From first ideas to first research paper

I am rarely in at the start of a research process. Often for me researchers come when they get stuck and need a specialist to help them out of a situation; sometimes they come when they have collected their data and want someone to guide them through the analysis and some even come at the design stage of the research. When the final starts happening I know I have a good research relationship. However me being there at the germ of a research idea is rare.

So here is the first one where I was. I have for a while attended the Broomhall Breakfast which is a community breakfast held every Friday that cooks a breakfast for all who comes. There is no charge but donations are welcome and as result it has mixed clientele. There are alcoholics, artists, police officers, homeless people and asylum seekers.  Storying Sheffield also made a video about it, if you want to know more. Well it occurred to me that actually the Breakfast would be interested in knowing more about what people were eating and how they might improve the breakfast. They already provide bananas and cereal bars for people to take away and tend to be quite fussy about what they cook. So as one of the people I regularly work with was in Human Nutrition and they run a masters course, I asked whether she would be interested in investigating and she said yes.

We got a student, indeed we were fortunate and got a very bright student who managed to cope with both analysing food diaries and also conducting qualitative questionnaires. The focus changed once she started going to the Breakfast and realised how many different sorts of people go there. She decided to focus on those who are homeless or temporarily housed. This meant that actually with the mix of the people at the Breakfast, there were not enough people and she needed to find another place to recruit. She found that in the Archer Project which really does specialise in providing food for people on the margins. This gave her the ability to recruit enough members to actually get some idea what homeless and vulnerably housed people were doing for food in Sheffield.

Importantly it also meant she began to get ideas about food aspirations and patterns of food. For instance one of the crucial things was that although there were quite a few places to get food on a normal working day, weekends and particular bank holidays were another story all together. That meant that sometimes these people were going for almost forty eight hours without food.

This got written up as a paper and eventually submitted to the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, and today we heard it has been accepted. However this is only the start, there are still big questions about how, given the resources and restrictions so many of the charitable places that provide food have, do we go about improving the diet. Also work on what motivates and enables people who create these places to function.