“I Feel Like I am Part of Something Bigger Than Me”: Methodological Reflections From Longitudinal Online Participatory Research

Abstract

This article details methodological reflections and implications for future work from an innovative, participatory research project that started life during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020. We reflect on the practice, ethical considerations, and challenges of this (necessarily) online participatory research program, which featured intensive, prolonged collaboration with parents/carers living on a low income within the UK. We discuss the ethical-epistemological foundations of the work, specifically a feminist ethics of care and reciprocity, and present our unique methodological approach, detailing how technology was used to collaborate with a diverse, nation-wide community of parents/carers. We discuss our own and participants’ reflections, including the distinctive complexities and advantages of conducting participatory research online, and also the challenges of upholding an ethics of care in an online, participatory space. We highlight the time intensive nature of this work and argue that, within the academy, more needs to be done both to recognize this and to find ways to create space within it for documenting and learning from innovations in the methodology pursued. We conclude with reflections on the new possibilities that emerge when translating participatory principles to online spaces—learnings with clear relevance for others interested in pursuing these approaches.