Lived Experience Narrative (LEN) Program of Research
Dr. Sara Nickerson-White
Principal Investigator
Humber College, Faculty of Social and Community Services
Tel: 416-675-6622 ext. 79271
Email: sara.nickerson-white@humber.ca
The purpose of the LEN program of research is:
The LEN program of research includes eight individual research projects. Humber College, Lakeshore Campus, students and staff are being asked to provide personal narratives on one or more of the lived experiences under study. These experiences include suspicion, lie-telling, road rage, a feeling of ‘you get me,’ making mistakes, hope, being misunderstood, and forgiveness.
By collecting lived experience narratives, online through anonymous data forms, the researcher come to better understand how these phenomena are experienced as well as how people make sense of their everyday experiences.
From September 6th, 2019 to April 5th, 2020, Humber College, Lakeshore Campus, students and staff will be invited to participate in the Lived Experience Narrative Program of Research Project. Participating students and staff are asked to sign on to publicly available LEN program of research website at https://communityservices.humber.ca/lived-experience-narrative/. On this website, participants are asked to select the lived experience for which they are interested in providing a lived experience narrative. By clicking on one of the eight research projects options, participating students and faculty will be redirected to the webpage devoted to data collection on that specific phenomenon. On the LEN research project-specific webpage participants will have access to the online data collection forms. Each project asks 3-4 open-ended questions that are meant to help participants detail their experiences with the phenomenon using the online textboxes along with 4 generic questions that ask: age, current profession, current city/town of residence, and country of current residence. On average responses to the questions posed in each of the eight LEN projects take approximately 10-20 minutes to complete, although the time my vary depending on the level of detail provided. None of the textboxes have a word count limit in order for participants to feel comfortable adding as much detail as they deem necessary.
Once students and faculty complete their lived experience narrative pressing the submit button enters the data directly into the LEN program of research database. Students and faculty are not asked to provide names, their date of birth or information regarding their program, nor are they asked to provide contact information for future follow-ups. Participation in this project is completely voluntary and solely involves web-based completion of a lived experience narrative. Any names, dates and places provided in a narrative response will be anonymized.
Student and faculty participants can participate in any or all of eight LEN research projects. Members of the general public are also welcomed to participate in any of the research projects although, only Humber College, Lakeshore Campus, students and staff will be formally recruited.
Aside from the minimal risk of the inconveniences of completing research work and the possibility of slight psychological discomfort associated with reliving past experiences, there are no known risks to participation in any of the eight LEN research projects.
Although participants will not directly benefit from their individual participation, their active engagement in the LEN program of research will benefit professional care practice knowledge, communities of practice and future students who will have access to the findings that come out of this program of research.
Only members of the research team, the Principal Investigator (PI) and the Research Assistant (RA), will have access to the data obtained in the course of the LEN program of research. Data will be password protected and kept on a password protected computer accessible only to the PI and RA. In order to protect the confidentiality of participants any potentially identifying information (e.g. date of birth, addresses, names, program/study details) contained in the lived experience narratives will be removed and replaced with anonymized information. No codes or records will be kept of any identifying information. Hardcopy records of the lived experience narratives will not be kept. The electronic database that will contain all of the lived experience narratives responses will be stored in password protected databased on a password protected computer available only to the PI for a period of 7 years from the end of the study date (May 30th, 2027).
LEN program of research participants have the ability to withdrawal from any of the eight LEN research projects during the process of entering their data. Participants may choose not to submit their entry or they may elect to decline to answer any of the open-ended questions that guide their lived experience narrative submission. Any data submitted will be considered and pooled into the LEN program of research database for analysis. Once submitted, via the web-based forms, data can no longer be withdrawn because the lack of personally identifying information makes deletion difficult.
The LEN program of research is funded by Humber College through a Cultivate grant out of the Applied Research Office at Humber College.
While the PI and RA are both members of the same community as the invited faculty and students, the nature of the research design mitigates the impact of the potential conflicts of interests associated with this shared community relationship. It is important to note that although the PI may have taught some of the potential participants or will be teaching them in the future, the PI will be unable to trace the lived experience narrative data to any one individual student due to the anonymous nature of the information provided.
Humber College students and faculty who participate in one, or more, of the LEN research projects will not be contacted for follow-up sessions nor will they receive requests for further information. Contact information will not be collected in the course of this research.
Findings drawn from each of the eight research projects will be disseminated among the Humber College community, within academic and professional practice literature, at professional conferences, and within Faculty of Social and Community Services classrooms and courses headed by the PI. A summary of findings will be made publicly available on the LEN program of research website (https://communityservices.humber.ca/lived-experience-narrative/) on June 30th, 2020.
This project has been approved (Protocol #RP 0355) by the Humber Research Ethics Board. If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant, you can contact Dr. Lydia Boyko, REB Chair at 416-675-6622 ext. 79322 or by email at lydia.boyko@humber.ca.