115 – Research Methods Support Teams

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a Social Impact Scientist and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi, David.

[00:00:12] David: Hi, Lucie. What are we discussing today?

[00:00:15] Lucie: The team we now have in West Africa as part of the research method support grant that we have for the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems.

[00:00:26] David: Thank you, yes, and this is coming off the back of our recent trip where we went to Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali to support these workshops.

[00:00:37] Lucie: To run the workshops and to support the projects in those different countries, yep.

[00:00:41] David: Yes. We were there running a research method support workshop, bringing in ideas of qualitative methods, mixed methods, artificial intelligence in the context of agroecology research. And my big takeaway from this, there were lots of wonderful things that came away, but I was really pleased with the team we’ve now got in place. And it really felt like we’re somewhere new, which is exciting. I’m so grateful for where we’ve got to and particularly for the role you’ve played in building that team and supporting them to grow in the way that they’re really now stepping up into a role, which I think is so exciting.

[00:01:24] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:01:24] David: Able to support projects and able to take ownership for a lot of the work they need to be doing. It’s great.

[00:01:30] Lucie: In previous episodes, we’ve talked about the training scheme that we have where people start as interns, and then the people who are more suited to our team, they can perhaps have an extended internship, what did they become? A research method apprentices.

[00:01:47] David: Yes. And then junior fellows.

[00:01:49] Lucie: Yes. And so we currently have just one junior fellow, no, we basically have people at all of the different levels at the moment.

[00:01:56] David: Yes. And the thing which is so interesting, this is something which has emerged. I’ve been in this role for over 10 years now, supporting projects in the West African region specifically, but more globally as well. But Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have these agroecology projects where we support their research by training in research methods, by helping with research design, by helping with the analysis, by challenging and pushing people to be more ambitious in line with the program objective.

We have a very varied role, and our role, specifically when I started, involved a lot of hands on support. And a lot of that was with what I would call the basics. It’s data collection, being able to use tools like ODK for digital data collection was some of the early trainings that I gave because that was some of the need, data visualization, when people had data, particularly this more complex data coming from larger trials, how to visualize that data, how to look at it to actually draw understanding and learning. Data cleaning, working with data, being able to get data ready for analysis.

A lot of those skills, which are really basic skills in some sense for research were really valued. And they were valued by the projects in general, even if a lot of the work had tended to be with students who were working on the project or with various counterparts, because not all the projects are within research organisations. So we worked with farmer federations, we worked with all sorts of different institutes and organisations.

And although that support was valued, I was always conscious that it was never enough, because me going into the region a few times a year was never enough to really build the critical mass with the skills that were supporting projects. Some projects took those skills, they embedded them, and they really ran with it, but others needed more support.

[00:04:15] Lucie: And this was all though before you started IDEMS anyway?

[00:04:19] David: This was predating IDEMS. And of course part of the motivation for IDEMS was to make some of the skills that we were bringing more scalable. From within a UK university, it’s very difficult to build local structures in West Africa.

So once IDEMS existed and we started to be able to support local structures and think about these sorts of distance internship programs and so on, to be able to build that local capacity, that’s when we started thinking about and trying to create these other approaches and building the local capacity to step in.

It’s been a long journey, as these always are, but it was amazing to be there with the teams. We’ve now got a team in place in Niger, in Burkina Faso, and Mali, where I was feeling, okay, now what? We were ready for the next phase, because we’ve been spending a long time, I spent a long time doing things myself. Spent a long time trying to think, how do we build a team? We’ve now got small teams in place in all three countries.

[00:05:28] Lucie: By small teams, in most of the countries it’s one person!

[00:05:30] David: Exactly. It’s a very small team, but they have some skills, they now have some expertise which they can bring, and particularly these basic skills which are needed so widely, they’re really well placed to start supporting that part of the training.

[00:05:49] Lucie: And they have already been engaging, the researchers are already appreciating them, seeing how they can be of value to their projects. I think that was really nice too, I mean like with our most recent hire, I’m not sure if it’s a hire, our most recent team member.

[00:06:04] David: Apprentice. She’s been made an apprentice, so our most recent apprentice.

[00:06:08] Lucie: So even in the workshop the researchers were sort of encouraging other people to make use of her, to ask for her support, which was really nice to see, especially as she had only just joined the team.

[00:06:18] David: Exactly. Yeah, she’d gone through an internship and actually her internship had been with one specific project where she was supporting them and as she has just grown into this role, that team promoted her to everyone else in a way which was wonderful.

[00:06:30] Lucie: And it’s in a way that, if we do it, it’s one thing, but if a project says, no, we’ve had the experience, I think that has a lot more meaning.

[00:06:40] David: And it’s something where, again, this slow and steady progress towards building local capacity to take over the roles that we have been playing, but don’t need to play. That’s a big raison d’etre in some sense for IDEMS, is to be able to build others’ capacity to fill the gaps that we identify and fill initially ourselves. And it’s really interesting, this particular research methods gap, it’s huge, it’s everywhere.

[00:07:13] Lucie: It’s everywhere, exactly. I think that’s really key.

[00:07:15] David: It’s not just in low resource environments. It is something which we play similar roles and as do others in the UK with colleagues at Oxford in their areas, they need research method support. And there aren’t enough people who are playing those roles, partly because if you’re an academic statistician or data scientist, well, the research methods support needed by others doesn’t advance your career. And this is an interesting mismatch, that role is one which is surprisingly non academic, or seemed to be non academic, because you’re not pushing the boundaries necessarily of data science or statistics.

But you have a skillset as an applied data scientist or an applied statistician, to really add value. But that mismatch between, well, what’s the career pathways, do you now switch over and become a social scientist with good statistics skills or agricultural scientist with good statistics skills where you can now really use those skills in a particular domain? Or are you going to sort of play this sort of second fiddle role in research support, which is a real gap.

And if you take that into other contexts, that gap gets larger and larger, because the nature of the disciplines means that if you want to proceed as a statistician or a data scientist, you really aren’t necessarily being exposed to the needs of partners. You’re not being taught in any of these disciplines, how to really serve others in that applied way.

And this is not a new problem. My father was an applied statistician whose career started in the sort of 60s and 70s, and they were talking about this problem there, and they were one of the very first applied statistics departments in the UK not to be based in mathematics, but to be based in agriculture, related to biometry. And that battle was being fought then, 50 years ago.

It’s something which is so interesting that this still hasn’t been, and I’ve heard of these battles happening time and time again in Australia, in the US, in the UK, all around the world, where the value of applied data science, statistics, is recognised, but not really integrated into academic systems and keeps coming back.

I have some colleagues in the US who have built these amazing laboratories doing applied statistics and data science with partners, and this is seen as new, relatively, it’s 40 years after the first instances of this that I know. But it’s still seen as new because it is needed. And they are struggling, it’s hard because the need is there, the need is obvious, but actually building it into systems and institutions is not obvious.

So for us to have our little team starting in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, and for them to be growing into this role, first, we need to be very grateful for the grant we have, which enables us to build this, which is one of the most enjoyable grants that I’ve ever worked on because it’s so challenging, it’s constantly challenging in ways which I find really stimulating, but it also has the freedom for us to try and reimagine how to deliver this better.

Our role is always to try and figure out how we can better support the partners. And that is where I’ve loved this evolution towards getting our little teams, building their capacity to build others capacity and to try and actually build these structures into the way we offer support.

[00:11:22] Lucie: And just coming back, you’ve been talking a lot there about data science and stats.

[00:11:27] David: Yes.

[00:11:27] Lucie: Which is only one aspect of research method support.

[00:11:30] David: Of course. I apologise, I am neglecting the anthropology, the social science aspects.

[00:11:37] Lucie: No, but even the right research methods question, I think it’s important to say that the team that we are growing in West Africa, they all have mathematical backgrounds, so they are very much suited to that data crunching and making use of that sort of hard data, let’s call it.

[00:11:53] David: But we’re trying our best to expose them to qualitative methods.

[00:11:58] Lucie: Exactly. And to the bigger thinking that all of the projects and all researchers also benefit in terms of thinking through what questions, what sort of methods will actually help us get the best data in order to really give us answers to our research questions.

[00:12:12] David: And I have to confess that I still see the biggest gap as being the gap of the skills to work with data with an understanding and a desire to think about it from a very qualitative approach. But in some sense in the region I know of quite a lot of very good social scientists in different ways. And yet what I know of very few is people with good data skills who are interested in real questions and problems because that’s not part of the training.

And this is what it comes back to that, in some sense, when you have training in qualitative methods, you can gain an appreciation for quantitative methods as well and how they come in. But it’s very rare for people who are on the data side, statistics, data science, to be exposed to the value of qualitative methods and the human element. And that’s what I feel is really lacking to be able to get these good collaborations.

I think, and I don’t know this as a fact, but I feel that there are enough people going through with good anthropological, sociological skills, who would be open to collaborating with people with good data skills, if the people with data skills were interested in building those bridges. And that’s what I don’t see at the moment. And I’m so excited that I think we’re beginning to create that, and to create that sort of place for these people who could help bridge into this.

[00:13:58] Lucie: Yeah, no, I hadn’t thought of it like that. That’s interesting. And in the recent workshops we did I definitely saw some people who were clearly resisting and not understanding the potential value of other forms of research to their own work.

[00:14:15] David: Yeah.

[00:14:16] Lucie: So yeah, what you’re saying speaks to me.

[00:14:19] David: And I think one of the things is that that’s always going to be the case. There’ll always be those who resist this, but we know that in the really important questions that are facing this moment, no individual research method is going to be enough.

[00:14:32] Lucie: And this is what’s so interesting too about the projects with which we work, that they are dealing with really complex challenging questions and situations.

[00:14:41] David: And because of the nature of the long term funding, and the patient approaches, which asks people to sort of evolve and to go beyond what they’ve done in the past in challenging and interesting ways, the teams are confronted. Our big problem now is no longer just entomology, but we need to actually think in terms of societally, how to get our results out and how to build these sorts of solutions into societies.

And so that evolution is something which a lot of the projects who have been part of the community of practice for longer, they’ve experienced that evolution. And now we’re trying to help them to solidify the research methods, to be able to get the teams with the breadth of skills to support them.

It’s a long process. And where we’re going, who knows? Is this something which will remain a small set of projects, or is this something which will become a model for others? That’s always been my hope, that we’ll actually find ways and that the ways we’re finding are becoming models for others to think about how to do research differently.

And even just the role that we’ve played, and as I say, I’ve played it for over 10 years, the group that we’re part of has been doing this for 20 years now almost. Not quite, it’s 18 I believe, I think it was 2006 that they started as well.

[00:16:07] Lucie: In West Africa?

[00:16:08] David: So West Africa started in 2006 and I believe so did the research method support.

[00:16:13] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:16:14] David: It might have been 2008 in which case I’m afraid it’s only 16 years or so, but it’s still, it’s a long time.

[00:16:21] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:16:22] David: And I’ve only been involved since 2014, so you know, a mere 10 years, just over. But within that, there is this element that I don’t know other research programmes that do this. That, as well as giving financial support, are giving real methodological support in a way which is building the coherence of the different research partners and, again, the communities of practice. We mentioned that 2006 was the date the West African community of practice was born, and it’s going to be 20 years in a couple of years time, which is really exciting.

And that process of actually having these communities of researchers working together with people coming in and out, having this support, so it’s not just financial support, it’s also methodological support, and it’s not just our methods support, it’s other forms of support. There’s been leadership training. There’s been so many other components which come in to serve and to enhance the research and this long term approach to actually recognising that if you’re wanting to get local institutions really involved and engaged, you’re going to have to build over a long period of time the capacity for them to do high class research, to be able to integrate into sort of global research norms, and do really valuable research which aligns with their needs in the local context.

It’s a fantastic collaboration to be a part of, and a lot of our learning as an institution within IDEMS has come out of observing this community of practice, which, as I say, predates IDEMS for a long time and has been a lot of the inspiration behind what we want IDEMS to be. We want IDEMS to be able to contribute to these collaborations in this way.

We’ve deviated a little bit from our local teams.

[00:18:29] Lucie: Exactly, I was just going to bring it back because I think the oldest team member has been with us for about four years.

[00:18:36] David: Yeah. Going through an internship programme, an apprenticeship, now coming to the end of a junior fellowship. And what’s really interesting there is that we have, since last year, been discussing what next? And there’s been evolutions there in terms of thinking about, well, should this lead to them setting up their own sort of enterprise where they’re doing the research method support and they’re making a business out of that in their local context, or social enterprise out of that, or just an organisation that does this.

And very recently that’s shifted. There’s been a particular project where suddenly they’ve got more deeply involved and it might lead to a PhD. And this was something where, you know, I’m an academic at heart. I love, I love research. I love being able to sort of immerse yourself in that, but I know it’s not for everyone.

And this is a very interesting case where there wasn’t a point before where I felt, yeah, PhD is going to be the right route. You don’t need a PhD to do quite a lot of this. There’s very good examples of people who do fantastic research method support at the highest level, and have never done a PhD.

But what’s really interesting to me here is that actually in this particular case, what Issouf has done is he’s got to the place where he’s starting to ask deeper questions, where really to dig into them he would need the time. And that’s exactly what a PhD gives you. That opportunity to spend time digging more deeply into specific questions.

And the nature of the support he’s trying to do for a specific project, he wants to go deep. Now, in our role, it’s not about going really deep into an individual. It’s about being able to offer bits of support to many. But that desire to go deeply into the support for an individual and understand exactly how their needs require innovations in research methods and the way we’re working with data and how we’re thinking about data, because this is a farmer group, rather than a research group.

And so thinking about data in their context and how this relates to research or doesn’t and so on is a really interesting set of questions. But that’s exactly what a good research or PhD topic could be. And so he’s found himself at the end of this sort of journey of four or five years, getting to the point where I’m saying, oh, you’re ready for a PhD. You’re ready to go. And that’s really exciting and really interesting that that journey has taken him there.

[00:21:08] Lucie: Yep, yeah, it’s really nice to see.

[00:21:12] David: And of course that research could be very well aligned with what we want to be able to do as an organisation as well, offering deeper support in those contexts and then we might need to then find ways to get new people to be coming through offering the broader support, he might be going deeper. Wonderful way for our team to evolve. And very different, I think, from what’s happening in the other countries, in the other cases.

Exactly. So one of the surprises in Mali was that instead of having one representative for the country, there may be three.

We did have eight interns start with us, and they were all very good in so many different ways. And of course, we couldn’t take all eight on. We needed one to fill the apprentice role and grow into this. But what’s been very interesting is that two of the other interns, they’re really engaged and they were really good.

[00:22:09] David: They weren’t the right person to fit into that apprentice role at this point in time, but they’re really good. And we’ve had discussions with them and what we’ve actually reached the conclusion is that actually extending their internships further, you know, actually is a win because they feel they’re learning so much.

And of course, they’re adding value to the team. And now we have our new apprentice who has these extra responsibilities and she’s now supported. She’s not just doing it on her own. And so this is a really exciting different initiative. You know, if we could have more apprentices, it would have been wonderful to extend that and maybe that’s something we’ll try and fit into the future.

But right now, what we can do is we can say okay, under the apprentice, we can have a couple of extra ongoing internships. And obviously, you guys are much better candidates for that than anyone else because of the experience. And so if it’s continuing to serve a mutually beneficial role, having these extended internships is something we haven’t done before in this way. But it’s something we can try out.

It’s very interesting how these things are evolving and we’re still not at the stage where we’re, how would I put it? We’re not at all at a stage where we know how to scale this. But what we do know right now is that the little teams that we’re building, they’re starting to build well. And that we have found ways to support individuals to grow and to grow into roles where they can take responsibility, where they can start really being useful in their contexts.

There’s been trainings within the agricultural research institutes, within universities, within of course collaborations with the farmer groups and farmer organisations. And the roles these team members are playing locally, we could never play remotely. They’re just there on the ground, able to get involved.

And they’re learning so much. This is why these two are keen to stay on, because they recognise how much they’ve learned from the experience.

[00:24:18] Lucie: It’s going to be interesting to see in the, I think we’ve got another year and a half on this phase of the grant. And so it’s going to be interesting to see how things evolve within that time.

[00:24:29] David: Absolutely. I feel that is long enough for us to really think through what this next evolution could become.

[00:24:36] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:24:37] David: And it’s really quite exciting to try and see this. So we haven’t yet mentioned Niger. We’ve mentioned Burkina and Mali, and Niger is really interesting because that’s a place where we feel they’re really ready for a whole new set of interns to come in, supporting… He’s still an apprentice, but he must be coming to the end of his apprenticeship soon. It’s next year, I think August. And so he’s really got to the stage where he’s ready to mentor others. He played a key role mentoring the Mali interns. And is now ready to have his own set of interns working with him, because the demand for his time has really increased.

[00:25:13] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:25:14] David: This is great. This is exactly what we want. How do we start building teams in these countries to do this rather than just having individuals?

[00:25:22] Lucie: Exactly. Great, well, thank you very much, David. And we’ll catch up no doubt on this again another time.

[00:25:29] David: Yes, absolutely. When things have moved forward again. Thank you.