An interview with Kerry Montgomery, Centre for Appearance Research
Kerry is a recipient of one the VTCT Foundation Career Development Awards and here she tells us about her project and how it will support her career in academia.
My background
I started in mental health as a psychological wellbeing practitioner, supporting people with anxiety and depression. I’ve always wanted to work in visible difference and I started my PhD in 2013, looking at how to support people with skin conditions to improve social anxiety. From there I worked with a number of charities in the Appearance Collective, including working with Alopecia UK for 4.5 years as their psychological wellbeing lead, which was great. I’ve moved over to this role because this was very much a passion project for me as I don’t think there’s enough research of this kind out there. I did look at other places where I could do this, but CAR really was the only place that could supervise the project in the way that was needed. It also enables me to keep the links with the Appearance Collective charities I know and build relationships with others that I don’t know as well.
Overview of my research
My study is looking at family planning and decision-making for people with a visible difference that can be inherited. It’s an exploratory study as it’s an area that’s not really been looked at before. We’re looking to explore experiences in depth and ask questions about what influences their decision-making about whether or not to have children. We’re particularly looking for people where visible difference is the factor, as there may be some for whom the decision about having children is not related to their appearance. We will be asking questions about the factors that influence the decision and what support they perceive is available to help them with those decisions.
It is a sensitive subject and if you boil it down it’s addressing the question ‘should I have a baby that looks like me?’ That’s a really tricky thing to talk about and safely express your feelings. Having children is such a divisive subject for everyone, but there’s an even greater stigma for those with a visible condition.
How EDI is part of my research
As part of this study I want to look at decision-making within different cultures and religions. In many cultures people won’t even consider the decision, let alone discuss it. The stigma may be greater in some cultures and this may influence their decision-making. The centres where we operate are in places like Birmingham with diverse populations so we will have different avenues for recruiting people from different backgrounds. I will be looking to interview the person with the visible difference (male or female), but not their partners as some of the issues might not have been shared with them. Hopefully we will have a mix of men and women, but we predict that the majority will be women. I’m hoping also that we can talk to people of different sexualities.
There will be diversity in the sample and as it’s an exploratory study, we can adapt the focus so we can delve deep and get the richness of experience we are seeking with particular groups. It might be the right thing to have everyone together and there may be enough similarities. It could seed lots of future research!
The challenges of this kind of research
One challenging area is that we will need to be open to talking about termination. It is part of the journey for some people. It can be hard to hear, so I hope that my background working in mental health will have prepared me to manage this. There are always people who pull on your heart-strings, there’s trauma, tragedy abuse, so supervision for me is really important. I have my supervisor, Di Harcourt, here at CAR and I’ve got a ‘buddy’ here to support me too. I’ll be an interviewer rather than a therapist, but some of these skills come into play and also knowing where to signpost people to for support if they get distressed.
How the award will help my research career
I love the academic environment, I love study, I love research but it has to be applied research because that speaks to my need to actively help. It’s selfish really but I need to see how I’ve helped, to see the product being used. The award has given me a chance to rebuild my academic career as a research fellow, do this research really well, build on it, hopefully secure further grants for the work. I need to be careful as the project needs to be contained within the two years but I can see how we also need to be thinking about the next steps and how we grow this. I want to stay in research! The project will take the time to help participants reflect on a really difficult subject area, and the way that we do this will be a huge learning to take away. It’s not just abou€t the results we publish, it’s how we did it.