Researching everyday experiences of COVID-19 in racialised landscapes of care and caring

There is a strange relationship between a research interviewer and interviewee, one where the researcher asks the research participant to trust them with the details of intimate and important moments of their lives. In a study like ours, which researches the impact of COVID-19 on racially minoritised communities, care and caring, participants shared with us their daily routines of care, their experiences of racism and their life journeys.

Our research focuses on the care of racially minoritised older people in Coventry and Leicester. They belong to different cultural, social and linguistic communities. Early on, we realised how important language is to understanding the experiences of COVID-19 for these communities. Language is the vehicle of communication, a marker of engagement with the social environment, and a resource for accessing help. We realised that we cannot do research on COVID-19 without addressing the issue of language(s) in our work.

For some of our participants, English was a second or third language and for some, their English was only functional - enough to get through their daily lives having learnt to navigate the systems, and sign their name, but not enough to be able to read study information that was only in English. We sought to recruit to the study in as inclusive a way as possible, by creating information leaflets in the first languages of research communities. However, distributing written information, even in multiple languages, only worked up to a point. Many might not have had access to education in their countries of origin: for example, older women now receiving care support, who had had to drop out of school as children to care for multiple family members; or younger women now working as carers, who had never finished primary school because they had to flee from war as children. To include these and others’ voices, we worked with local, trusted community organisations, who could verbally communicate our study information in multiple languages.

In the interviews, we recorded participants’ own narratives about their experiences of care during the pandemic. Our qualitative, feminist methodological approach meant that we focused on understanding not only what participants did in relation to care (and how this might have changed during the pandemic) but also how they felt about what they did, and how the wider context, across both space and time, might have shaped their lived experiences. Unsurprisingly, participants preferred to communicate such complexities in their first languages.

For example, in one interview, when Shahnaz asked about the age of the research participant in English, the participant simply gave her a number. But when Shahnaz switched to speaking in Punjabi, the telling of age uncovered a life history which revealed the poor birth records of a women born in colonial India, and who had different ages put down by well-meaning people, all attempting to help her. For the rest of the interview, Shahnaz’s tongue stumbled over the topics, using her own mother tongue of Patwari (itself an offshoot of Punjabi) to ask questions, as the participant shared her experiences.

We couldn’t just work in English if we wanted to capture the rich details of these narratives in our study.

Other interviewees also switched between languages to add depth and nuance to their stories, which would otherwise have been missing. We couldn’t just work in English if we wanted to capture the rich details of these narratives in our study. Where we didn’t possess the language knowledge ourselves, we worked with interpreters so we could interview people in different languages, from Gujarati to Somali. In these interviews, participants talked about the material and emotional challenges of caring during lockdowns; of ongoing difficulties accessing care when information and support are only given in English; of how the panic, isolation and empty shelves at the start of the pandemic echoed earlier traumatic experiences of wartime displacement and migration. Thanks to the interpreters’ skills, research participants were able to share these poignant and significant experiences in their preferred languages, using their own words.

participants talked about the material and emotional challenges of caring during lockdowns; of ongoing difficulties accessing care when information and support are only given in English

The inclusion of interpreters also changes the power dynamics in a research interview. It can shift some of the power from the researcher to the participant: the researcher loses the privilege of understanding the language being spoken by the research participant and the interpreter and feels for a moment the vulnerability that our participants face every day, relying as they so often do on another to translate their words. This can help researchers think through issues of linguistic marginalisation, the vulnerability that this can produce and the importance of translation in our everyday lives.

While interpreters enable participants to speak more freely during interviews, we as researchers need to continue to work with linguists (translators) after the interviews are over. Linguists transcribe our audio recordings and translate them into high-quality English language transcriptions, so we can ensure the rich ethnographic material can be fully included in our data analysis. Because we placed particular importance on understanding interviewees’ stories in their own words, and because these were in-depth and complex, qualitative interviews, we needed, ideally, to work directly with (and of course fairly remunerate) highly skilled linguists. This is a time-consuming and so costly, but crucial, part of the research process. It is often not factored into UK-based research as it is too often presumed, even when working with racially minoritised communities, that participants can speak English and/or a better known ‘minor’ language such as Punjabi or Urdu. While academia often aspires to speak to silences in research, we should be mindful that we contribute, however inadvertently, to the process of silencing when we only fully include the voices of those who are conversant in the dominant language. To truly fill the silences and centre those who are multiply marginalised, research funding and processes must allow for all voices to be heard.

Blog post by Shahnaz Akhter and Jayanthi Lingham