SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Inclusive space, Black, race, Covid-19, pandemic
SPEAKERS
Dr Barbara Lipietz, Dr Jordana Ramalho, Daniel Oviedo, Tyler Hinkson
Barbara Lipietz: Hello, and welcome everyone we're just going to wait a few more minutes to allow more people to join us. I think we'll wait one more minute and then we'll start.
Okay, so I think I’m going to start a session and start by welcoming you all to this Inclusive Spaces seminar series here at the Bartlett, which is the faculty of the built environment at UCL. So, today you've joined the October edition of inclusive spaces, which coincides with black history month. And indeed, today's session is specifically taking as an entry point, the experience of black and minorities young adults in England, to explore the impact of covid-19 and associated lockdown measures, so my name is Barbara Lipietz, I’m associate professor at the DPU at the Bartlett. And it's my pleasure to introduce you to the collaborative project in Title navigating space in the lockdown. I'll be introducing you to this project, with the help of my debut colleagues Jordana Ramalho: and Daniel Oviedo and also the help of Tyler Hinkson and Nasar Iqbal to have the participant pure researchers on the project you'll be introduced to what that term means shortly.
Before we begin, I have a few housekeeping points to make, so the session is a recorded session, and it will be added to the to the Faculty YouTube channel, Bartlett website and also forwarded to all the attendees of this seminar. We encourage you to submit questions for the speakers at any point during the session and or and you can do that by clicking on the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. Of course, you can also put your own question and upvote that of others and the session will close at 2pm sharp.
So, we're going to go to the next slide, please Daniel is helping me with them, with a slide and the next slide to just want to give you a sense of the rationale for the project, then, if you don't mind coming to the next slide. Thank you.
The collaborative project really came out of an observation four to five months into the pandemic, which was that, on the one hand, there was a large and growing body of evidence of that black and minority communities in the UK were being disproportionately affected by the health and brought us economic impacts of covid 19 pandemic and the associated policy responses which, as you remember we're lockdown, social, physical distance. But on the other hand, there was a relative silence regarding that the specific impact, for the specific experiences and needs of young black and minorities adults in this context and by young, I know it's a disputed term in different parts of the world, but here we chose to use the 18-to-35-year group the silence of course echoes the relative invisibility of this demographic in public discourses and policy more genuine. And so, to try and fill this evidence gap, the team at DPU initiated a pilot research project with our long-term partners The Ubele Initiative, It is an African just for a lead intergenerational social enterprise that was set up with a purpose of building more sustainable communities across the UK.
And Ubele Initiative has been a strong voice for black and minority groups in England during the pandemic and so really warmly invite you to have a look at their work on the website. And it explains why no one of them is with us today because they're either discussing at workshops or actually receiving an award as we speak. But they're very much with us in spirit, so we also teamed up with FOAM20, which is a multimedia community focused organization, to support the mixed methods approach that we thought was really necessary for such a project and that Jordana is going to outline for you. And all of this was financed through the national lottery community support fund grant.
So Jordana who's going to be explaining the different methods we use for the research. Daniel also will then talk through a little bit some of the findings from one of the research methods that's mentioned there. We’ll also have a quick look at the first minutes of a film that was co-produced with the team. And I’ll talk to you through some of the key findings of the report and then we'll have Nasar and Tyler explaining their perspective on the whole project experience and key findings.
So, Jordan over to you.
Jordana Ramalho: Thank you, Barbara so yeah about the methods we decided to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods that would enable us to engage with a diverse group of respondents from across the country. And really capture the nuances and complexities of people's experiences of lockdown more accurately. So early on in the research process we recruited a group of 12 peer research volunteers to help us ensure that our focus and methods were accessible meaningful and relevant to the demographic that we were trying to reach. And we invited these individuals alongside a wider group of young adults from within new Belize network to participate in some exploratory focus groups, which we're looking at the impact of the pandemic and related lockdowns on mental health and well-being, housing relationships and connectivity and mobility, space and income.
And we collectively analyse these discussions to pull out the common issues and experiences that we felt could be explored at scale using an online survey tool called maps generic which Daniel will speak to you about in a little bit more detail shortly. And while we lead on by the DPU research team, we kind of lead with our internal pure research volunteers. On the focus group discussion and survey aspect of the research our partners from really and from 20 lead on the development and production of a podcast series exploring the themes of education and employment, Mental health positive experiences of lockdown and relationships and they also produced a short film featuring creative content and video footage from the volunteer career Researchers themselves and as Barbara mentioned we’ll show you a little bit of that shortly.
So, this mixed message approach provided respondents with a variety of platforms, through which they could express themselves and engage with the research according to their interests and preferred way to communicating. And each method also produced a really distinct set of data and insights into the complex subtle and at times contradictory impacts of the pandemic on this group, so the survey, I just want to speak through each of these. You know, to give you a sense of that richness of data that came through in.
The survey really enabled us to reach a much larger sample group of respondents and then we would have been able to kind of meet face to face or in focus group discussions. And this provided us with a sense of scale and also a grasp of the commonality and speciality of the issues and the spatial dimension, Daniel can speak to in a bit more detail shortly. The focus group discussions and podcasts as well as the film that was produced, this is the qualitative side of the research allowed us to really hone in on the more detailed personal accounts of respondent’s individual experiences. Which shed light, not only on the key issues that were writing from the pandemic for these individuals. But almost more crucially on the complex ways in which these issues we're interconnected and, at times, compounded or reinforced one another and, needless to say, the contributions from the group of pure researchers were absolutely invaluable in the whole process, and particularly in ensuring that the research focus, and methods were relevant accessible and appropriate.
As well as engaging I think that this this work is incredibly engaging, and I hope you do check out the website after this talk. But it's also important to note that the volunteer pure research group and survey respondents are not fully representative of the young me, so to speak, adult population living in England. And, and indeed this introduced the number of biases that I think are important to consider when thinking through the data that we collected in the survey and through the qualitative approaches. And, in particular, just want to highlight that all the peer researchers and the majority of focus group discussion participants had completed or were enrolled in some form of higher education. And even though participants certainly took care to reflect beyond their personal circumstances and adult a community lens. In the focus group discussions, their experiences can be taken to reflect the experiences of young racially minorities adults and even more generally so that's an important caveat.
And it's also interesting to note that 71% of survey respondents are female and the majority of all respondents regardless of gender were under 30 they were single and in full time employment or studying at the time that they completed the survey, so please just bear those demographic details in mind and I’m now going to hand over to Daniel, who's going to tell you a little bit more about what we found from the survey.
Daniel Oviedo: Thanks, Jordana. So I’m going to walk you through some of the findings of optional survey in just for context missionaries an online participatory GIs tool that allows us to collect what is called, your question is basically a common survey, but with a whole set of Geographical Information connected to it, and before I move further with our findings I wanted also to acknowledge that this wouldn’t be possible, the analysis that I’m going to show you, without the help of our PhD student and research assistant Orlando from the DPU, who has been working actively with, especially with the quantitative and spatial part of the data of the project, so Jordana already gave you a quick overview of what's the composition of our sample in the survey and we can see here, I have highlighted in green and in red are sort of the details of where do we have in green the presentation and we haven't read the list in in different categories from ethnic background, to the main occupation of July, also walk your right to remain biases but it's important as well to have that geographic location was also another bias, we had a large concentration in cities like Greater London, less than Brighton and Greater Manchester.
And also, it's interesting to note that, for the age group in our respondents, we will have some specific contextual issues that will explain part of the findings now just to get directly into the mix, something that was very important. Was this idea of identity in what the BAME acronym represents and actually when we look at the responses from our participants. They experienced covid-19 and its various impacts as a catalyst for rethinking about the limitations of this acronym and in a call for self-identification so actually we included. In our survey a space for open identification of your ethnic identity and we found a here you have like a summary of the of the workload but some accurate terms and the pictures, such as racialized communities, communities experiencing racism or racially marginalized communities were some of the most relevant findings on this part of our methods now in terms of we had different sections I’m going to walk you through each of them.
The first one is common housing, and what we found is that almost 40% of our respondents had to change accommodation, at least once since March 2020, informed consent of the survey sample report to having bought their first home, so we have sort of a majority of our respondents were actually in renting accommodation in houses that for a lockdown condition is relatively highly occupied, so the average occupation in the in the population of respondents was 3.7 people. In 57% actually reported renting their accommodation at the time of the survey and 16% of them report in doing so in rented accommodation, so we can start having an image of what were the conditions in which people were living at the time of the impulse lockdowns then, when we talk about work, which is another important section of our survey 79% of our respondents actually have been furloughed at least once since March 2020. And 49% of them had changed a main occupation since the same date if we see here this distribution of whether our respondents change their occupation, and we have that a majority of them had at least once but also is 12% that more than once had to change their accommodation, where we look a bit further into these findings are the changes suggest for frequency vibrations.
The first one is retraining and acquire new skills, so we had around 9% of the survey sample that we're in the situation, having to change jobs or being moved part time employment. We also had up around 10% of the sample that were subject to redundancies without finding new employment. And then we had the changing occupation from students that were completing their degrees, so in this situation, those that that responded positively 11% of the survey sample move either into self-employment or freelancing. Now, in terms of word, something that is important in here I’m starting to make the connection also with mental health. Is 60% of them reported working from home at the audit and responding the survey and 46% of our respondents were dissatisfied. With their work life balance, since March 2020 in here, you can see a bit more detail about that distribution, we see that the majority of our respondents were working from home. And, and that for them it had become much easier for those that had access to technology, but of course there is A considerable share of the of the respondents that started having more and more difficulties because of the limitations for moving locally in the city in other restrictions, for example, not having the adequate technology or the access to Internet with enough quality and bandwidth to actually conduct activities properly.
Now, in terms of connectivity and access something else that we're finding is how easy or how difficult was for people to access different essential services, and you can see here in this chart from work to Community spaces and that there is One and to represent the levels of satisfaction and actually Community spaces become one of the areas where people is the most satisfied of in terms of since March 2020. Accessing those facilities, followed by markets and health care, so those were sort of the three areas where the majority correspondence with were suggesting that they were dissatisfied with the level of access, something else that sort of plays a role here is the Internet and, for example in terms of connections. In social interaction social media plays a significant role, and it was described, both as a source of support and of anxiety. So, 57% of our sample report that the level of engagement with social media was either high or very high at the time of responding in actually this hard. For the ramifications that we can probably on part from the qualitative side of the of the research now in terms of mental health well-being in here I’m going to take a bit more time.
Here we have a chart that, in my opinion, says a lot in terms of what was the effect of covid-19 and the local measures in terms of people’s sleep, mental health and relationships and we can see that for mental health, there is negatively and very negatively, we have almost 70% of our of our respondents are perceiving such a level of negative effect, and then we have following the sleep 50% and then relationships 45% more or less of our respondents were decent, we're perceiving a negative raining at the impact of the pandemic. Now, if we move further 37% of our respondents actually reported that their perceived depression levels were high very high. And 54% of our respondents also reporting that the perceived levels of isolation were high and very high, so this starts talking specifically about sort of the impact Of the pandemic on the mental health and well-being of our respondents now there is something that is important that we consider here and is that the pandemic also had huge economic impacts On the population in in depending on whether you were working remotely or not, there was also a correlation with the levels of mental health well-being So here we have a small correlation stable which I’m not going to explain too much in detail, just to say that for those that precede the economic impact of the negative neutral positive we have different effects, so the higher, the number the more negative the effect we have an in mental health is to be the highest so those that perceived actually a more negative effect, depending on the economy also are reporting the highest course of negative impact on mental health. those that were working from home as well, were reporting the highest negative impact on mental health, overall, we have quite a few for indicators, we had scores over 30 over three, we suggest a more negative in average effect. In a well, this is what we're trying to capture here and is the respondents perceived negative effects of look down on their house will economy actually were affected across the board living conditions, mental health sleep and relationships, but those working from home actually were suffering more at least psychologically if Their impact on the economy was not as big which, which was another correlation that we run. Now, in terms of accessing support for mental health, so we have that 27% of our sample had in that says support but wanted to, and then we had 30% that actually had access to, and here we have a 41% from whom we don't know if they had access it before or not, I mean there are a lot of open questions that. considering the nature of a pilot study that we had for research is important to continue exploring in front of research. So many respondents noted difficulties in accessing mental health, partly because the provision is limited, especially in some neighbourhoods and also because it is costly either in time or financially afford this type of support, however, a positive side of the pandemic is that there is a new public legitimacy of the discussion around mental health in young adults and that's something that we feel should be addressed.
Now I’m going to try to share a little excerpt from our video which you can actually look at in detail is an 18-minute video that we have available in our website and we're going to share the link at the end of the presentation.
(FILM https://nsul.org.uk)
Daniel Oviedo: Let's stop there, and you're more than welcome to watch the rest of it, which has many of these very interesting and moving and informing testimonials from editorial participants in I’m going to hand over to Barbara, she can give us a bit of a rounded-up summary of our findings.
Barbara Lipietz: Thanks very much so, yeah so key findings so again, these are finding that come from the research in the focus groups from the maps, from the podcast from the films, and this is sort of trying to run everything together. Maybe the key central finding from our research and unsurprising no doubt is the central city of home and housing conditions. In shaping the impacts of covid 19 on young black and minorities adults in England. And it's not a surprise, given the main government response to covid 19 during the time of the research project was in the form of lockdown and the incentives to stay at home. So, I’m going to break down the statement for you a little bit, the first point that we found from this collective research was that who young people live with, how much space they have access to, the housing density or indeed cost consideration, all of these different aspects had a significant impact on people's ability to work, including their ability to work from home, their work prospects and their economic security.
Secondly, the housing conditions have also had a major impact on young adults’ mental health and well-being so for some it was a source of comfort and a shield from isolation. But for others it was really a major point of stress of anxiety of insecurity. Especially for those living in high density households and shared accommodation, where they hadn't necessarily been able to choose who they were sharing with ahead of lockdown. Many reported feeling unsafe or unable to be themselves in their own homes or having to hide aspects of themselves. So effectively what I researched, it was to highlight to possibly more precisely highlight again the very close interconnection between mental health, housing and work situations.
What we saw was that the loss of physical connectivity and access in the context of you know, the several periods of lockdown have had have really intensified this link and as Daniel pointed out earlier, in this context social media was described, both as a source of support and of things I won't go too much more on the mental health dimension because Danielle pointed to many of the issues when discussing the finding some option. Now, another really important finding from the project was how much covid 19 and lockdown experiences have played an indirect role in sharpening identity awareness, for many young so called BAME adults in England, so the word cloud that Daniel showed to you, steams very much from that reflection of that was shaping during the covid lockdowns, so one of the things that we picked up from some of the qualitative methods in particular focus groups, and in a workshop, was the impact of the intersection of covid 19 with the black lives matter protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Many participants in the research mentioned how they became acutely aware of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority groups and the injustices that this represents. Generally, in particular, and you'll see some of it is reflected, also in the film, this was noted, because of the high presence of black and minority groups in essential services are in the gig economy. For some respondents to this coincided with a heightened sense of disenchantment with the state and the mainstream institutional landscape whose covid 19 responses, as many racialized minorities, they fell off the map. So, in a in a nutshell, the navigating space and lockdown project has really highlighted the deep dive and differentiated impact of the pandemic on young black and minority as adults in England. The research pointed to the vulnerability of many in this demographic marked by security and housing and employment conditions.
Covid 19 and prolonged lockdowns have essentially compounded these experiences of disadvantage and exclusion. However, the research also highlighted the remarkable resilience and adaptability of young minorities adults, aided by technological know-how and in many cases by social media in what have been unprecedented in often quite traumatic times. In such context what appeared evident is that so called BAME community networks have been critical pillars for young adults and then networks filling in gaps left by government and access to essential goods and services and support and so really important question that emerged from this research is.
How far and how long can such networks, often most affected by the pandemic and yet we have limited resources, continue to pick up the slack and so on that note I’d like to pass on to Nasar, who was one of our researchers during the project.
Nasar: Can everyone hear me?
Jordana Ramalho: We can hear you now, we just can't see you. There we go perfect.
Nasar: So, from my perspective, I think this was a real great opportunity where committed university and the many initiatives labels are called design project was able to help put the survey the questions together and to reach out to her networks. And know this was a pilot and I’m hoping that this will be to start with the catalyst of other things to come, hopefully soon, and I think, on reflection, I think. The time was quite short, so I think we could have reached a lot more young people, and I think that's mainly due to funding constraints and the way the budget was set out, but it was a great opportunity and is quite empowering to be with peers, who have a desire to make a difference in their communities, and also to continue that, and this is the first kind of pure research on being involved in.
The University was very supportive in the process in ensuring that the right questions, we were able to ask the right questions and to ensure that we were able to impact policy in the long term, so yeah so from my perspective, great opportunity, if I ever have opportunity in the western institute research project I would definitely recommend it.
Thank you.
Barbara Lipietz: Thank you very much Nasa.r and Tyler we go to you, please.
Tyler Hinkson: Oh hello, can you hear me… yeah, Different people's perspectives from different races, different cultures and different backgrounds, so it was an eye opener really because some of the issues that I experienced was different to what other people have been experiencing so yeah and literally just put up relate to other people who are going for the last experiences. And it was good to get some things off of my chest and be around people who have a similar understanding so it's definitely something that would be interested in taking part and again I’d recommend it to anyone else so yeah… That was good experience.
Barbara Lipietz: Okay, thanks, very much Tyler yeah, we really certainly enjoyed working with you and with your other colleagues, it's been really actually critical for the success of the research so thanks again for your participation, so I think now we've given you a little bit of a summary and a taste of the other research.
And then I’ll just put the last slide here that indicates the website of the research project, so please have a look, there's some really interesting that the film is really, really interesting there's a report there there's the podcast series which is also very eye opening To the discussion between some of the participants in the project and the researchers so I’ve to we'd love to hear your questions now and just noting that some of the questions were already answered in the chat one was a question about the region reason for the change in accommodation, but there in the response, the reasons that came up from the maps survey, but what's also interesting to see is the that because of the mixed method we had some insights from other experiences so we can talk more to that.
There was also a question why the focus on young people, and Jordana responded. That was really because we felt that there was this visibility, I can see there's an there's a question which hasn't been answered yet so I’m going to read it out loud and it's from Karen Martins what issues were further compounded can we get a breakdown of issues that were pre-existent before covid and how will the information gathered by the project be used to address those issues as part of a wider social systemic change?
That's a very good question and a very broad question and does any of my colleagues want to pick up on that now?
Jordana Ramalho: I can step in, and I can keep my best to try to kind of refer back to some of Daniels slides that spoke to the ways in which different issues, get compound and I’d like to draw your attention, if you can remember the slot that was speaking about mental health and just as an example, so people whose incomes were more affected by the lockdown and firstly, so if they lost their jobs refer load and so on we're more likely unsurprisingly, to expressed feeling depressed or encountering anxiety or other kind of mental health conditions. In relation to your question Karen about issues that were pre-existing before covid, and so some of our focus group respondents who had already an established relationship with the medical or health care kind of services Okay, the pandemic exacerbated a lot of their pre-existing health conditions in the sense that they weren't able to get the support that they had previously been getting prior to lockdowns. So, it made pre-existing conditions worse and people who had had kind of worked through certain things and we're in a better place found like found that conditions that they had previously were kind of coming back again because of not being able to seek the support that they had needed to because of relationship breakdowns and so on.
Another compounding issue which I think our entire research is really sits the intersection of is the ways in which racial discrimination, racism. Structural racism, interpersonal racism compounds people's experiences under a pandemic are locked down, and so we saw this in terms of the interactions with public services, healthcare and the reasons I’ve mentioned, but also with police and also feeling police within one's own home so. Barbara noted, you know, when speaking about insecurity in a home context, I think one of the most striking comments and points of discussion for me personally was a number of respondents describing how within their own home they weren't able to be themselves so remember that this all happened with alongside George Floyd's murder alongside Black Lives Matter, there was a lot going on relating to race, racism, structural inequalities, discrimination in the kind of public media, right and so people recounted feeling quite isolated from like-minded souls, and when they were living with strangers, Sometimes encountering really antagonistic behaviour just because of the colour of their skin or because of politics or because you know, someone might be reading a book on Black lives matter and it would prompt antagonism from people within their homes. And separate to this but connected, in the sense of people who are non-gender conforming or gender binary, or you know, from the LGBT community and perhaps haven't come out to housemates or to their parents that they ended up moving back home also found it very difficult and needing to almost police themselves at home. Given that they were put into a home situation that they hadn't necessarily chosen or that have been kind of changed on their behalf, so I hope that speaks to some of your question there Karen but happy to pick up on that and I might I mean I’m happy to touch on the question, but what we want to do with this research moving forward, but I think, if I can I’d like to turn to Nasar and Tyler because I think a fundamental part of his research and what was exciting about it is that it was co-produced and obviously we want to build on that, but maybe Nasar and Tyler if you could potentially comment on the bigger picture of that collaboration what it's done for you personally, any striking issues and how you could see us being able to meaningfully expand on this or make change.
Nasar: Thank you, Jordan. And I know that this was a conversation that we had in our group as well as Co designing the research about what impact will have another you many initiatives send this research, how across the country towards partners and I’m hoping that local authorities and people in the public sector will start to become some of this stuff and use it to drive policy forward, and I mean there's a question here from Allen and he says, do you feel anything was missed in the research, I think it, I think, is quite important to understand that.
And when doing surveys and questionnaires, you could just carry-on asking questions and questions, I think we come and found themes together. So, we all had different questions we wanted to ask, we had some themes and then under the themes we started to develop questions into them themes. In terms of anything that we missed I’m not sure if we missed anything, but I think we could expand on some of the inequality stuff and some of the mental health, and I think my peers share that.
In the Group and nothing that needs to be a focus on understanding the impact of inequality is on young people across the board and looking at what policy changes to happen there and that needs to include some of the stuff around mental health, because I think that's just a massive issue, we're talking about it regularly it's regularly in the media, unfortunately, some of the resources and some of the some action has been taken yet.
Jordana Ramalho: Thank you very much for that now so Tyler do you want to come in and talk.
Tyler Hinkson: Oh yeah, the sun just came out, so I wasn't able to hear it even come back inside to hear the question.
Jordana Ramalho: I can read it out for you, so the question was whether anything was missed in the research anything that you felt could have been expanded on to give a fuller picture and also just generally where you see kind of space for impact or moving forward productively.
Tyler Hinkson: um yeah really matter really see I couldn't say anything that would need any improvements, I feel that it was open space, everything was good, so I couldn't say anything really to improve but going forward, I think that the best basically able to make any impact or change is probably what I’ve gathered is probably more community spaces, more opportunities like this, for people from different backgrounds to come together to be able to have an open talk to be able to connect and network and make change in different ways.
Jordana Ramalho: Thank you Tyler. We've got to we've got another question about asking whether they're young black people involved in the research process not participants now I’m not sure if I understood correctly and but in terms of the kinds of respondent’s survey group, yes, we did, but in terms of young that might if that's where your question is a leading to you, we didn't engage with anyone under the age of 18 for ethical reasons.
But I think that that's an important thinking through that kind of transition period from kind of teenager hood or adolescence into young adulthood. Precisely speaks to the unique challenges that affect young adults so that's certainly an area that I think we could look at in more depth, should we expand on this project moving forward if I haven't answered your question, please restate yeah with a bit more details and.
Daniel Oviedo: Let something go to as well, in terms of the involvement of the researchers, that the research was entirely co-produced from the design and the framing to actually do the analysis of information. And we had the opportunity to work with, with a few of the other participants that research participants and actually we had training on option, and they were involved directly in the design of the survey and delivery of it, of the survey.
So, that I think that's something important that that sort of is part of the legacy of the research that that there were some additional questions, and so we identified skills that could be part of a second phase of the project or even as Australia was as Nasar was saying. I would like to do this type of research as well in in the in the West Midlands, it would be fantastic to build on this. And that's part of the legacy as well, of the method and the understanding the production of the survey itself and the service, the live, you can still find it. In in our navigating space website, in case you feel identified as part of the of the target population and you would like to continue providing us with information, we do cuts every now and then and we're still getting some answers after the final cut that we had for the delivery of the projects.
Jordana Ramalho: Thanks Daniel there's another question about sex desegregation in the data on which we did do, but maybe you can speak a bit more, we didn't present on its proper complexity of slides etc, but Daniel could you speak a little bit more about the gender desegregation.
Daniel Oviedo: Yes, I mean, as you said at the beginning, one of the biggest biases is that the majority of our respondents of the survey where women. So, we had like female is around 70% of sample and therefore does bias, that we are outright putting at the beginning of our important that we try to mention at the beginning, but there are some significant differences, particularly in this course of there was one particular score of dissatisfaction with the balance of time, and I think our female participants tend to report much higher negative scores.
For that, as well as the impact on sleep impact of mental health and, to some extent on relationships compared to men to participate in the survey, but given the imbalance in the sample we tried not to bring in that because there's a much higher representation of women are women and I just add something to that actually in the in the group of research pure research that help us shape the questions that are there was less there was more of an equilibrium there.
Barbara Lipietz: So, so that attention to gender issue was quite important, but I think the points, maybe that your question.
Jordana Ramalho: You just mean oh I just realized that I hope, I hope you heard the beginning, I was what I did.
Barbara Lipietz: Okay, great. So, it was showing was asking the question, I think it points to the fact that we actually have a huge amount of data. From the imaginary, let alone, from all the qualitative information and we haven't as Nasar was saying we haven't had yet the time to make the most of that unpacking what we've learned from this knowing also full well, some of the limitations of the quantitative data that we got and some of the also that some of the biases who was represented in them.
In the more qualitative work so there's a lot that can be unpacked according to precisely gender issues or regional issues or potentially income level issues or educational background, etc, etc, so there's really a lot there. And, but that is the idea of the pilot research is really to show what is what could potentially be done why it's relevant and therefore as Nasar and Tyler indicated why it makes sense to try and continue that and to look at and to localize it to get sort of local councillors Various cities to take to take this initiative and develop it with the community groups of engage with so that was really our ambition with a really to try and catalyse this conversation.
And on that note, I have to say Nasar, Tyler and their colleagues had fantastic ideas of how to bring in, you know, communities and local authorities or other groups that matter and communities to sort of help bring this conversation, to make it more alive. Do you want me to say a few words on that either Nasar or Tyler because there were so much interesting ideas that would be wonderful to take up later on?
Nasar: And so, we had this discussion and wanted to blow things up now and, from my perspective was around and policy conversations a local link. To ensure that is that the date has been presented to local policy offices to ensure that will be taking action and driving that forward and but Tom is time was of the essence of time, however, if there are any public sector colleagues on this call I recommend you share this information with your Community teams, with public health and use it to drive forward some of the policies or some of the initiatives that you're going to take forward in your local communities and spaces, and I think it's a valuable piece of work, I think a lot of time and effort it's gone in to it from both researchers, a DUP and the university as well.
Barbara Lipietz: Tyler did you want to say, thanks, and I said, did you want to say something Tyler.
Tyler Hinkson: um yeah so which we are just even… there's so many other car but um yeah so yeah literally just from having discussion from people from outside of this project and, within this project what not really you've come up with is that you need to like send out emails contact people who work in in Parliament MPs local communities, reaching out to people of all different ages and literally just like starting up charity, starting up organizations, like looking where there's funding, where is what we can do, because there's more than like there's a lot more that we can do even as a people if you put our heads together on the network and just come together really and everybody in the community, like we just need to make it happen and inspire people to literally make that change.
Barbara Lipietz: Thanks Tyler just looking at those three other questions I mean how many I think we did answer we had a whole we had 12 people who were working with us, including Tyler, Nasar who are between 18 and 35 who helped shape the questions without them, the relevance of what we were looking for would not have been the same. So yes, they were intimately connected and helped shape the questions and the focus of the of the work, and in fact also helped to shape some of the methods, that were developed to collect people's voices so, for instance, the podcast series very much came out of the desire of the pure researchers to continue the conversation, it was between themselves and then it also invited people around them to sort of to contribute so, so I hope that answers your question.
Deanna great to see that you want to do a similar essential be happy to talk with you, if you want to sort of discuss further what was what was some of the issues that we came up with. And then quickly, I see there's a message from Jesse regarding how the pure research volunteers were recruited and whether they were compensated so there was a call out from Ubele initiative. Ubele has links with the black and minority groups through largely in London, to start with, but throughout England and, as you can see, on the back of that we had a lot of representation for the project throughout I mean not obviously throughout England, they were some there are some places where we didn't have so many responses and then again that's something that we'd have to work on, if we have a follow up on this which we'd really like to have but, so the recruitment went out through the Ubele group so can they go in the network of event, if you want, and so people sent in their CVs and they were recruited on that, on that basis, and they were compensated for their time through the winning that was part of their of the budget from the National Lottery grant.
Is there anything we should add on that, Nasar and Tyler?
Nasar: I think what you've just said that those are process, so you have to apply for the process, and we had an interview with the project coordinator, before you took part and there were people from different parts of the country from different backgrounds, different races different this is different religions and county as well, so it made it was what's why that's how this research come together by the import the different elements in people's experiences.
Barbara Lipietz: Okay, thank you very much do we have any other questions. Quite a few as any other sort of issues you'd like to raise with us. This one more I can see, this one has been I think we have answered, yes, and in that case, I think it's going to be time for me to close the session.
Thanking you all for your interest in this, as we, as you can see from all of our answers, and we certainly learned a lot from the process, and we feel that there's so much information that came out of it so much really important points that came out of it that need to be further recognizing that need to be further investigated and discuss and really the importance of this research is really to start conversation to lead to action to change an action.
So, we are really hoping that we'll be able to have the grant funding in order to continue doing this, so please watch this space. And we really encourage you to have a look at the at the website, which is nine the chat I think and so I’m going to close, now the session and just with a reminder that there is going to be another session, as part of the inclusive spaces seminar series next month on the 17th of November and the title of it is Accelerating Islamophobia and emerging most phobia so thank you again and see you very soon I hope.
Jordana Ramalho: Thank you everyone.
