Martine van der Pluijm

168 Chapter 6 Design-based research (DBR) Our DBR approach combined three objectives: 1) facilitating the collaboration between researchers and stakeholders, 2) testing the intervention on its practicality for teachers and parents, and 3) systematically analyzing the results of changes in operationalization of the design (McKenney & Reeves, 2012). The scale of the design studies did not allow for reaching substantial numbers of lower-educated parents (e.g., selecting schools with mainly lower- educated parents, willingness of school teams to be involved in intensive collaboration). Nevertheless, this approach had several benefits. It has contributed to the ecological validity of the design, evidenced by teachers’ adherence to the theoretical principles, their positive evaluations of the AHL program (Chapter 4), and the improvements in parent-child interactions measured for the target group of parents (Chapter 5). The DBR also provided the opportunities to establish a sense of trust and partnerships between researchers and stakeholders (e.g., teachers, children, parents). It is important to acknowledge that these highly diverse and vulnerable parent populations (e.g., low education levels, low incomes, immigrant backgrounds, low Dutch language proficiency) can only be reached through frequent personal contact. Therefore, researchers often participated in school activities, taking part in dialogues, and building relationships with teachers, principals, and parents. This approach is well established in other types of research (e.g., ethnographic or action research) aiming at developing the position of an insider in research contexts (Emerson, 1987; Herr & Anderson, 2015). This immersion in educational contexts goes beyond designing and testing interventions (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Kessels, 1999; The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). It is important for addressing the critical needs of the target group of parents and for fostering teachers’ sense of ownership of the program. A disadvantage of such a multifaceted approach is that it can be time-consuming and that there may be a lack of conditions (e.g., trust and communication) to balance the different objectives (Francot, Broekhuizen, & Leseman, 2019). In our research, establishing the personal approach to engage stakeholders required more time and effort than we expected. With respect to the first [facilitating collaboration] and second objective [testing the design on its practicality for users] , building the relationships on the basis of trust required intensive involvement of researchers in schools long before the formal research activities started. This time-consuming part of the process was not budgeted. This also accounted for the time that was needed for continuous tailoring of testing in classrooms. Most research grants do not allow for such efforts and costs (cf., McKenney & Reeves). This implied that designing and testing of AHL was highly dependent on the efforts of all participants (i.e., teachers, parents, researchers) who were, fortunately, all intrinsically motivated to collaborate. However, there was a lack of intrinsic motivation for the structured data collection (e.g., filling in questionnaires and in-depth observations, before and after implementation) that was needed for realizing the third objective [systematically