BU Research Blog

St Deny’s Activity Group presents at Community Voices Webinar on Wednesday,11th June 12-13pm. The June community Webinar will welcome Anne Cato and Paulette Julius from St Denys Activity Group to share insight on activities they do to improve mental health and wellbeing to members of their community, as well as their involvement with cancer awareness and research activities.

You are warmly welcomed to the next research process seminar. Hosted by the Faculty of Media and Communication but open to all.

Culturally Responsive Focus Groups: Purposes, Practices, and Possibilities

I will explore the purposes and practices of culturally responsive (CR) focus groups as a powerful qualitative research method, based on my book, Focus Groups: Culturally Responsive Approaches for Qualitative Inquiry and Program Evaluation (Hall, 2020). Culturally responsive focus groups go beyond traditional approaches by intentionally centering the cultural contexts, lived experiences, and knowledge systems of participants—especially those from historically marginalized communities.

Participants will gain insight into what makes a focus group culturally responsive and how this orientation influences decisions across the research design, from recruitment and protocol development to facilitation and analysis. I will outline when and why CR focus groups are particularly valuable, and I’ll share key considerations for their successful implementation, including attention to power dynamics, group composition, language, and cultural humility.

About the speaker

Jori N. Hall is a President’s Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Hall’s research is concerned with social inequalities andenhancing the robustness of social science research methodologies. Her scholarly pursuits address issues of research methodology, cultural responsiveness, and the nuanced interplay of values and privilege across evaluation, education, and health domains. Hall has published numerous peer-reviewed works in scholarly venues. She is also the author of the acclaimed book “Focus Groups: Culturally Responsive Approaches for Qualitative Inquiry and Program Evaluation.” Notably, she was honored as a Leaders of Equitable Evaluation and Diversity (LEEAD) fellow by The Annie E. Casey Foundation. She was also the Co-Editor-in-Chief for the “American Journal of Evaluation.”

About the research process seminar series:

The purpose of this research seminar series is different to your typical research seminar and conference presentation. Instead of presenting the results and outcomes of research, we want to share good practices around the process of doing research. This might often involve a focus on research methods but it also includes aspects of publishing, writing, time management, career management etc.

The idea here is that the speaker takes us through the anatomy of the project or approach focussing particularly on the process – the challenges, the successes, and the failures. For the audience, we walk away with a practical application of a method or approach we may not be familiar with or may not have applied in this way before. Our ambition is to make us all better researchers as a result.

2-3pm, Tuesday 24^th June on Zoom

Register here: https://bournemouth-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/buiws7xORiCEX-RzyGvpDA

And if you want the recording but can’t make the event then please register and I will send it to you.

all the best

Dan

You are warmly welcomed to this week’s research process seminar.

Thinking about epistemology – where do we start as researchers and how to make that word more exciting than it sounds?

When we approach research, do we have an overarching structure of objectives that keeps us on topic and helps us to keep our work focused and efficient ? Instinctively, we know what we are trying to do, but so often there will be forks or bumps in the road, and some wider structural architecture is useful to help us negotiate those. We have a number of traditional choices as researchers, and while these are well suited to some types of research, they are lacking for some others. So this talk suggests a pragmatic option for media research, and one that adds value and the dimension of explanation for our work.

About the speaker:

Professor Richard Thomas is the Head of the School of Culture and Communication at Swansea University. In this role, he oversees the operations of the subject areas of English Literature, Applied Linguistics, Modern Languages, Welsh, History, Classics and Media. His research concerns the quantifying and qualifying of the trends and patterns in the coverage of economics, business, finance, politics and conflict by a range of news outlets ranging from TV and radio to online blogging and social media. He is the co-author of “Reporting Elections: Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage” and has published many other journal articles and book chapters. He was the CO-Investigator in a joint Cardiff University/Swansea University project examining Alternative Political Online News. He has also been engaged in other research commissioned by and working with, media regulators. He is the Global Chair of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree Advisory Board, working with journalists from across the world.

Tuesday 3^rd June at 2pm

Please register in advance here: https://bournemouth-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/AjyvCtXkS2q5XClHiqBMOQ

And if you cannot make it but want the recording then please register.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bournemouth-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82472410837?pwd=Q2jFktKc9a80cka4ytnQ5QQEA8fzaz.1

Meeting ID: 824 7241 0837
Passcode: 8a7?!k5R