Pros and Cons in international research cooperation
Working on Demiknow Project as a PhD research student has brought me a wealth of experience in how to collaborate with other national teams to conceptualize, design and conduct joint research. I enjoyed the process when different national research teams conducted their own literature review on the research topic that they were interested in and then shared their works with other teams for comments and feedback. Through this process, I had chances to learn from other teams, shared my thoughts and developed my critical thinking, which is essential for a PhD student. Especially, joining the research gave me a chance to learn a new research skill – conducting a scoping review. I learned a lot from the process of conducting a scoping review on transnational grandparent migration to identify research gaps from which we identified the area of research. This was truly the new research skill I gained from participating in Demiknow.
In particular, the process of developing research ideas and preparing ethics applications brought me new insights and great experience in international research collaboration. In developing research ideas, each team developed their own topic of interest. For example, the Australian team focused on international migrant grandparents while the Chinese team emphasize internal mobile elderly. Though these two topics are relevant in some ways, the research samples, research methods and locations of research are different. If the teams wanted to submit a joint ethics application, they needed to develop a joint research proposal that showed the links between two research components. To address this concern, the Australian team, based on the research ideas of the two teams, drafted a joint ethics application and a joint research proposal and requested the Chinese team to fill in their part. The ethics application and the joint research proposal must show the interrelation and independence of two research components, which can be not only two independent research but also a joint one for comparing and contrasting purposes of research findings.
Despite a quite challenging process, this collaboration did bring benefits to each research team. For the Australian team, we had a chance to review our research purposes and research questions that both reflect national and international concerns about our research topic. This review could bring the team more opportunities to gather better and extensive cross-national research findings that are valuable for comparing and contrasting translocal and transnational migration patterns of grandparents – a new emerging trend in family, ageing and migration research. For the Chinese team, this collaboration process could help them address their difficulties in getting ethics approval in their country while they do not have a similar system. By sharing common research questions, both teams will have a chance to compare and contrast their research findings, which will bring the potential for the two research teams to develop joint research finding papers in the future.
To sum up, Demiknow has brought good opportunities for research partners to cooperate and learn from each other. This is a process of learning and sharing to enrich knowledge in a topic of concern ‘Decentering knowledge: the role of family decision making’.
