Start With the Question: Rethinking Research That Makes A Difference
A conversation with Dr. Ashley Stewart-Tufescu on being undifferentiated, justice-led research, and letting your question choose the method.
Something happens early in graduate training that we don’t talk about enough.
Somebody asks you to pick a side. Maybe it’s a supervisor. Maybe it’s a committee member. Maybe it’s just the implicit structure of the program itself. But the message is clear: are you interested in qualitative inquiry and context, or quantitative methods and statistics? Choose.
And most of us just… choose. Because that’s what training looks like. You learn a tradition. You join a lab. You inherit a method. Before you’ve ever been asked what question is keeping you up at night, you’ve already been handed the tools you’re expected to use.
This is the starting point of our latest episode of the Emerging Scholar Podcast, and it’s the starting point because I think it’s one of the most important conversations we can have as emerging scholars: what gets lost when we commit to a method before we’ve committed to a question?
The Conversation
My guest is Dr. Ashley Stewart-Tufescu, an Assistant Professor and Registered Social Worker in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Manitoba. Ashley’s research on childhood adversity and resilience spans 19 countries across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond. She’s used storyboard methodology to understand children’s lived experiences. She’s studied what happens when we ask kids to complete surveys about their own trauma. And she helps lead research training platforms and partnerships that centre community voice and justice in every stage of the research process.
Ashley describes herself as an “undifferentiated” scholar. And she means it as a point of pride.
The arc of our conversation goes something like this:
If the questions keeping you up at night are grounded in justice — if what drives you is making the world better for children, families, and communities that have been overlooked or harmed — then you’re going to need a large suite of tools to answer those questions. A survey alone won’t get you there. Neither will interviews alone. Justice-oriented questions are messy and layered and human, and they demand methods that can meet them where they are.
And when you bring patients or community members in to work alongside you, when they are the ones asking the questions and driving the research, their questions won’t fit neatly into the paradigm you learned in your first-year methods course. They’ll need storyboards, or talking circles, or a well-being measure that doesn’t exist yet because nobody thought to ask them what well-being looks like. If you’re going to honour those questions, you need an extensive methodological toolbox.
That’s what undifferentiated means. Not indecision. Range.
Listen to the latest episode here: https://umfm.com/podcasts/the-emerging-scholar-podcast/season-2-episode-12
What We Covered in This Week’s Episode:
→ Why graduate programs often ask trainees to choose a methodological identity before they’ve asked a research question — and the cost of that
→ How a justice lens should shape the question itself, not just the ethics application
→ What it means to build authentic, non-extractive relationships with communities before a single variable gets measured
→ Ashley’s work using storyboard methodology to understand children’s experiences of adversity (published in Child Indicators Research, 2019)
→ The WE Study — research that identified which adverse childhood experience questions children find most upsetting
→ The ACHWM — the Aboriginal Children’s Health and Well-being Measure, a tool designed by First Nations youth, for First Nations youth
→ The CARe Research Training Platform and the Alliance Against Violence and Adversity (AVA) — two initiatives building research capacity grounded in community partnership and equity
Resources & Links
Dr. Ashley Stewart-Tufescu — University of Manitoba Faculty of Social Work
umanitoba.ca/social-work/faculty-and-staff/ashley-stewart-tufescu
Storyboard methodology with children: Stewart-Tufescu et al. (2019), Child Indicators Research
ideas.repec.org/a/spr/chinre/v12y2019i2d10.1007_s12187-018-9533-8.html
Children’s experiences completing an ACE survey: Stewart-Tufescu et al. (2024)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39482185/
The WE Study — upsetting ACE questions: Stewart-Tufescu et al. (2020)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33038722/
ACHWM — Aboriginal Children’s Health and Well-being Measure
achwm.ca/measure-wellness
Qualitative methods for Indigenous youth well-being measure: Wabano & Young (2013)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23618206/
CARe Research Training Platform
carertp.ca
Alliance Against Violence and Adversity (AVA)
avatraining.ca
Coming Up Next
On our next episode, we continue this thread with Dr. Tara Horrill from the College of Nursing at the University of Manitoba. Tara is an emerging clinical scholar whose question — why are people who are already marginalized dying of cancers we know how to catch? — led her from a decade of bedside nursing into critical ethnography, scoping reviews, and community-engaged research aimed at transforming cancer care systems from the inside out. It’s a powerful example of what happens when you let a justice-driven question lead and refuse to be limited by a single method.