Background and objectives: How do qualitative researchers collect meaningful and representative data, and engage in action research, when constrained by cost, distance or unforeseen events? In our work investigating health and older-person services in Tasmania, we had to confront this question in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, redesigning our methodological approach to support participant engagement in qualitative group research to meet unpredictable pandemic isolation and ethics requirements. Study type: Rapid review. Methods: We searched three academic databases, limited to the past 5 years, cross-referencing to identify strategies to support online qualitative group research and assess the suitability of videoconferencing (specifically through Zoom and Skype) as a tool for participant engagement in qualitative group research. Results: After removing duplicates found across the three databases, 866 articles were screened by title and After manually searching citations deemed to add to our understanding of online qualitative methods, 66 articles were included in this rapid review. The review found that the strengths of videoconferencing include its cost effectiveness and ability to reach disparate populations, but that several concerns must be addressed to capture its benefits: rapport, technical issues, planning, privacy and equity. Conclusion: In response to the methodological challenge of engaging with participants without using routine face-to-face qualitative methods, our rapid review identified several advantages of using videoconferencing applications, such as Zoom or Skype, to facilitate research. However, to enhance data quality and the research experience for participants, consideration must be given to technical issues, planning, privacy and rapport. Underpinning these elements is consideration of equity of access.

School readiness is a construct used by educators and policy makers to describe a range of abilities that are beneficial for children transitioning to school. The association of socioeconomic disadvantage with developmental vulnerability when children start school is well established. Parents play a crucial role in supporting children’s transition to school and are acknowledged as their child’s first and foremost teacher. The aim of this study was to explore how parents experience and support their children’s transition to school. This study presents findings from an ethnographic study with 39 parents living in two Australian communities characterised by high area-level socioeconomic disadvantage. The study reports on how parents experience and support their child for transition to school, specifically through their understanding of the concept of ‘readiness’. The role of early childhood services in supporting parents is also explored. Parents conceptualised school readiness as the child’s capacity to function effectively and independently in the hitherto unfamiliar physical and social world of school. Parents considered early childhood services supportive of their children's transition to school, particularly the development of social skills.

This article examines the way that aged care workers and clients are devalued. It is argued that they share a stigmatised and marginalised position, not experiencing recognition at individual, rights or societal levels. The research draws on a qualitative, ethnographic study of aged care and disability support, with Honneth’s recognition theory used to analyse the intersection of practice and meaning in this work. The study reveals that workers’ and clients’ presentations of a competent self are compromised by external signals of mistrust and devaluing, forms of misrecognition. These include low wages and status for workers, public and policy discourses that position them and their clients as mendicant or undeserving, and demeaning treatment from organisations. In turn, those participants who lacked a sense of themselves as uniquely valuable, as deserving of rights, and as contributing to the shared project of society, displayed practices and perspectives that were disabling of themselves and one another. Their interactions were characterised by distrust, resistance and mutual disabling. Boomageddon and silver tsunami scenarios are part of the problem; such discourses of misrecognition must be contested.

The complexities of dating are exacerbated when couples’ getting together happens with the support of another person – the disability support worker. This paper explores the experience of Vic, a worker whose role it was to drive a couple to their dinner or movie dates. Vic’s narrative prompts consideration of how such workers position themselves within the sometimes conflicting role demands of enabler, risk manager, and mentor, negotiating the emotion work and relationship mediation roles they may be expected to perform. His narrative reveals the event as a performance of normalization, surveillance, management and othering, emotion work and feeling rules, and recognition.

There is a global trend towards place-based initiatives (PBIs) to break the cycle of disadvantage and promote positive child development. Co-location is a common element of these initiatives and is intended to deliver more coordinated services for families of young children. This paper examines how co-locating early childhood services (ECS) from health and education in Child and Family Centres (CFCs) has impacted collaboration between services. This ethnographic study included 130 participant observation sessions in ECS between April 2017 and December 2018 and semi-structured interviews with 45 early childhood service providers and 39 parents/carers with pre-school aged children. Service providers based in CFCs reported that co-location of services was facilitating local cooperation and collaboration between services. However, insufficient information sharing between services, prioritising client contact over collaborative practice and limited shared professional development remained barriers to collaborative practice. For parents, co-location improved access to services, but they experienced services independently of each other. Co-location of ECS in CFCs contributed to greater cooperation and collaboration between services. However, for the potential of CFCs to be fully realised there remains a need for governance that better integrates service policies, systems and processes that explicitly support collaborative practice.