Research Timeline
2.4.2 Participants and Roles
The ethics of insider research require the researcher to be aware of, make explicit and plan for possible imbalances of power that may exist between the researcher and their interviewees. To this end I include the following table which describes the participants, their professional roles, relationship to the researcher and how this may influence their contribution. Please see table on the next page.
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Participant Participant’s
professional role and relation to the researcher/Time in Post Participant’s role within the CAMHS/SCH link project Possible influence on data Educational Psychologist 2 Maingrade Educational Psychologist working
with TEP researcher. 4yrs as EP, 12 months in current post
Working on the
project with
responsibility for two schools
Shared reference points
and language may
encourage detailed data
Educational Psychologist 1
Senior Educational
Psychologist (SEP) and
supervisor of the
researcher as TEP. 10 yrs as EP, 2 yrs part-
time secondment to
CAMHS. 5 yrs in post as SEP
SEP worked with
CAMHS staff to
design and manage the project
Shared reference points and work may encourage detailed interview data. SEP may withhold some views as there may be a concern to maintain some professional boundaries
CAMHS Worker 2
CAMHS worker with sole responsibility for the day to day CAMHS provision for the project.
5 yrs as mental health nurse practitioner, 6
months in post as
CAMHS lead for the project.
CAMHS worker
employed on
temporary contract to act as the identified
CAMHS link
practitioner
CAMHS worker’s future
employment may be
influenced by success of this project, so she may wish to report positively.
CAMHS Worker 1 Tier 3 manager responsible for operational management and, supervision of
CAMHS worker 2. The researcher has little direct contact with this participant.
To oversee delivery of the pilot project and to evaluate its efficacy
CAMHS worker 2 may be
tempted to report
positively and downplay barriers to effective working to encourage relationships between the two services but also pursue recommissioning of the project
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Qualified Adult
Psychiatric Nurse since 1999. CAMHS worker since 2007, Head of Westfield CAMHS transformation for 18 months. School Worker 1
Assistant Head teacher at Westfield School.
Responsible for
involvement in the
project. The researcher is also the allocated EP for the school.
Ass Headteacher in post for 12 years, Head of PE for 5 yrs prior to that. All at Westfield School.
Responsible for
school’s involvement in the pilot attends consultations and organises the staff training
School worker 1 may be reluctant to identify barriers to working with EPS and identify these with the researcher due her role as allocated TEP
School Worker 2
Pastoral support worker line managed by School worker 1. Researcher is known to School worker 2 through the project involvement.
8 years as Pastoral Manager at Westfield School, 2 years prior to that as Learning Support Assistant.
Attends
consultations and
carries out the
recommendations in
school. Attends
training
School worker 2 may be influenced by her position in school to report either positively or negatively and may not want her views to go to her manager
52 2.4.3 Semi-structured Interviews
Semi structured interviews were used to provide the researcher with sufficient structure to keep the research questions in mind, but also allowed the flexibility to follow the interviewee’s lead. A balance should be struck between the interviewer’s control of the interview and the interviewee’s ability to explore the topic and generate new insights. An initial interview schedule was designed (Appendix 4), but was adapted for each participant, sometimes to change the order of the questions asked or to ask probing questions which encouraged participants to go into more detail. Adaptations to the agenda were also necessary to reflect the varying professional roles of the interviewees. The goal of qualitative research is to explore the opinions and experiences of participants, consequently standardisation is not desirable (Mertens, 2015).
An advantage of conducting semi-structured interviews as an insider researcher, is that rapport between interviewer and interviewee has been pre-established. Rapport between interviewer and interviewee, is necessary to encourage a willingness to disclose with less inhibition. It is also possible that as an insider researcher, prior experience of working together, designated roles or plans for future joint work, could act to inhibit an interviewee from being candid (Sikes and Potts, 2008).
In designing the interview agenda and preparing for the interviews, consideration was given to the type of questions selected. Spradley 1979 (in Willig, 2009), has formulated different types of interview questions. The first is the ‘descriptive’ question, which requires the interviewee to share biographical information. An example from my interviews would be; ‘When have you worked effectively with
CAMHS to support a young person?’ Alternatively this might be categorised as a
‘theory-driven’ question as it relates directly to the research questions (Flick, 2009). The second category Spradley calls ‘structural’, these questions require the participant to make sense of the categories they use to order their world. An example might be ‘What do you understand to be the role of an Educational
53 thoughts or feelings about someone or something. An example from this research would be; ‘Why did you think this was effective practice?’
A criticism of the use of interviews has been the researcher’s acceptance of what is said as being at face value and that all translation or transcription involves interpretation. The use of recording equipment, to record the interview, means that it is preserved to be re-visited, but the presence of the machine can also inhibit interviewees. The purpose of the interviews conducted in this research has been to uncover the interviewees ‘subjective theory’, this refers to the cache of knowledge, about the studies phenomena, that the interviewee holds (Flick, 2009). It is the tool of questioning that is designed to support the interviewee in articulating their explicit assumptions and exploring their implicit assumptions.