Process 2-4: Plan, prepare and conduct fieldwork

After the first session with the co-design crew, our sub-group met twice to prepare for fieldwork which was conducted between the 11th and 14th of February 2020. Our first Plan and Prepare session was an evening session on the 4th of February 2020 where we have:

  • Revisited the theme’s description for clarity
  • Started to identify people and places to conduct further fieldwork
  • Started discussing what we wanted to ask and the reasons behind our questions to make sure we stayed close to our objective: explore what Being Yourself at Work means for Corporate parents in the Falkirk Council.

This work was then completed during a morning session on the 10th February to consolidate our approach. We created the final version of our theme’s description, the people and places we wanted to meet, and assigned fieldwork tasks to the team. We have also narrowed down our focus of the project’s vision (Being Yourself at Work) by agreeing that this second round of fieldwork would be aimed at helping us find insights into the barriers/enablers to Falkirk Council staff in:

  • creating a relationship-centred culture 
  • providing the right resources, support and education that enables care-experienced people to grow and thrive 

Having defined the profile of people and places to approach in the Council, we refined our questions and connected them with our topic. The aims listed in the bullet points above informed our questions and a discussion about the type of information we expected to get (see image).

 

Before conducting our fieldwork, we have gained informed consent from those we wanted to interview or observe with an information sheet and a consent form. In total, we conducted eight interviews and produced two sets of fieldnotes from observations and conversations. The diversity of places and people visited included:

  • Mungo’s Secondary School: 1 interview with the Head of Pastoral Services, observation of two PSE classes S2 and S6;
  • Grangemouth Hub: observation and informal conversation with staff;
  • Tremana Care Home: 3 interviews with residential workers and supervisory residential workers;
  • Inclusion and Wellbeing Secondary: 2 interviews to staff members;
  • Sealock House – Additional Support Learning: 2 interviews with a social worker and a member of staff.

Additionally, we have looked into six existing case studies as a source of good practices at national and international levels. This information fed into our analysis filter 3 referring to enablers of our theme. The case studies looked at included: The 3Ps from Social Pedagogy; One Page profiles, Helen Sanderson Associates; Ways of working, Participle; Community Circles; Christopher’s Charity; Buurtzorg Healthcare.

 

All transcripts from the interviews, observation fieldnotes, and case studies were then analysed using our data filters.