Reflections on Peer Interviewing among Paid, Migrant, Live-in Carers in London

We have chosen to write about our experiences of conducting peer research among paid, migrant, live-in care workers in London. Live-in care is the stepchild of social care, and not a lot is known about it. The role of a live-in care worker is a unique employment arrangement where there are very few legal guidelines and a lack of expectations. From the perspective of the care worker, it involves being at work for twenty-four hours a day, with a couple of hours break normally at midday. Night calls are an expected part of the job. These features blur the boundaries of work and rest. Our project investigated the vulnerability of migrant, live-in, care workers to severe forms of labour exploitation related to deviations from standard working conditions such as working hours, leave entitlements, health and safety standards and decent treatment. Instead of academic researchers questioning a string of these individuals, the project team of academic and charity researchers decided to involve as interviewers those very people that they wanted to know more about. Three of the co-authors of this article, including the lead author, are live-in care workers themselves and were recruited as peer researchers to interview participants from their respective migrant communities. Both peer researchers and interviewees were paid for their participation. In this article, we reflect upon and write about our experience of conducting research that included these peer research interview techniques. We have used Kolb’s (2014) experimental learning cycle to structure our reflective approach. According to Kolb, learning arises from the interaction between four learning modes: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation. In his idealised model, observations and reflections arise from immediate or concrete experience. These reflections are assimilated and distilled into distinct concepts, from which new implications for action can be drawn. As a team of peer and academic researchers, we present extracts from our individual, written, reflections about our views related to the peer research interviewing techniques we used to gather data. We shared and discussed these reflections, taking notes to identify generalisable themes and acted upon some of the insights this generated as we negotiated the processes through which our research was finalised. Peer researchers are people with lived experience of the issue being studied who take part in directing and conducting the research (Lushey, 2017). Earlier studies of participatory research methods such as peer-to-peer interviewing, where the research tools are shaped by those with personal experience and understanding of the research context and share common experiences with the research participants, suggest that there may be specific benefits to this approach by, for example, enabling more nuanced data to be collected (Yang and Dibb, 2020). Interviewees may be prepared to speak more openly, the risk of misunderstandings can be reduced and the likelihood that issues of relevance to the participants are discussed may be improved. The participation of individuals not otherwise involved in policy research, perhaps due to barriers related to language or trust, can also be encouraged by engaging with participants identified through peer researchers’ personal and work networks. Live-in migrant care workers engaged in this research as paid peer researchers throughout the project. Our peer researchers were included in designing the research questions, identifying research participants, collecting data through peer-to-peer interviews and peer-facilitated focus groups, providing feedback on the analysis and contributing to the recommendations. This approach was adopted because the academic project team believed that live-in migrant care workers, through their experiences, had important insights to share related to the risks and drivers of labour exploitation in the care sector. This knowledge helped us to identify and shape better and more relevant policy solutions and, as the ones directly affected by these policies, we felt that live-in care workers should also be involved in shaping them. Most of the live-in carers who responded to our advertisement also wanted to advocate for change, share their experience and expertise, were prepared to comment upon reports and other outputs and were willing to speak directly to policymakers and the media. Our peer researchers were drawn from four communities: Hungary, Poland, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Fourteen semi-structured peer-interviews and two peer-led focus groups were conducted with and by live-in migrant care workers. Each peer researcher recruited up to five other care worker interviewees. All but one of the interview participants they recruited had worked as live-in carers either currently or recently, and one participant was employed as a live-out carer. Remote interviewing was a necessity due to the coincidence of this research with the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. However, it also facilitated contact between live-in care workers in their respective clients’ homes. Zoom video conferencing software was used to host the interviews. Three of the peer researchers, and co-authors of this article, interviewed each other to practice their research skills using a topic guide that had been co-developed during the training. These practice interviews offered the opportunity to test the interview questions in practice and receive some feedback on interviewing skills in a supportive environment before interviewing others outside the project team. Our peer researchers also received project team support throughout the project through post-interview debriefings and regular contact with a designated member of the project team through email and WhatsApp. Once peer researchers felt confident in so doing, other live-in migrant care workers were then interviewed. In the main, these interviews were conducted in the peer researchers’ and interviewees’ first languages. Interview participants were recruited by a variety of means, including peer researchers’ personal and work networks, social media and WhatsApp groups, a paid Gumtree advert and frontline organisations. This enabled us to hear from workers traditionally less likely to participate in research, including people who do not speak English and those who are undocumented. As we prepared to write this article, our peer researchers contributed written reflections on the peer interviewing process. Suzanne wrote, ‘I have been quite verbal on social media about issues that I came across in live-in care but felt quite powerless. Firstly, because nobody listened and secondly, most colleagues are comfortable or rather oblivious about their mistreatment—this research was something I was hoping for. I believe once there is more knowledge about the live-in carer and what is expected from them, a lot of questions will have to be asked and answered. Doing the interviews has highlighted the exploitation of live-in carers by companies who employ them/introduce them to clients. I believe that a live-in position is such a unique employment arrangement that there are very few to no guidelines or even clear boundaries of expectations. Carers aren’t enforcing them, because they are not sure of it either.’ Dominique described her experience, ‘Having worked as a migrant live-in carer for most of my adult life, I feel strongly about exploitation for myself and others individually, and us as a “class” of people; “migrants”. I enjoyed doing the interviews, listening to people’s experiences, so like my own, feeling like I was there with them. There were also moments that I felt frustrated on their behalf of the unfairness in some instances, however, feeling frustrated is a useful drive. It suggests there is much more to uncover.’ We shared and discussed these written reflections, one of us taking notes about our discussion as we identified more generalisable themes. We discussed how links were forged between interviewees, peer and academic researchers and the data collection issues that emerged in relation to the research design, the implications of the peer researcher role for interview dynamics, scheduling difficulties, problems identifying novel information and, as a result of these discussions, how the academic project team could involve peer researchers more closely in subsequent policy discussions. Interview participants were either friends of our peer researchers, or people who had responded to a posting on a closed, dedicated, live-in care Facebook group. Suzanne recalled how she was recruited by Agnes via a Facebook group dedicated to live-in carers, ‘I jumped at the chance as I have always felt that not a lot of information is available on this specific group from the social care sector and saw this as an important opportunity’. She also turned to Facebook to recruit participants, ‘Pursuing candidates amongst friends and posting on a closed dedicated to live-in care Facebook group, I managed to recruit four people.’ Dominique reflected upon the difficulties of building trust with interview participants who were previously unknown to her, and the effect that this had on her ability to gather insightful data related to the emotionally laden work of live-in care within a regimented, two-hour, interview timeslot, ‘In my experience it also takes time to think about how the work you do makes you feel, whether there are things you would like to change, your likes, your dislikes. Because care work is labour and then heavily weighted in emotional work, there is a lot to think about and navigate, this is also in relation to one’s own personality, history and culture. There may be jobs where you build a strong connection with the person you are caring for and remain loyal to them. When asked about your experience working you may then withhold personal thoughts or feelings, perhaps unconsciously too, that may shine a light on things you don’t like. Trust is something that develops over time and this I feel played out in the interviews.’ Suzanne reflected upon the experience of the peer interviewing process of interviewing her friends, ‘I managed to get very satisfying answers to interview questions that were set up for us by the researchers. Conversational questions often led to answering the next question and made it easy to get the candidates to open up, mostly.’ Dominique added, ‘The interviewees themselves seemed to feel comfortable, it felt like there was shared intrinsic knowledge, like all colleagues have when working at the same level in the same industry.’ Yet the process was not always so easy when interviewing strangers. As Dominique explained, ‘I don’t feel that there was enough time for myself and the interviewee to build a trusting relationship whereby the interviewee felt comfortable to talk openly about the work to a greater extent.’ She felt that it was difficult to judge how much of this was down to the situation, or whether this was a result of interpersonal dynamics, ‘And yet that could also be dynamics between myself and the interviewee’. Dominique described the importance of fair payment and its effect upon interview dynamics, ‘Taking part in the production of data that aims to change something, anything, is worth my personal investment, however, being paid for taking part was an essential aspect for me. I have previously declined offers of participation in research when an exchange of money for my lived experience has not been offered. Without payment the separation of being exploitatively paid to care then not being cared about is upheld. And for both myself and interviewee having both received a fair payment for participating evened out any economic power dynamics, I think.’ We believe that this payment was central to our peer researchers’ involvement. One of our co-authors, Dominique, had previously declined offers of participation in research where payment was not offered. Suzanne wrote, ‘I was on assignment in Cornwall and interviews were done via Zoom. So, with less than perfect internet connection and with only two hours per day of free time to do interviews in, I set out to make appointments with willing interviewees.’ Client calling bells often interrupted these sessions, providing a direct illustration of the difficulties creating a boundary between work and personal time in live-in care work. Similar issues were aired by Dominique, ‘During interviews I identified with many aspects of the interviewee’s role. Those I interviewed were in paid work at the time. I noticed that like myself finding time to fit in an hour-long session to talk about ones lived experiences wasn’t straightforward. Besides the long hours that care work entails I was aware that we also have lives outside of work. In one interview the interviewee was on a two-hour break on a live-in job. Time felt compressed, I know how those two-hour breaks fly by.’ In our conversations, Kinga reflected that the contents of the interviews were common knowledge amongst carers, ‘They are like conversations [between carers] after work.’ The experiences described by the interviewees acted like a mirror, with the participants reflecting back to the peer researcher ‘what I think and what I feel, more like talking to a colleague. They don’t say anything new.’ This appraisal stands in contrast to the description of the data by Agnes, a member of the academic project team who led our data analysis, as ‘so rich’. It highlighted to us the importance of joint analysis so that peer researchers could see the value of the data which they had gathered—which may have been seen as common knowledge within the peer community—and its contextualisation within a wider body of academic knowledge. Following our team discussion, we identified a need for early communication with peer researchers about the overall policy objectives of the research. This was something that the academic project team either had not done—or at least had not done well enough—during peer researcher training. Kinga explained, ‘There is a need for peer researchers to understand what are the policy objectives, where the research can lead and what it can change.’ As a result of writing this article, this recognition of the value of our peer researchers’ involvement in policy-related project activities beyond their engagement in peer-to-peer interviewing led us into further, active, experimentation. We discuss here the implications of this process of reflection for the later stages of our research. The literature suggests that participatory research approaches of this type can be transformative for groups who are otherwise socially isolated, minoritised or marginalised, such as migrant and women workers in undervalued and underpaid jobs, especially in feminised sectors such as care (Devotta et al., 2016). At a societal level, this type of participatory research produces knowledge that can be used to influence policy and advocate for a more equitable society. We agree with others that this form of participatory approach can have transformative effects—for all those involved (FLEX, 2021). For those of us who had roles as peer researchers, we noted how people reacted differently to us as we conducted ourselves in these roles. Our involvement in the research contributed to our existing activism and action. For those of us who are professional researchers, this feminist, participatory, action research approach included learning from people with lived experience, questioning and challenging the conventional hierarchies within the research process and changing our research practices to reduce power imbalances and make space for our peer researchers to contribute at all stages of data collection, analysis, policy development and dissemination. A peer researcher representative presented at a stakeholder group meeting and, with other professionals working in this area, helped to prioritise our policy recommendations. Three of the eleven policy recommendations included within our final report were advanced by peer researchers as a result of their facilitation of peer-led focus groups and comments on earlier drafts. In addition, peer researchers attended University project team media training and actively participated in media engagement, providing comments for the report’s press release and engaging directly with national media in both Hungary and the UK. Peer researchers and academic project team members also co-operated in the circulation of the project findings, each through their own social media networks, postings on channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Without this reflective process, it is questionable whether our peer researchers would have been so actively involved in these latter stages of the project. Our peer researchers say live-in carers are exploited so often in almost every assignment that it has become normalised and almost expected. Some of the interviews highlighted the exploitation of live-in carers by companies who either employed them or introduced them to their clients. They describe how they feel that there are still more important insights to uncover. The media usually focuses upon the exploitation or abuse of clients by their carers. Without seeking to downplay the seriousness of such mis-treatment, this may have vilified care workers and left society unsympathetic to them. Our engagement with peer research has allowed us to gain some understanding about this stepchild of social care work. We hope that these reflections on our experiences of peer-interviewing will encourage others to continue this learning process through their own concrete experiences with peer research. We are a group of live-in care workers, academic and third-sector researchers who engaged in a feminist participatory action research project to investigate the vulnerability of paid, migrant, live-in care workers in London to modern slavery between February 2021 and July 2022. Although we are all women, and all work in England, those of us who are live-in care workers regularly migrate between our home countries and the homes of the clients for whom we care—a phenomenon known as circular migration. As we found, this practice can leave, particularly novice, care workers vulnerable to exploitation.

Interview · Political science · Sociology · Medicine · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Migration, Health and Trauma · Nursing · Psychology · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics · Social Work

• Enriching qualitative research by engaging peer interviewers

  Open Access•Kimberly Devotta, Julia Woodhall-Melnik et al.•Qualitative Research•2016

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