New Researcher Forum
Each year, in conjunction with the annual rural policy conference, CRRF organizers a New Researcher Forum. The forum is an opportunity for new researchers, community development practitioners, and seasoned research veterans to create new networks, discuss issues of methodology, and build skills and capacities.
Rural research methods topics identified at during previous New Researcher Forums have included:
- Interviews – to tape or not to tape
- Place and community-based research versus consistency, reliability, replicability, rigour, etc.?
- Balancing needs of communities and researchers
- Why can’t people move forward using their own methods?
- Narrow versus generalizable/more widely applicable
- Partnerships – with organizations such as Statistics Canada, Alberta Rural Development Network
- How do ethics limit us? Types of research we do, voices heard or not heard
- Pulling together and sharing information from personal documents, our elders’ experiences
- Identifying the right topic, questions – purpose, questions lead to methods
- Defending social science methods
- How to best use internet tech to collate and organize data, documents
- Knowledge transfer – how to engage community, policy makers
- Modes of representation, e.g. use of drawing – a way of seeing
- Active learning, service learning – time requirements, not recognized in Promotion and Tenure (P&T)
- How to disengage (from communities where we are working)?
- Longitudinal case studies (new people + repeat people & questions)
- Valuing and learning/using a range of methods and approaches
The next New Researcher Forum will be held in conjunction with the Health and Shared Prosperity Conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. For further details check out the conference program.