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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.