Qualitative Research in Practice : Stories From the Field - Blogs Unpad

Qualitative research in practice
bureaucracy, in homelessness services and in politics
. . . and the sorts of things I’ve said are simply that it’s
pointless to move people on. These are the spaces that
capitalism has left for them. If you’re now going to tell
them to leave these spaces, where will they go? And
how do you expect that sort of response to be effective?
But in the last twelve months, I now hear the
local Councillor saying things like, ‘We will no longer
move homeless people on from this area.’ Some
people in Brisbane City Council—not necessarily the
top levels—are starting to take on this idea of ‘Yes,
that’s actually right. These are all the same people
we’ve been moving on from these spaces for ten years
and they’re still the same people so obviously this is
not a very good way to go about it.’ So I know that in
terms of the federal government response it’s pretty
much unchanged, and I know that the long-term
homeless people whom I’ve looked at in this research
probably won’t be much better off, but I can see a shift
at the local level; in terms of making life different for
the people that I’m concerned about, where it will
make a difference is at the local level. So ...I feel like
it’s been a very useful piece of work already.
Cheryl Tilse—The long goodbye
Cheryl:
I didn’t change the world. I think I had an impact on all
of the facilities that I worked in, and I certainly spent the
year after I’d written the thesis talking about the need to
understand the perspectives of older spouses. I did a lot
of that—I got invited to the annual general meeting of
the Gerontology Association; I did a talk with staff at a
hospital; and I did a talk for nurses in aged care facilities.
So I targeted workers and . . . really I was saying
these older spouses need a voice. I was trying to
increase the understanding of the issues for them. I was
trying to get to front-line workers rather than social
workers or policy workers. I did some in-service training
sessions for some church-run nursing homes where
they brought in all their workers ...I wrote a report in
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