ARU Final Report

14 Care leavers’ experiences of support during the Covid-19 pandemic 3. Design and methods 3.1 Participatory research design Participatory research aims to involve young people in the research process in order to conduct research that fits with and reflects the priorities and experiences of young people themselves (O’Brien and Dadswell, 2020). During the Covid-19 pandemic, participatory research has been forced to move online; however, this should not compromise its aims. It is now more important than ever to involve young people in research about them. Indeed, Sevelius et al. (2020) claim that the pandemic has generated new and intensified barriers to research with marginalised populations. These include technological challenges, difficulties with reimbursing participants, and additional concerns around safety. Nonetheless, they state: “It is critical that research teams not only get creative about ways of reaching, engaging, and reimbursing ourparticipantsduring this crisis, but alsofindways to come together with communities to create, identify, and disseminate resources to those most in need.” Sevelius et al. (2020, p.2011) In this participatory research, we worked with a research team comprising 25 care leavers aged 16-25 and one or two support workers from each of the six LAs involved in the wider project, along with two researchers from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), Niamh O’Brien and Anna Dadswell. Care leavers were recruited by support workers and were sent a research team participant information sheet to read and understand before they decided to take part. Young people gave their consent verbally, recorded by their LA support worker, during the first research session. The research took place entirely online from 1st December 2020 to 2nd March 2021 over eight sessions as well as an online questionnaire and focus groups. Research sessions were held via Zoom and generally started with a presentation and activities as a whole group facilitated by the ARU researchers as well as discussions in breakout rooms facilitated by LA support workers. Research sessions were divided into four phases. 3.2 Deciding priority areas and designing the questionnaire This phase consisted of three research sessions. The first session began by meeting everyone in the research team (care leavers and support workers from each LA as well as researchers from ARU). The ARU researchers gave a brief introduction to the research and its importance as well as an overview of the recent literature, and outlined the plan for the four phases. In LA breakout rooms, care leavers discussed the priority areas in their LAs based on their own and other anecdotal evidence of experiences of support during the pandemic. Key points from these discussions were fed back to the whole group to generate a word cloud and identify pertinent priorities across the LAs (see Figure 1).