Family Meals Research
Family Meals Research
This experimental approach, working with 18 diverse families in each of our study settings, has at its heart a simple idea. In previous research many people had told us that it is rare in the majority of families for people to spend meaningful time together discussing what is going on in everyone’s lives. We therefore decided to seek volunteers who would agree to come together as a family group, once a month for eighteen months. The project provides the means to prepare a good dinner and the family consent to sit together over their food for an hour or two, talking about their lives and communities. The conversation is audio recorded, and subsequently, after anonymisation, translated and transcribed.
Family meal research training team at Walukuba Community Centre July 2024 with co-investigator Ginny Morrow standing in for Kirrily Pells
Cynthia and Venah practicing how they will get consent from their families for gathering research data
Examples of conversation topic ideas for families to use as part of the family meals research
Family Support Workers Cynthia and Venah plan how they will run the first family meal
Families can be formed in different ways. They may contain several generations. They may be headed by a single parent, by alternative guardians, or indeed by another child. We seek to include as many different sorts of family as possible. The selection criteria are simple - there must be at least two generations. Children under 12 can participate in the meal, but do not participate in the discussion. The discussion group can include up to six people per meal. Everyone’s voice must be heard and listened to.
To support families in what may be a novel and possibly challenging experience we have Family Support Workers in each country, facilitating the project but also available to discuss any issues arising, to suggest possible topics and to debrief and follow-up with the families. This strand of the work is led by Kirrily Pells, Co-Investigator on the project from University College London.
Year 2 - Family Meals Research 2025
The 18 families recruited in Uganda and Kenya - in the Walukuba/Masese district of Jina in Uganda, and in the Ahero and Awasi districts of Kisumu in Kenya continue to take part in the research scheme.
The families volunteer to take part in the project offering open recorded conversations over a family dinner (the ingredients for which are provided) once a month over the course of 18 months.
Focus groups take place periodically in specific groupings - young people 12+ boys and girls, mothers, fathers, grandparents etc.
Creative opportunities will be offered via the ongoing community centre programmes. Ideas on topics of conversation will be shared from focus group discussions. Research will be gathered from these encounters and fed back to the focus groups. This cycle of work will be repeated resulting in research data that will be collected and reflected back to the families and community - feeding into a final creative community performance in 2026.