed to simply discover knowledge, but should be active and beneficial to the young people around which it is centered (Duncan-Andrade, 2007). Care as a practice is how researchers engage and relate to participants in caring ways. Practicing care, with youth in particular, requires that researchers adopt an orientation and stance that implicitly and explicitly tells the youth they matter, that researchers care about them as people (Noddings, 2005), and that researchers are willing to be vulnerable and take an unknowing stance to learning about their lives (Winn & Ubiles, 2011).

Much of the prior literature on care and education importantly focuses on relationships between students and their teachers or other adults (i.e., social workers, therapists, coaches) in the school building. This body of literature (e.g., Noddings, 2005; Rolon-Dow, 2005) has helped us understand the critically important role that caring relationships play in young people’s educational development given that schools can often be uncaring, isolating, and fraught places for youth from nondominant communities (Ferguson, 2000; Fine, 1999; Kirkland, 2013; Valenzuela, 1999). Authentic caring in these educational contexts requires attention to the fullness of youths’ lives, including the way their lives are shaped by their social identities and societal structures of oppression and who they are (and want to be) beyond their institutional role as ‘student’ (Rolon-Dow, 2005; Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006). We draw on these scholars’ work on care within youth-adult school-based relationships, as well as on more recent scholarship about “humanizing” research (Paris & Winn, 2014), in developing our conceptualization of care-based research.

Overall, this conceptual presentation provides a framework for care as a radical and necessary component of school-based research, and offers a lens with which to take in the lessons learned in the other five empirically and methodologically focused presentations.

Authors

• Veena Vasudevan, University of Pittsburgh

• Nora Gross, Boston College

• Katherine Clonan-Roy, Cleveland State University

• Pavithra Nagarajan, Teachers College, Columbia University