Session 15. Participatory and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Renew Investigation Practices and Overcome Post-Pandemic Methodological Challenges

The Covid-19 pandemic has been posing a series of practical limitations to social research from a methodological point of view, limitations generated by the civic imperative of social distancing and the need to preserve the health of both the researcher and the study participants. By virtue of the aforementioned limitations, some scholars championed the improvement of data collection techniques that can renounce personal interaction (in presence), by developing mediation strategies to obtain similar results (Hine, 2020; Horst & Miller, 2020; Lupton, 2020). Indeed, what appears to be a limit, when we consider social research most canonical tools, such as ethnography and face-to-face interview and focus group (Silverman, 2015), could represents also an opportunity for an epistemological re-examination of our toolbox, allowing us to reshape and reformulate research techniques in the light of current concerns. An opportunity, therefore, to develop a form of social investigation suited to the times we are living in, by focusing on different types of interaction between researcher and study participants.

The goal of this panel is to champion a way of doing social research aimed at encouraging the (now recognized) multiple subjective perspectives on reality, questioning the power dynamics enforced by traditional research paradigms. Instead, we encourage presenting interdisciplinary research processes that recognizes subjectivity, authority and responsibility to actors, traditionally considered as “objects” of investigation, and in this way translated as “subjects” within the entire research process from its conceptualization, to its design, the processing of data, the interpretation of the results and finally their dissemination (Decataldo and Russo 2022). We would like to discuss the solutions identified to overcome the pandemic challenges, on the renewal of investigation practices, on their limits and opportunities, on the very meaning of scientific action for the researchers that engage in the sociology of health and medicine.

Concetta Russo is a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology and Social Research, at the University of Milan-Bicocca. Her first monograph is an ethnographic study of a Mental Health Community Center in la Habana. Recently she co-authored a book on participative social research techniques, with a specific focus on collaborative ethnography and visual methods. Her current research topics, investigated from a gender perspective, are preterm parents’ wellbeing, the impact of job insecurity on mental health, the relationship between academic precarious employment and family planning, with a specific attention to adulthood transition and work-family-balance.

Alessandra Decataldo is Associate Professor in Sociology (she teaches Methodology of Social Research) at the University of Milano Bicocca since 2017, where she already was Assistant Professor since 2011. Her current research interests are on methodological issues, as mixed methods research, participatory and collaborative research, the use of big data, experimental social research, and gender-sensitive methodology. Her research activities promote interdisciplinary collaborations, and are focused on the relationship between health, medicine and society, on the evaluation of programs and public policies and on the study of social health inequalities.