 Good morning everybody it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you to the first webinar in our project changing research methods in covert 19 method suited or adapted to research in times of physical and social restrictions. We're going to be running for a couple of hours. And and if you are on social media and would like to tweet then we're using the hashtag covert ncrm as written on this front slide. My name is Rob Meckin. I'm a presidential fellow at the University of Manchester in the School of Social Sciences. And I've been on this project with two colleagues, Professor Melanie nine at the University of Southampton and Dr Andy coverdale also at the University of Southampton and they'll be introducing themselves. Slightly soon. So in terms of what we're going to do today. First of all, we'll have an introduction, an introductory and overview from the from myself and Andy. And then I'm going to invite a team, the in touch team and they're going to talk about adaptations and sensory material methods in covert 19. And then after five minutes of Q&A, I'll invite Poppy Gerard Abbott from the University of Edinburgh and she'll talk about transferring online value in covert 19 methodologies. Then we'll have a 10 minute break and then Melanie will take up a session on expressive methods and he will talk about survey methods and then I'll finish with secondary and secondary data analysis and then we'll have about 15 minutes of Q&A and then a brief next steps and closing. Obviously the timings are slightly out now that we've started a few minutes late but it gives you a rough idea of how we're going to go. So how we're running the meeting is we're running it as a webinar so all participants are muted in terms of your microphones and videos, partly because we're recording and the speakers have their videos and microphones enabled. Excuse me. And they've given consent for recording the session so any communication if you could use the chat function Mel and Andy are going to be surveying and responding to questions on the on the chat and in the Q&A sessions, they can check through what's come up and and we can put questions to the speakers at that time. So this is a part of NCRM we're affiliated with the National Center for Research Methods which is comprehensive training in research methods and NCRM is a UK wide organization funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and it delivers resources and a comprehensive program of online and face to face training, including core and advanced quantitative qualitative digital creative and mixed research methods. I officially started at NCRM in January 2020, just as NCRM was funded for five more years in its fourth phase so it now ends in 2024. And my proposal, and my interest still is to understand interdisciplinary collaboration infrastructure and innovation in the context of methods both in the social and natural sciences. So why, why have we got this project and what's the webinar, what's the position of the webinar we're, we're obviously in a very difficult period with social and physical restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways that that's unfolding and the kinds of societal and social changes that are happening, they're affecting our methods. And so a lot of the methods and practices that researchers have been doing and are comfortable with needed adapting need changing in order to keep research moving ongoing and keep progressing. There's been a huge amount of activity. In terms of blogs and support and crowdfunded documents and I'm sure lots of people will be aware for instance of Deborah Lupton's crowdsourced document which has been very useful to lots of people. So the background to the to the project and what we were interested in doing is is synthesizing some of that information and some of that support and providing a platform for sharing. So our project was had two main aims which were to synthesize the evidence available to the research community on how social research methods have been adapted for or may work in the pandemic conditions. To engage the research community within and beyond the Academy in learning and sharing positive methodological responses to and possibilities within the constraints of COVID-19 measures when conducting social research and just moving my head out of the way there. And so the project design. We, sorry, in terms of objectives we had, we wanted to stimulate sharing of the challenges and adaptations in terms of methods to conduct a rapid evidence review and a synthesis of emerging grey literature, and to produce and disseminate some guidance materials. And we had two work streams. The first was around the published evidence that was emerging, which is led by Melanie and a lot of the work was conducted by. Andy. So we have a rapid evidence review and a great literature review in that work stream. And in the engagement side, which is the side I was leading. We were looking at sharing experiences and resources through a series of workshops. And those two sides we were meeting every couple of weeks. And that's what we were, what we were doing and what we were finding in the different work streams. Mel and Andy came to, to all, all of the workshops between them. And so with them out of that we're making reports and co produced resources so lots of things were shared by participants in the workshops and guidance materials and these webinars as well, which this is the first as a second one in a couple of weeks. So I'd like to hand over to Andy briefly so he can just talk quickly about the rapid evidence review. Yeah, good morning there. Thanks, Rob. Good morning everyone so just a quick intro for me just to start with so I'm Andy Coverdale. I'm a research fellow at the Education School at the University of Southampton, and where I'm primarily doing participatory research with people with learning disabilities. And my main role on this project as as Rob mentioned was working with Mel on the the rapid evidence review which to talk about now. Next slide. Thanks, Rob. So, so yeah, developing our sort of protocol around this lots of explorative work and piloting of methods. You can see a summary of our searching for the literature that I won't go through all of that but you can have a look at some of the sort of the search terms that we used. I think the key thing with with rapid evidence reviews is that it's important to obviously adopt a very systematic and rigorous approach but also be prepared to make concessions and be flexible within the time constraints which in our case has been a six month project so for example I mean we set out search literature on comparable sort of crises like SARS and Ebola but that we found that wasn't particularly relevant. Thought about forwards and backwards in sort of citation searching that wasn't particularly effective in our 2020 sort of time span. You know we focused instead on like the hand searching of selected journals so it said it was very much about as I say that rigor but also being flexible around that as well. So on the next slide. I mean I won't go through these but you can see sort of the stages of filtering down the papers using inclusion exclusion criteria to get to those highly relevant and informative papers. We did reserve others that can help with the contextual information sort of help us map the literature more broadly and in terms of numbers I mean we're talking about roughly 800 papers or papers down to about 50 or 60 which is sort of ongoing so yeah and those with those final selected papers we did develop quite a rigorous quality criteria for evaluating them for the for the synthesis which is ongoing. We're still obviously doing that now to the final stages of the project. There was clear challenges with COVID and obviously how researchers have gone about creating solutions but we also found COVID has presented researchers with an impetus to create new research and adapt projects so interesting to obviously look at that dynamic and obviously we were very interested in how effective these examples have been as well. And then the final slide Rob. Thanks. So with a lot of the COVID related published literature is yet to come. But we did have examples of things being fast tracked, you know, and there's some examples I won't go through and you can see three examples there. Obviously we're evident from call for papers that there's more special issues to come this year but obviously the published literature is yet to catch up in many ways with obviously the typical literature sort of publishing cycle. And so lots more to come obviously this this year with with that. So it was important that we also tapped into the great literature. Obviously great opportunity to get things out fast. Rob's already mentioned Debra Lupton's crowdsource documents which was, which was widely distributed earlier in the year some really good blogs as well that we've come across that we've used as resources and obviously the great literature has informed and pointed us to some of the published literature to come. And yeah, and I would just add to again what Rob said you know throughout I think reviewing the literature the published and the great literature has has informed and been informed by the workshops and you know the wonderful people we've had on our workshops. And so the two strands the two work workflows have been very much interconnected. Thanks ever so much Andy that's that's great and I'll just give a little overview of the engagement work that we were doing so we ran eight online workshops from December to December last year. And these were on interviewing. That was particularly something that ESRC were interested the funder were interested in making sure that we got some guidance up quickly. And working with groups with additional challenges and participatory and deliberative methods we had a session on ethics and creative and sensory methods and then online ethnographic methods surveying longitudinal methods and finally we decided to have one on the 19 data and secondary data. And our aims were around knowledge exchange so we were inviting people who had had experience of adapting their methods in in the pandemic, either in an open project that have been running on, or they've been planning and working out how they were going to do a project on in the tangible conditions, and so they were offering support and sharing the different ways they found through the issues. And one of the key things that we developed was using a metaphor to explore people's experiences and using that as the foundation to kind of discuss and and talk about what people have been involved in and excuse me. And that's a sort of adapted a method from the steps center in Sussex, which is called rivers of life, where people represent their personal history as a as a river, and their engagement with the environment, and we turned this a little bit into the rivers of research. And people were participants were asked to create an image and think about their last year of their research experience, and to represent that in terms of a river and we had lots of lovely images and ways that people had taken that we offered a bit of guidance around kinds of features of waterways but people, you know, took it and played with it a lot in their own ways so we had lots of people using rivers as their own lives people traveling down rivers. People traveling up rivers we had dams and will pools and boats and all sorts, and, and different kinds of representations so by row drawings and collage and all sorts so it was a really nice way to to explore and it became turned into what had been a nice exercise became kind of the core of the, or a significant part of the workshops, which you know we had between five and 18 people at in the different workshops. And here's an image which was taken behind at the University of Surrey was gave us permission to share. Just to give you an indication of the kinds of things this is from her view as a PGR director and seeing PhD students navigating through the, through the, the river of the last year. So just the top line from the engagement really is there are lots of expertise and people are keen to share and discuss, and there are many researchers and similar situations who, whose expertise you can draw on, and, and seek out. We found that I'm partly because of the, the metaphorical method rivers kind of draw attention to pace and timing and speed. So that came out quite strongly in terms of how the long lockdown had affected methods and that the uncertainties that we're all facing. I need new research contingencies in terms of research design and how we're understanding how to how to deal with these kinds of uncertainties.