While doing my PhD, which explored community water governance in Scotland, I interviewed participants to understand their work and views concerning communities.
I quickly found that I wanted and needed to leave my and their offices to have these conversations. The setting restricted the conversation, making it difficult to connect with what they told me, and sometimes to move beyond expected answers.
I began walking with participants, conducting my interviews on the move. In a recent paper in WiresWater, I (alongside my coauthors) explored these water walks and how they can be used in social research to generate data.
The water walk is gaining popularity in qualitative water-related research, but we found few resources for researchers interested in using the method. We wanted to change that.
Through our paper, we hoped to offer an entry point for researchers and others interested in using water walks in data collection. We incorporated examples from our experiences in four distinct research contexts (in two countries), where we described what the water walk allowed us to do at these sites.
What is a water walk, and why do one?
We define a water walk as a research method in motion associated with water or water-related infrastructure used to collect qualitative research data. We understand the term water broadly—it may be a visible mark of water on the landscape, like a river, but it can also include less visible water, like an aquifer, and water-related infrastructure.
Practically, water walks might take a range of forms: walking with a community through a flooded area, going on a tour with practitioners to discuss water governance, walking with people in an area where controversial infrastructures are being developed, or lone walking using a map that participants made with the researcher team.
Water walks allow for interactions with water – collecting, using, or being with it – that other methods, such as seated interviews, do not.
Water walks can create an environment conducive to researchers’ better understanding of people’s experiences. This can occur by bringing participants and researchers into contact with what happens now or has happened in the past in the environment. By providing visual cues in places where something happened, water walks make it easier for people to talk about past, present, and future events
They can also facilitate a more relaxed interaction by walking alongside someone, which might feel less confrontational than sitting in front of them in a seated interview.
Image credit: Canva.
Challenges and practical considerations
Water walks can be useful for generating data, but it is important not to assume they will automatically generate rich and insightful data.
For instance, water is embedded in power issues. Our ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and class shape our visibility in areas and how we can move. Some spaces, such as rural locations or parts of a city, are less available or more dangerous for some groups, and water walks must be handled carefully.
Terrain can also be challenging for people with mobility issues. Researchers should adapt their research to honour inclusivity, for instance, by adjusting the pace and location of the walk or, as we show in the paper, allowing the participants to map a route which researcher may walk alone.
Importantly, water walks require much more preparatory work than seated interviews; for example, you have to consider challenges relating to recording the interview and the weather.
Water walks and different ways to do them
In our paper, we wanted to explore how our experiences conducting water walks were similar and different.
We used three main ‘planes of variation’ to examine our applications of the method. First is the walk leader – who leads the route? This can vary from interviewee/participant-led to interviewer/researcher-led. Second is the walk mode: how is the walk structured? Possibilities range from a wander to a structured tour, with different options in between. The third plane is the form of engagement with the water environment. There are key differences in how the water can be ‘treated’ in a water walk, ranging from a landscape or a backdrop to more deliberate or sensory engagement.
Using the planes of variation, we show that water walks are valuable for gathering qualitative data in water-related research and that there are many approaches to leverage water walks as a research method. The planes allow others to consider what type of water walks they want to do, how they compare them, and how they can be part of diverse research designs. We hope to inspire others to enhance reflexivity in methods and methodological choices!
