“Music helps my thoughts process – even when life feels a mess”… Using lyric writing workshops to engage young carers with findings from public health research

Informal caregiving is widespread across our communities and is feature of daily family life for many.  Our HealthWise Wales data show that informal carers experience poorer mental health and report poorer self-care behaviours than their peers. Indeed, there is rising concern about the impact that caregiving has on informal carers, but to date, most research in this field has focused on adult care providers.  

We wanted to find a way to engage with younger carers to discuss our findings in the context of their lived experiences in a respectful and mutually beneficial manner.   The timing of our engagement project during the COVID-19 lockdown impacted its delivery in both challenging and favourable ways.

About HealthWise Wales

HealthWise Wales is an online health research resource, led by Cardiff University in partnership with Swansea University. We bring researchers and the public together to do research that matters.  Members across Wales (>35,000 participants over 16 years old) take part in surveys via their secure HealthWise Wales dashboard and in other advertised researcher-led studies.  All participants provide consent for their HealthWise Wales survey data to be securely linked to their HealthCare records (SAIL databank, Swansea University).  This means that the impact of lifestyle and behavioural factors on health outcomes can be studied.  The HealthWise Wales resource is available to verified researchers for participant recruitment, data collection, data integration and remote analysis.  Anyone who lives in or receives their healthcare in Wales can join as a participant.  Find out more or sign up at www.healthwisewales.org/

Methods

Feedback from HealthWise Wales participants suggested that arts based methods could be useful for engaging young people with our research.  Our experiences with the Storytelling for Health community inspired us to consider a lyric writing method that could enable young carers to tell their own stories within a supportive environment.  This method had the added benefit of delivering skills based training that might be of interest and longer term use to the young carers.  On this basis, we identified Ministry of Life (MoL) as a project partner.  MoL is a community interest company that provides youth support services and has an educational arm (MoL Education) that delivers training in music production.   

Necessity is the mother of invention…

We initially planned to offer in-person, community-based workshops to our HealthWise Wales participants, however, the enforced lockdown conditions imposed by the response to the COVID-19 pandemic scuppered our plans.  Co-incidentally, an existing relationship between MoL and the local YMCA provided an opportunity to work with young carers who had already enrolled in a series of workshops, and YMCA needed a partner to lead the workshops.  Online delivery was not something that we had considered, but we quickly jumped on the virtual bandwagon, and having addressed security and safeguarding issues, decided to deliver the lyric writing workshops online via Zoom.

The youth work experiences and established ways of working of both our MoL and YMCA partners were paramount in delivering the workshops respectfully, establishing the basis for participation and co-production with the young carers and for promoting trust, buy-in and continued engagement over several weeks.  The workshops were really successful and through word of mouth, more young carers joined and additional workshops were facilitated through the Carer’s trust Wales with Swansea Carers’ Centre.

Evaluation and results

Attendance logs, observational notes from the sessions, the lyrics composed by the young carers, recordings of the views of stakeholders including staff from partner organisations and workshop leaders were used to evaluate the workshops.

Forty-six young carers took part in the project via 24 online sessions.  Infographics based on the HealthWise Wales research findings were used as a basis for discussion.  The young people embraced these findings which they found useful for prompting discourse about their own experiences.

The participants set themselves the challenge of creating lyrics for songs so that they would have outputs from the sessions which they could share with friends and on social media.  Discourse, brainstorming and lyric writing formed the core of the sessions.  There were also guest appearances by local music artists.  The lyrics composed during the workshops were translated into GIFs and other animations by a graphic illustrator under the guidance of the young carers and were available for the young carers to share.  One of the songs was later performed by its author at an event to launch Young Carer ID cards.

Key themes identified from the qualitative data showed the following impacts of participation in the workshops:

Connectedness.  The lyric writing workshops provided a source of respite for the young carers at a stressful time during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and an opportunity to share their experiences with other young carers who were not already in their friendship groups. 

“With COVID a lot of my groups have had to finish or there hasn’t been much going on so it has been very difficult to try and be productive and carry on. . .in the two sessions I actually came up with something, it made me feel. . . like oh wait. I can do something, which is something I don’t feel very often” Female, Site 2 session

“it’s been nice to have a chance to do something with other people, like some of them you may not know and it’s nice to be able to come and sing for a little bit” Female, Site 2 session

Accomplishment

The sessions also provided participants with a sense of accomplishment that promoted their self-confidence.

One participant said: “I really enjoyed them (the sessions) because it’s something that I can do that’s productive and it’s giving me a sense of accomplishment. . . every time we come up with a lyric or every time I sort of actually contribute it gives me a sense of like ‘hey I actually did something’ which is something that I don’t feel often recently, so that’s helped me” Female , Site 2 session.

Another young carer spoke of the role the sessions took in helping to build their confidence in overcoming barriers:

“I was like nervous about it, but like I know you are always going to be nervous and it’s nice because you’re not really judged and it’s a sense of accomplishment as much as you think to yourself that you can’t do something about it. . .and then having people that you don’t know like a singer herself say that you can do it. It gives you like a good feeling about yourself.”  Female, Site 1 session

Self-expression

Having the opportunity to express their feelings and thoughts through lyric-writing appeared important for young carers who faced difficulties in having their voices heard.

“It’s always like we are fighting for a spot with different people and obviously is so nice to just let your feelings out and just make sure they are actually done in a productive way” Female, Site 2 session.

Another participant spoke of the value of feeling heard through expression:

“you’re getting your emotions out on paper which I think has been proven as a good way to get your emotions out. Without it you can’t talk to somebody, but not only that, you are having your voice heard because in a group you put your emotions down and you find out that people around have other ideas and other thoughts and it’s kind of like a group therapy” Female, Site 2 session

Societal engagement

Finally, the legacy of the activities was highlighted by young carers in terms of the potential impact that creative outputs can have on other young carers. One young carer stated that:

“you do create the song at the end of the session, you got that you can put out to the world and get other people to think that hey that’s relatable. It sort of has a knock-on effect afterwards” Female, Site 2 feedback session.

The young carers had a sense of pride as a result of their involvement with the workshops, clearly valuing being involved in the research and the positive impact this could have on others:

“we are the future generations, but they’re going to be future generation who are younger than us and they need to have wisdom from us who have been through that, they need to have that guidance that other people won’t give them” Female, Site 2 feedback session.

More details of the lyrics that were produced can be found in a scientific publication based on the project https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2024.2387102

See a music video animation of one of the songs produced by the young carers:

What we learned

Lyric writing workshops were an effective way of engaging young carers with public health research that is relevant to them.  The workshops were experienced as a fun activity which facilitated a discourse between young carers and the sharing of experiences relevant to their mental health and wellbeing.  The young carers were aware of and relished the potential impact of their lyrics for helping others in similar situations and were proud of their accomplishments.  The safeguarding provided by YMCA and Carers’ Centre staff (their presence at the workshops as invigilators) raised their awareness of issues that would have been unlikely to have arisen organically.  In this way both facilitators and participants attained unique insights. 

Despite our initial concerns about delivering the workshops virtually, we found repeat attendance high and that the sessions were easy to incorporate into the young carers’ routines.  There were no safeguarding or consent issues. We were also able to facilitate the workshops at geographically diverse locations.  Further work is required to replicate this project at scale, potentially using face to face or hybrid (online and face to face) delivery modes and to involve other hard to reach and more diverse groups.


Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund for Public Engagement – Proof of concept award.

We thank all the young carers who participated in the workshops, our partners at MoL, YMCA Cardiff, Swansea Young Carers’ Centre, The Carers’ Trust and Mr Carl Smith, Public Engagement Officer, School of Medicine, Cardiff University.

This blog post was created by Dr Pauline Ashfield-Watt, HealthWise Wales, Cardiff University – healthwisewales@cardiff.ac.uk

Project team: Dr Foteini Tseliou (Cardiff University), Dr Jonathan Gunter (MoL), Dr Sofia Vougioukalou (Cardiff University), Dr Pauline Ashfield-Watt (Cardiff University). More information about this project is available in this article: Tseliou, F., Gunter, J., Vougioukalou, S. and Ashfield-Watt, P. 2024. Engaging young carers in public health research through online lyric writing workshops during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2024.2387102