Participatory Action Research

Before you begin you will need to discuss which specific workers you will be interviewing.  Participatory action research is particularly critical to organising, campaigning and collective bargaining with both formal and informal sector workers. If the union wants to improve the union’s gender representation, one-to-one individual surveys of workers about gender issues could be helpful.  Or, if you are looking at expanding your education programme, you might want to conduct action research interviews with past and potential future participants in the union education programme.

The next step is to form a collective research team or teams.  Each research team then identifies which groups of workers to interview and discusses how they will contact these workers. The research team can have up to 7 people who are committed to doing the work.  Rank-and-file workers should be involved in the creation, decision-making, implementation, and analysis of the research. Union staff and leaders will need to participate so that they can gain an increased understanding of, and relationships with, the workers interviewed.

Once you have the collective research team(s) formed and they have identified the specific group of workers to focus on, the participants create their research instrument together, usually a survey questionnaire. The questionnaire or series of open questions gathers information about the workers, their situations at home and the nature of their work. It identifies the nature of the relationship with their employers or key decision-makers, their income/wage processes and the problems and issues they are facing. The questions may be related to the future action plans of the union or may be more general in nature.

The research groups then go into the field to conduct their surveys using their questionnaire.  It is important that these surveys are one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with each individual worker.  A location and time is decided where each worker feels safe either at their home, place of work, after work or during a break. Risks to the workers should be minimised. The survey interviews are conducted by other workers so as to ensure both individual skills development and to strengthen the collective knowledge. If it is not possible to meet in person, the interviews can be done by telephone or online, but this is not ideal as the ability to develop a relationship with the worker being interviewed is limited.

During the interview, you want the interviewee to trust you and to open up so that the information provided “tells you a story” about the worker. Conversation and bonding are encouraged between the interviewer and the interviewee. The interview should focus on information-gathering, not giving. Note should be taken of non-verbal signals, going “beyond the words” and creating a shared sense of empathy. 

The rights of the interviewees are important as a part of ethical research. The interviewee has a right of explanation. You will need to introduce yourself and explain what you are doing, the research project and request an interview. The interviewee also has the right to anonymity and confidentiality and the right to refuse both the entire interview and to answer particular questions.

Once the interviews are done, the research group(s) analyses the interview responses by entering the data into a spread sheet or adding up the responses. 

Participants analyse the data and identify the most pertinent or interesting correlations and present the survey results and any action plan ideas produced by the interviews with workers to union members and leaders.