The Challenges and Opportunities of SEL Research:

Be prepared to listen.

August 31, 2020

For the past year, Patricia Cabrerizo has been engaging in a study, led by the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child and in partnership with UNESCO’s Horizontes program, on understanding local perceptions of social and emotional skills in rural communities of two regions in Peru (Cusco and Piura). Her research has highlighted many of the challenges of qualitative research while also illuminating helpful considerations for practitioners looking to do similar research in their own contexts.

Ask someone to describe Peru’s culture, and you will be hard-pressed to find a succinct answer. Peru displays incredible diversity in geography, food, language, and ethnicities. While this richness of culture characterizes Peru well, it can also pose great challenges for qualitative research, especially in the field of social and emotional learning (SEL).

SEL as a concept is already complicated and can be difficult to define and implement without the added layer of cultural contextualization. While there are frameworks such as CASEL or “The Big Five” to help understand or organize SEL skills and competencies, these frameworks, with their broad language and terminology, often do not translate well to local contexts and cultural identities.

Consequently, in order to assess SEL and implement it into UNESCO Horizontes programming in Peru, practitioners must understand how SEL is perceived at the community level, which is why for the past year Patricia and the GC-DWC team have been conducting ethnographic interviews with parents, teachers, and students to better understand what SEL means for them. Given Peru’s diverse regions, the team’s focus has been studying SEL in the rural, indigenous communities of Cusco and Piura in order to develop a relevant tool for the Horizontes program to measure the impact of its programming in these regions. Ultimately, the hope is that this tool can be tested and adapted in other Peruvian contexts in the future. 

The team’s research process, now in the analysis stage, revealed a few challenges as well as recommendations for practitioners looking to do similar research in the future.

Challenge #1: Given Peru’s diversity of languages and dialects, deciphering how to talk about SEL in interviews was difficult as the level of nuance necessary to fully understand perceptions and understandings of a complex topic is high. For example, if an interview was conducted in Spanish rather than Quechua, the mother tongue of many participants in Cusco, researchers found that a respondent’s responses were far less-detailed than when interviews were conducted in the local language. Thus, conducting interviews in the local language allowed for a higher level of probing and follow-up to truly unpack and understand respondents’ perceptions of SEL.

Recommendation #1: As much as possible, hire researchers and interviewers who are native to the local areas in which you are conducting research. In addition to being able to speak the local language, there is added value in the interviewer being familiar with local customs, cultures, and phrases as this can mitigate losing important insights in translation. 

Challenge #2: Beyond the language barriers, simply talking about SEL was a key challenge in Patricia and her team’s research. If you stop and think about it, how often do we define and ascribe specific meanings to abstract terms and ideas that we frequently use? If someone were to ask you to define ‘responsibility’ or ‘creativity’, what would you say? Although you likely have a clear understanding of what these words mean to you, to actually articulate their meaning is no simple task. Ultimately, most will define these traits by the different skills and behaviors that exemplify them; therefore, researchers must categorize these skills and behaviors discussed by interviewees and organize them into a broader, common framework, which again is abstract and necessitates a great deal of follow-up to ensure accuracy of reporting.

Recommendation #2: Be prepared to listen. It is important for practitioners and researchers not to attribute their own meaning and definitions to ideas expressed in interviews. If practitioners shape an interview based on their own understanding, they will not grasp what is actually important to the local communities. When it comes time to implement programming or research tools based on the analysis of these understandings, the programming will lack relevance for the local community, ultimately risking its sustainability. While truly listening and asking probing questions will lengthen interviews and create more data for analysis, it is worth it for the accuracy of the final product and sustainable learning.

The final recommendation is simple: partner to do more. The challenges of qualitative research require time and expertise to ensure the quality and reliability of the data. Plan for the necessary time at the onset of a project and seek out educational and university partners who can support you to do more.