Our NICE Approach and How it Interacts with Non-Extractive, Trauma-Informed Research Practice
In 2015, we wrote about our approach to fieldwork, which we called NICE (it’s not an acronym). We shared some basic principles: respect people’s time, protect their privacy, make them comfortable, listen carefully, and recognise that taking part in research costs people something. But what does this look like in practice and how can you take it further to ensure your research is not extractive and that it is respectful of the possible trauma and betrayal of trust that a lot of folks feel? Some lessons came early. When we interviewed users of New York City’s Financial Empowerment Centers, we learned that small things build trust: calling no more than three times, meeting people where they chose (Dunkin' was a common one), and calling the day before so they knew we would come.
In Guatemala, we were researching demand for an outpatient health insurance product. A nurse came with our surveyors and offered each respondent a free check of their vital signs. We decided against paying people cash to take part, because a payment could have made people feel they had to accept a health check from a stranger in order to be paid. It was more effective to offer this perk voluntarily and show that we cared about their health and agency in the process. In 2019, we surveyed more than 2,000 migrants in New York, Los Angeles and Miami about how they send money home. Many came from communities with large numbers of undocumented residents, at a time when speaking to a stranger with a clipboard could feel dangerous. So we held interviews in places people already trusted: their consulates, neighbourhood barber shops and beauty salons, and restaurants, always with the owners’ permission. Those places vouched for us. Our surveyors came from the same communities and often the same countries, with the idioms and local accents that made people feel comfortable. We also removed every question about immigration status, along with names, addresses and phone numbers, so people knew nothing they told us could identify them. Finally we offered relevant incentives (no Amazon gift cards please) on the spot including a MetroCard in New York and pupusas at a Salvadoran restaurant in Los Angeles.
Looking back, we were working against what is now labelled extractive research: taking information from people without weighing what they give, what it costs them, or what they get in return. Recent fieldwork has made us more conscious of something underneath that: many of the people we interview are carrying a deep and painful loss, or running on very little time and energy, when we arrive. They may be one wrong sentence away from a full breakdown, and one right one away from a sigh of relief. Last month in Colombia, we visited farmers whose entire crop had been destroyed by drought. A season of work, the money borrowed to plant it, and the income a family was counting on were all gone.
In our work with US small businesses, many of the owners were women running a business and a household at the same time, with every hour already spoken for and little energy left at the end of the day. We were asking all of them to stop and talk to us. Think about how it feels when your own time and emotional energy are running low and someone arrives with questions that have nothing to do with what you are facing. Or they fill the first ten minutes with stories about their unsatisfying lunch or flight delays. You smile politely and wait for them to leave. You may resent their being there, and they may never know. Researchers can easily be that visitor. The respondent answers, the survey is complete, the data look fine, and we leave believing it went well.
Trauma-informed research gives a name to what we try to do instead. It centres safety, trust, transparency, choice and collaboration. In practice, that means finding out what people are living through before we arrive, asking only what we need, taking calls from people's cars and putting the person’s situation ahead of the questionnaire, and making it truly easy to say “not today.” Non-extractive research adds another set of questions: who shapes the questions, whose knowledge shapes the findings, and who benefits. Respect can mean collecting less. When a business owner is going through a hard stretch, we pause our requests and wait. Working with the Small Firm Diaries with FAI at NYU Wagner, when business owners we were interviewing asked to learn from one another, we brought them together in voluntary peer sessions where they set the topics. In Colombia, next month, we are meeting farmers to co-design solutions alongside their associations. We're bringing ideas for insurance, loans and payments from a financial institution to the table that they may decide to reject, revamp, or adjust. That honesty is uncomfortable, but it works to build trusted conversations, and ultimately, more honest and useful results,
If you want to be people-first, putting your own people first is a key element of success. Our surveyors and relationship managers, and Noahuis walk up to strangers, ask them to take part, and sit with stories of loss. We recruit them from the communities we study, pay them for training, cover their transport, set base pay high enough that lunch in the field costs them nothing, and provide every team a supervisor and a sense of belonging. Our sister company in Mexico, Noahui Soluciones, works the same way, hiring and training local teams of underemployed women (Noahuis) for its fieldwork. This approach is fair and has two important additional effects. First, it shows research participants that we care about people
and second, it reduces the stress our team is going through while working, giving them more time and space to be attentive listeners and learning partners.
The person across the table is deciding, quietly, whether we were worth their time. Our task is to deserve the answer. As we wrote in an earlier post, showing up, asking and building trust with strangers is the part of the work no tool can speed up and that's important, because you don't know what you've missed even if you've missed it .
Comments