If you were a community leader

What you care about

A community leader might be a panchayat member, a local women's group leader, a religious figure, a school management committee member, or an elder respected in a neighbourhood. You care about your community's children, its values, its reputation and its dignity. You have seen outside researchers arrive, collect information and leave.

What worries you about the original study

• It was designed elsewhere, for elsewhere. The models, toys, language and gender expectations came from 1950s California.
• It defines your children's behaviour for you. Outsiders would decide what counts as aggression, perhaps labelling ordinary play-fighting as a problem.
• It could stigmatise. A study reporting that "children in this community are aggressive" could harm the community's reputation, even if the cause is poverty or poor schools.
• It gives nothing back. The original study took information from children and families and returned nothing to them.

Your redesign

1. Start with the community's question. Hold meetings with parents, teachers and elders. The question might become: "What do our children learn from what they see at home, at school and on phones, and how can we help them handle conflict without violence?"
2. Form a local advisory group to approve the design, the materials and how results are reported.
3. Use local models, toys and language. For example, an older child or a respected adult from the community, familiar toys, and the local language for every instruction.
4. Use local researchers. Train people from the community, or from nearby colleges, to run sessions and interviews.
5. Define aggression with the community. Ask what people consider harmful, and what they see as ordinary rough play.
6. Share results first with the community, in a meeting and in plain language, before publishing.
7. Leave something useful. For example, workshops for parents and teachers on positive discipline, built from what the study found.

This approach is called community-based participatory research: research done with a community, which shares control over the questions, methods and use of results.

Why

Who asks the questions affects the answers people give. In the 1950s Khalapur study in Uttar Pradesh, the American fieldworkers felt that Rajput fathers' first answers about teaching their sons to fight were cautious. When a male Indian interviewer later asked the same questions, eight of nine fathers said they told their boys they must fight (Minturn & Hitchcock, 1966, p. 145). Local researchers and trust change what a study can learn.

Respect for the community is also good science. People are more honest, more willing to take part and more likely to use the results when they helped shape the research.

What your redesign gives up

• Comparability. A study built around one community's models and language is hard to compare directly with the original or with other places.
• Control over the question. The community may choose a question that interests researchers less, such as school discipline instead of media.
• Time and money. Meetings, training and shared decisions take months before any data are collected.
• Community politics. Every community has its own power differences, for example between castes, genders and generations. A leader's voice is not automatically everyone's voice. A good design makes sure that women, children and less powerful groups are also heard.