A small problem with awareness raising!

I used to work at a busy youth hostel. In that job I was required to communicate with a lot of people who did not have a good command of English. It could be a stressful struggling to communicate and I never quite stopped trying to speak louder to the person opposite me or to try to say the same thing in different ways.

One evening, my Japanese counterpart answered the phone. The caller from another hostel spoke fast in English and when he asked her to repeat it, she spoke increasingly louder until eventually my colleague finally handed me the phone. He didn’t need her to speak louder. He needed her to speak slower and to repeat exactly what she said so that he could put more of it together to understand it. Instead she phrased her request differently which only gave him more work to do to understand her.

My observations are that although this may be obvious, it is not easy to put into practice. The first thing that most of us do when we are not understood or not heard is to assume that we need only to speak louder and the problem will be solved. Alas, speaking louder can actually prevent your message going across at all in the wrong situation! It can be useful to speak loudly to a deaf person or to speak slowly to them. To someone who speaks a different language, slower will make a difference, louder won’t. In a crowd of noisy people, speaking may not be the best way to communicate although observations indicate that most of us just try to yell louder than everyone else. In a crowd of foreigners, it may be most effective to hire the services of a translator and to use a completely different language. It is often as effective to say less rather than more. As I found when I was teaching, better to get a small amount across well than to put lots across badly.

This seems all self evident and yet it is clear that people are great at filtering information before it gets anywhere near our brain if it is irrelevant or just perceived as noise. Rather unfortunately, that noise can stop the useful information getting through!

As Bickerstaff and Walker (2002: 2175) note, “there is now a myriad of awareness raising campaigns urging members of the public to take responsibility for improving their environment.” As they note, these campaigns have not been very successful. Such campaigns assume that people will passively soak up information and then become actively responsible for simple changing their own behaviour in line with that information. At best this is somewhat contradictory! At worst it misses completely the complexity even of making relatively simple changes.

The joys of connecting sciences etc.

I"ve just been away at an interesting conference on making connections across science and between science and other forms of knowledge. It was great. Perhaps the talks that stood out for me most (they made me laugh with considerable relief at the time too) was the difficulty that people experience as scientists trying to do work that spans disciplines and professional boundaries.

As Hugh Campbell put it, you have to get used to reviewers hating your papers, to feeling like an idiot rather than an expert.

On top of that you don't have such great outputs because building the relationships necessary takes a huge amount of time since it takes heaps to work out how to engage with other scientists and most of these kinds of projects also require researchers to engage meaningfully with research "subjects" and with other stakeholders.

And on top of that most science institutions have no idea of the difficulties and tend to view people involved in these kinds of projects as abject failures!

Oh dear!

Conceptual vs concrete

I watched a meeting some years ago in which there was a major mismatch in communication between 2 planners and a group of 3-4 community members all trying to work together to develop a district plan.

The planners would put out a question with some background and then the group of community people would sit there and try and work out what it meant in terms that would help them answer. This was a complex task - they had to listen to the question, work out what it meant by finding concrete examples of what it might mean, gauge the reactions of the planners to see uf they were on the right track, and then think about what they should do in their plan.


The planners were frustrated that the community group had to 'go round in circles' before they could come up with what, to the planners seemed like a simple answer. As an outside observer, I guess I was able to see what was happening - the planners were conceptual thinkers who worked across a range of communities. The community group were much more grounded in the local area and as such were more concrete thinkers.

I got the opportunity to point this out to the planners over lunch and they were immediately able to try to communicate using concrete examples up front which made life much easier for all concerned (so they told me).

This , I think, was part of what was going on the other night (see my last post). What I found difficult was providing relevant concrete examples of new ways of doing things. I realise now that its relatively easy if you can give examples of what exists now but coming up with relevant, credible ideas that provide options for new ways of doing things is more difficult. I need to ponder this too, because there are some other issues here about the way I see participatory research which might be intervening here.

Relevance and irrelevance

I was in a meeting the other night with a community group to whom we had come to deliver some research results. From where I stood it was frustrating, so it has been occupying my thoughts recently.

Relevance is a funny thing. From my own experience as a receiver of information, one wee statement can suddenly make a whole lot of information suddenly much more personally relevant than it was a few seconds before.

As a giver of information, working out how to frame what I"m saying so that if is relevant is a matter of listening really carefully to the people I am are talking with. I guess part of my frustration the other night, was that I was finding it incredibly difficult to understand where they were in the conversation. Perhaps also my team and I were so bound up in the idea of delivering the research results we had prepared that we couldn't easily listen in a connected way to our audience?

More later.

Chrys