Ricky Talks about Fieldwork

Ricky describes why he thinks working as a team on the photographic project at Bankside Hostel was a good idea.

"I knew some of the residents there. I knew some of them already."

If you are already friends with people you want to do research with, it can save a lot of time. They might trust you if they know you well. Of course, doing research with your friends can also be difficult. For example, friends usually do not want to upset each other and so they might not tell you things that are important to the research.

“Because when we were doing the interviews we let people go at their own pace . . . If people wasn’t in the mood to do it we just left them and worked with someone else. Yeah. I don’t think people like to be forced to do things they don’t want.”

Maybe Ricky found it easier to tell how people were feeling because he already knew some of the people he was working with. Ricky had met them at a day centre. The woman who runs the Hostel also knows Ricky and trusts him.

“Because you just couldn’t take anyone into the hostel. I think you had to get permission for me, from the woman that runs Bankside, to be involved yeah. She knew me. I’d met her before.”

This also helped when Steve and Ricky started taking photographs.

“I think the staff were wondering what Steve was doing. When they saw him, when they saw him taking pictures at the beginning. What was going on?”

Of course, there are lots of practical reasons why working in a partnership is a good idea.

“I think two heads are better than one.”

And Ricky brings to the project things from personal experience that Steve maybe does not have. For example:

“I was involved in what was going on in the local authority – what was going on with the services – that helped.”

Ricky also wonders whether a person with a learning disability will understand other people with learning disabilities better than people without a learning disability.

“They would have a better understanding of the person, wouldn’t they?”

However, when asked if he thinks this is true of the project in Bankside Hostel, he says that there are other important issues to think about as well:

“Some of them got to know Steve before me so he knew them well.”

Ricky also thinks that the people living in the hostel might have felt happier talking to a person with a learning disability.

“It may be that they feel a bit more comfortable with the person asking the questions. They might think that a researcher asking questions is making reports about them . . . They might be asking themselves, why is he writing about me, why is he asking me these questions?”

Again, Ricky doesn’t think this was true of his work with Steve in Bankside Hostel.

“I think they felt the same. I think they felt the same with both of us. They usually see us together, didn’t they, not separate. They never saw us separately. Usually together. So you can’t really tell because we were together.”

Ricky does not want to say that people in the Hostel felt more comfortable with him than with Steve. Maybe that is because he does not want to hurt Steve’s feelings. But if you look carefully at what Ricky says it may be because he does not really know whether people in the Hostel felt more comfortable with him. As he says: “you can’t really tell because we were together.”

Ricky is pleased that he has worked on the photographic project in Bankside Hostel.

“It was a challenge and for the experience. To get a sense of what it is like to live in a hostel. To live with so many people – yeah – with a big group of people. To see how I would get on, how people get on, in big groups – yeah. It was an interesting challenge . . . and I got experience of research.”