PhD Candidate Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Overview: This presentation highlights the experiences of twelve low-income lone mothers that engaged with a researcher for six-weeks via text messaging to share their experiences accessing support services. It demonstrates how text message-based research is congruent with feminist research practices and provides strategies for educators and researchers interested in this method.Proposal text:
Background: Difficulties accessing high quality data on vulnerable populations presents large barriers when advocating for change to make policies, programs, and service delivery more effective, inclusive, and just (Rossiter & Ndekezi, 2021). However, the inclusion of rich qualitative accounts of marginalized groups can be limited by traditional data collection methods (Twiss et al., 2020).
The use of text messaging as a data collection method has increased in popularity for collecting responses to standardized questions (Premkumar et al., 2019; Raento et al., 2009; Twis et al., 2020). Studies demonstrate numerous benefits of text message-based research including low costs, the ability to collect rich data in a timely manner, the convenience of response for participants, good response rates, and participant preference to traditional data collection tools (Chang et al., 2014; Rempel et al., 2014; Twis et al., 2020). The empirical support for text-based data collection to gather responses to standardized questions provided solid rationale to pivot this strategy to collect open-ended responses.
This presentation highlights the experiences of a group of busy low-income lone mothers engaging with a researcher (a busy mother herself) via text to share their open-ended experiences accessing community support services. Further, it demonstrates the multiple ways this method is congruent with feminist research practices and provides learnings for feminist educators and researchers interested in this method.
Methods: Participants (n = 12) were asked to submit texts and pictures via SMS and MMS that represented their reflections, observations, and experiences accessing community support services over a 6-week period. After their 6-week engagement, participants were asked to complete a six-question evaluation of the research processes. Two questions were asked of the data collected from the evaluation. First, what were participants overall perceptions and experiences of the open-ended text message data collection? And second, what did participants value within their text message interactions with the researcher?
Informed by a feminist provisioning theoretical framework (Neysmith et al., 2012), data was analyzed following Braun and Clarke’s (2022) six phases of reflective thematic analysis.
Results: Participants provided positive feedback about sharing their experiences via text messaging. They found the method easy and convenient, that it facilitated accurate representation, and that it nourished a sense of familiarity and comfort. Participants shared that their engagement provided emotional support and opportunities for reflection.
With respect to the research processes, participants felt the 6-week time frame for the study “was just right” (Claire). They found prompts helpful, and necessary for engagement, and appreciated text message responses that were validating and friendly. Further, the clear guidelines provided on the processes of the project, and the nature of the text-based relationship with the researcher, were received as helpful.
Conclusion: This paper underscores conclusions in the literature that text messaging has tremendous potential as a data collection method (Twis et al., 2020), while demonstrating ways in which it is particularly well-suited to feminist research designs. Implications for education and practice are then described.
Learning Objectives:
To gain knowledge of the results of a qualitative study examining mothers experiences engaging in a text-message based research study.
To gain an understanding of how text message-based research skills is congruent with feminist research practices.
To learn practical strategies for utilizing text-message based research methods through a feminist lens.