"We wanted to understand why people use alcohol and other drugs, not what drugs they use."
OPEN’s Alcohol and other Drug Peer Research project began due to previous peer research that pointed towards Shetlands alcohol and other drug culture influencing the choices our young people make. The project ran from June 2022 to October 2023 with a total of 215 research participants. The aim of the research wasn’t to ask what the young people did but to understand the reason why they would choose to use alcohol or other drugs. This research provided a series of ideas for change to share participants hopes for Shetland in the future and calls to action for the community to work together to change our culture positively.
Please see our Research report below for our findings
A live working group has been created to implement the ideas for change that came from the Alcohol and other Drugs project. Professional stake holders and young people working together to tackle stigma within Shetland and challenge community mind sets to model compassion to build a more supported, connected community.
We started OPEN’s alcohol and other drugs research project in September of 2022, me and Akira were back in the office ready to hit the ground running. The reason for our new research project came from the findings from the OPEN space project, young people themselves had identified that with nothing to do and nowhere to go that their options were limited, other than mooching about the town or paying to go somewhere there was nowhere that was their own.
We wanted to find out if because of this alcohol and other drugs are being accessed by young people. The Shetland alcohol and drugs partnership ( SADP) agreed to work alongside us on the project as they had identified that there are no services available to support young people below the age of 16 if they are using substances and want to access support.
In our previous project professional researchers Amy Calder from YouthLink Scotland and Jennifer Russell from Anderson Solutions gave us a guiding hand and guided us through our work to complete the project. The professional researchers are teachers to us Peer Researchers and provide wisdom and insight on projects.
In the previous project we had worked with the Miro Board, it’s an interactive whiteboard platform that we could work on. Jennifer is the Miro board master, Akira and I met Jennifer online via zoom to create a new Miro board for this project Miro is so easy to use and it is really helpful to have all your thoughts in one place alongside being super helpful for seeing our timeline.
We discussed the project name and felt that instead of the alcohol and drugs project we would say the alcohol and other drugs project. This is because we didn’t want alcohol to seem separate to drugs, we felt that stating other drugs made the distinction that we do not feel alcohol is separate.
The Miro Board is where we start working on our core questions for the project, digging deep into what we want to find out and why we would want to find out the information. Honestly I struggled to get my head in the game when it came to understanding why we were doing the research without going down rabbit holes of questions I was curious about. Staying neutral and on task seems easy now but I remember wrestling with my own preconceptions at the start but really once I understood that we were exploring drug culture in Shetland, what it looked like and the impact on our culture through young people’s eyes.
Our core questions are:
How would you describe the Culture in Shetland around Alcohol and other Drugs?
Why do young people use Alcohol and other Drugs? What could be done to reduce use? What could be done to reduce harm?
When does use of Alcohol and other Drug become a problem for young people?
What could be done to avoid problem use?
Akira and I use the core questions in focus groups and interviews, we use different interactive methods to ask the questions above and would use the end of sessions to reflect quietly, finishing off with our “hard hitter” an envelope with this question inside it
If you could wave a magic wand, what would be the single most effective thing that could be done to reduce harm and support young people affected by alcohol and other drugs in Shetland?
Using Miro really helps us to shape our focus groups and interviews. Jennifer is a research consultant who works alongside me and Akira guiding us in our work, we would be lost without her, she has really helped me with any mental block I’ve had when it has come to our core questions and she’s really good at seeing the bigger picture of projects. Things would move so much slower without Jennifer helping us the first couple months of each project figuring out the how’s and whys.
Once our core questions were plotted out we were ready to try out focus groups and interviews. Akira and I began interviews and started planning for Amy and Jennifer to take a trip up to Shetland to work with our volunteers and get us settled into the rhythm of running focus groups.
In November Amy and Jennifer arrived in Shetland for a fly in visit. We spent the day meeting with them, Wendy McConnachie from the SADP joined us to give her perspective and we discussed our core questions, what we hoped to learn and what we hoped the research would achieve, which is to understand alcohol and other culture through young people’s eyes and to identify whether there was a gap in substance support services for under 16s.
Amy and Jennifer ran a focus group with our volunteers in an evening session, we were aware alcohol and other drugs can be a sensitive topic so while Amy and Jennifer ran the focus group. Amy would pause on occasion to talk about the ethics and how to handle a situation or how to redirect someone when they are sharing something too personal while also still validating the participant’s opinion. Jennifer demonstrated the use of tone and use of space in the focus group, using a calm controlled voice and making use of the space whilst delivering the focus group to give the impression being relaxed and in control of the space.
At the end of the focus group we mentioned about recruiting for the research team for the alcohol and other drugs project and some volunteers put their name down to join the team.
Amy and Jennifer coming to visit had been so helpful, strengthening connections with our partners, taking us through the focus group plan and ethics surrounding the work we are planning to carry out during the project.
After hugs we said our “until next times”, me and Akira felt ready to start gathering data. More about our data gathering, project journey coming up, as well as our first official research team meeting!
Its mid-November and the Alcohol and other drugs project is taking shape, we have our core questions for our focus groups and interviews, we have a research team of young people volunteering to take part and we are ready to get out into the community and gather our findings.
We spent some time plotting out how we wanted our next couple months to go, we sat and wrote out a timeline which Akira took charge with. I spent some time putting together a poster to draw interest to the project using Canva which is a graphic design tool which I have found hugely helpful tool when I want to get creative. We put up posts on Facebook, emailed schools, youth groups and stuck some posters up around places we thought young people might be. We wanted to cast our net wide to get as many people involved as possible, we are aware everyone’s life experiences are different and wanted to give the chance for that range or possibly lack of range from our work
- Shannon and Akira, Peer Researchers
Between December and February we conducted 5 interviews, we would start off by exploring the word culture with our interviewee leading onto a dictionary explanation of the word for clarity. The rest of the interview is structured around core questions asking interviewees what they thought of Shetlands alcohol and other drugs culture and looking at why young people might use any type of substance and what problem use can look like leading onto support they would like to see available.
The interviews provided a lot of quotes so we felt it was time to go back to the research team. The purpose of the meeting was to explore themes that were coming up in the interviews by grouping together quotes that say similar things, having the research team involved with this part of the process means that they would have a good grasp of what we were learning and it also gave them a chance to forecast any predictions for what they felt the main themes would be nearer the end of the project after coding. What the research team was doing was coding done with paper and a flipchart during this meeting instead of on a computer so they really can grasp what the data was telling them and hopefully they feel like invaluable members of the team.
Between February and March Akira and I managed to organise 3 focus groups, after the first focus group and a lack of uptake on focus groups offered through different networks we decided we would rather rebrand our focus groups into workshops and make them more interactive.
We still used our core questions and the same format as before but instead we used things like smart survey, Dixit cards and we used Menti to generate a word cloud. We also had a hard hitter question at the end where we would hand out envelopes with a question asking the young people if they could change one thing about alcohol and other drugs culture in Shetland what would it be. Amy Calder from YouthLink Scotland one of our professional researchers was actually due up for the March research team meeting so she was able to be our guinea pig, with us running the new workshop idea by her and making sure that what we planned to do still counted as research, she was very pleased with our work and said it looked great.
Having Amy up was great, she helped me wrap my head around coding during the afternoon followed by a meal at a local restaurant for dinner with myself, Akira, Amy and our boss Una, it was so lovely to come together and just relax for an hour or so. Afterwards we headed back to the office to set up for the research team coming in. Amy had planned a fun research task researching our own question about a box of celebrations, the team really enjoyed this and got really inventive making polls on their phone and messaging group chats to conduct their research task – Amy mentioned it was the first time she had seen someone do that during that particular research task and was impressed by the young people. We used the rest of the meeting for Amy to talk through the participative democracy certificate (PDC) to see if any of the volunteers were keen to gain this qualification. Most of the team wanted to do it and Amy explored ways in which they could do their own bit of research in order to get their PDC.
After the meeting we said our thank yous and goodbyes to Amy for coming and visiting. We were broken up for the Easter holidays as Amy was leaving so as her holiday (working holiday) ended ours started! Once we were back in the office we would circulate the new workshop around our networks and hopefully get some new participants for our research. More about how we got on in my next blog.
So it’s July 2023, the summer holidays are well and truly here with its muggy days.
At the end of my last blog I told you about our updated workshop that we planned to put into action after the Easter break. We came back after the Easter break put the workshop into action and ran it with some young people. The updated workshop method we used like Mentimeter and the survey with the Dixit cards gave every participant a chance to feedback, we are aware not everyone wants to speak up in group settings so we also ensured that the quieter voices in the room had a voice by using the updated workshop plan.
We also had a meeting with Wendy McConnachie a member of our research team who is the Alcohol and Drug Development Officer with NHS Shetland, the meeting was super productive we discussed how the project was progressing and explained how we were really struggling to up our numbers for our survey. She left the meeting with the promise that she would get the survey shared on ShetNews, which really helped our survey numbers once the article was published. We also had some help from the Robin Calder who got PSE teachers to circulate the survey in class rooms during PSE lessons, this was perfect as it meant every age group we had hoped to capture we have now managed to succeed in hearing from thanks to the help of our local community. The success we have had with the survey really is a positive example of partnership work within our community, the help we had circulating the survey really is a testament that people do want to make a positive impact within Shetland and value our young people’s thoughts and opinions.
- Akira and Shannon, Peer Researchers
Our research team members who were working on their Participative Democracy Certificate (PDC) have been doing extremely well, one member of the team has conducted a survey amongst their peers after choosing a research question and also creating an online survey. Another made up a question box and took it to a couple venues to ask their peers to give their feedback. Together we analysed their findings and the feedback they received was rich and the findings will be used in our final report.
We also had a research team meeting at the start of June, we discussed the volunteers PDC progress then did some analysis and coding as a group with all the information we had gathered so far, we weren’t able to get every bit of data analysed as a group but we did however get great input for what the research team had time to cover and they really got to grips with what the project is teaching us. Learning together is so valuable and challenges us professionally to make sure that we are led by the research team but also passing on the skills that we are learning whilst on the ground conducting the research.
By early June the time for focus groups, workshops and interviews had come to an end. I could begin going back over some of the coding and analysis that we had done along the way either ourselves or with the research team. I coded in the paper method that I have mentioned in previous blogs and upon completion I proceeded to input the information onto an excel sheet, by the end of it we had 399 separate codes however many of these are under similar themes such as education or support services if I hadn’t kept specifics within the codes so that we could refer back to peoples interviews or focus groups/workshops for reference at any given time that it is requested.
Our survey still needs to be coded, I have been having a play around with Chat GPT as a potential tool for finding the themes within the survey and then coding the data with those codes to see if it makes my work more efficient.
It would be really interesting to know if this is a tool that can be successfully used within research, especially if it means we can do more work for our communities.
Jennifer one of the professional researchers is popping along at the end of July to help me with coding the survey findings also.
Once the summer break is over and we are all back in the office together Amy and Jennifer our professional researchers have a planned visit to help us write up our final report for the Alcohol and other Drugs project for presenting back our findings. We have already been asked by the Shetlands Children’s Partnership to share our findings which is really encouraging to see the community taking such a keen interest in young people’s views. Currently we haven’t got any other presentations lined up but we will have until the end of October to share our findings so I am hopeful we will reach a wide range or groups and also be able to give young people plenty of chances to hear the findings.
I am so thankful for the support we have and so proud of our amazing volunteers for all the amazing work and effort that they have put into the project. Also the young people and adults within our community that have contributed or helped arrange time with young people has been truly wonderful, it feels as though we really are building great relationships within all aspects of the community the more chances that we get to conduct peer research projects which we couldn’t be more grateful for.
