Socially just, authentic research with families in Jamaica, Australia and the UK: exploring diversity, social change and inequalities

Practitioners’ whose work is driven by emancipatory and socially just notions often wish to transfer these aims to their research, resulting in better policy development. However, researchers can find themselves diverted from these values by neoliberal demands for quantitative impact measurement and ‘cause and effect’ models in qualitative research. If applied universally, these methods are not congruent with a critical-ethical methodology. Research may also be diverted or subsumed by normative conceptions of appropriate ‘family life’ and ‘parenting’, or deficit constructs that position fault with families, ignoring the role structures and systems. Paradoxically the social investment model simultaneously constructs families as the nexus for societal change through agendas such as employability, poverty alleviation and early intervention, treating people as units of improvement. Conducting research that is authentic to practice values may be counter hegemonic to current meritocratic, neoliberal agendas and existent culture of measurement, demanding that researchers stand firm in their beliefs. This chapter will help readers stand firm mapping a path, from design to delivery, which maintains the socially just aims that drove the desire to do research in the first place. This involves a reflexive process to disentangle the enmeshed values, beliefs and practices that shape research. This endeavour will lead to what some call inequalities imagining, disruption of racial and cultural normativity, a critical-ethical approach or socially just research. The resulting epistemology, ontology and methodology are critically conscious of knowledge democracy, seeking to reveal knowledge that enhances social justice and authentic practice with families. The chapter has been developed through cross-cultural conversations between the UK, Australia and Jamaica, ensuring a global dimension to the approach.