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<b><h4>Briefly describe your collaboration and why it was felt that working in a collaboration would be more effective than working alone to resolve your research question.</h4></b>

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<b>Professor Janet Boddy, Professor of Child, Youth & Family Studies, University of Sussex</b>

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<em>In her interview, Janet discusses her experience of working on an Economic and Social Research Council methods node, Narratives of Varied Everyday Lives and Linked Approaches (NOVELLA).</em>

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We wanted to work with families, in the UK and in India, in very different economic circumstances, in rural and urban areas. But rather than starting with, as people often do, with the UK, with the affluent minority world as the norm, and the global south as the other, we wanted to turn that on its head. So the collaboration with Young Lives, learning about their methodological approach, learning about the contexts in which they were researching, doing really close narrative work with the eight family case studies, and discussing what we were learning with the Young Lives researchers all the way through, meant that we started our project, by thinking about childhood and family life in an Indian context. 

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And then, taking that secondary analysis into new pilot work for the new data collection, which we carried out in India first, again with UK and Indian researchers working side by side, sitting side by side, talking to families. And then we went back and did piloting in the UK, then we did fieldwork in India, and then we went back and did fieldwork in England. And then, of course, we came together as well for the analysis of the new data collection.
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<b><h4>How was information or data collected, stored and shared?</h4></b>

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<b>Professor Janet Boddy:</b> I guess there are two things that are really crucial to highlight. One is that we wrote and funded time for Young Lives Researchers into the family lives and environments project. So the time that we needed for the contextualisation, to sit and read through their data gathering reports, to discuss with them how we would sample, from their big data set, how we would choose just eight families to focus on, that time, that support was written into the work and we had formal data sharing agreements. In very practical terms, what we did was they provided secure space on their server, password protected access, on their secure server, so that we could log in to access the interview material and so on. 
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<b><h4>Did the collaboration pose any administrative challenges, such as differences in regulations or hiring and accounting practices? If yes, how did you deal with them?</h4></b>

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<b>Professor Janet Boddy:</b> I think one of the key administrative challenges that we faced, through the project working in India and the UK, was actually about, I suppose, an administrative aspect of the project that you often don't give terribly much thought to, possibly I hadn't given enough thought to, beforehand. Which was that, because we were very carefully working with this collaborative process, with UK researchers and Indian researchers carrying out the new data collection together, in India, interviews were conducted in two languages. 

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And that created real challenges for transcription, because Telugu transcribers wouldn't necessarily be comfortable transcribing English. And Telugu transcribers wouldn't necessarily have sufficient English to translate the Telugu into English. And we wanted to have both, because we wanted to think about-- translatability was one of our central methodological interests, and we've written a bit about that as well. 

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But what that meant is that actually the transcription process had multiple components. So we had the Telugu transcribed, then we had the Telugu translated into English, and then we had the English transcribed into the translated transcripts. So we had multiple versions. And that meant, as you can imagine, that took three times longer than normal transcription would. 