A telefonía móbil 76

under the grounds of the ethics agreement. The first was in the primary school where I felt the picture a child had drawn and written about warranted sharing with the head teacher. She knew which child this story related to as one of the children was subject to child protection plan and the story resembled some of the current issues. The second was from one of the stories written by a young person in the senior school. The content was concerning and I shared the information with the Designated Safeguarding Officer.

research will take place

MASH Practitioners Those who work in the

MASH

Professional Information sheet

Consent form

Responsible others Those who have

responsibility for the welfare and wellbeing of the child/young person, i.e. Teachers, social workers

Professional information sheet

Consent form

Parent(s) or Carer(s) The person(s) with parental responsibility for the child or young person

Parents information sheet Opt-in consent forms

Participants for workshops

Children and young people

Children and young people information sheets

Opt-in consent forms

Verbal

presentation to the children and young people

Ethnographic Observation in the MASH

Access

Gaining access to a MASH must be through a Local Authority Chief Executive or Director of Children’s Services (DCS), therefore I chose to exploit my existing professional networks. I emailed a number of Chief Executives and DCSs, explaining the research project and seeking their interest and subsequent permission. Shortly after I received written permissions from a DCS (who I knew to be innovative in their approach to service developments). A meeting was then set up with the Head of Service Social Work and Early Help who passed on the

names and contacts details for the line supervisors/managers of the practitioners located within the MASH. I therefore contacted and arranged meetings with the following partner agency managers: the NHS Designated Safeguarding Lead, the Police Detective Inspector, Head of Education and Chief Executive Officer (voluntary organisation). The meetings were used to explain the project aims as well as discussing any internal ethical procedures that must be followed. All consent forms were returned electronically by the managers.

Partner managers were responsible for emailing participation information sheets and consent forms to their staff. However, the first day I entered the MASH the practitioners were aware of the study but had not completed consent forms. All the consent forms were signed manually and a set of consent forms and information sheets were made available for any new staff, for example, the duty social worker, as this changed daily. I was given an electronic pass to access the building and the key code for the MASH office door. This meant that I had free access to enter and leave the observation site at any time. There was also a sign on the MASH office door informing people to be aware a research project/observation was taking place.

The ethnographic study took place over two five-day periods two weeks apart, with access to the MASH from 8am to 6pm daily. I reflected on how my presence as a researcher within the MASH could affect the actions of practitioners when dealing with potential safeguarding information they receive. However, the team members seemed to ‘forget’ over time that I was a researcher and that I was only there to collect data. Perhaps this was because of my status as a registered social worker who had a clear understanding of their work. A constant issue for me was ensuring that I did not blur the boundaries between the two and to balance this with a duty of care to the team members as participants. This was monitored and discussed daily through my own supervision with my academic supervisor in telephone discussions.

Data Analysis

The ethnographic data had to be collected by writing comprehensive field notes as permission was only given to observe and not to record digitally. Field note templates were developed inductively to catalogue themes as they arose, as well as to help keep focused and maintain a position of treating the scene as ‘anthropologically strange’ (Garfinkel, 1967) even though I was an ‘insider’. The template slowly developed over several days to cover the following:

• How the MASH team members use and interpret information

• The behaviours and decisions taken between team members and computer systems

• Interactions between team members (physical, verbal and digital)

• Evidence of acting out professional requirements within the current system

• The social and cultural entities in play

• The communication flow(s) including the daily journeys of information

• Receiving, responding and the passing on of information

• Methods of communication

• What information is digital, verbal, written etcetera

• Social and collaborative practices

Undertaking ethnography depends on the purpose of the study. To generalise is to claim what took place in one setting or time would be the same in some other place at another time (Payne and Williams, 2005). In this case is was not to generalise out to every MASH in the UK but I was attempting to understand the everyday practices of technology use in the work of a MASH. My aim was to cover as much as possible within the limitations of sight and what I was able to hear. For example, I was limited in my view of the room depending on where I was seated, so at times my line of vision was obscured. Further limits included; what was happening in the room at the time of day I was in the research site; the practitioners that were in the room at that time and what specific events unfolded on that particular observation period. However, I could of never have been able to know and observe everything because the setting is constantly changing. This does not mean that observation is not possible, it merely limits the range of generalisability. Repeated observations across different time points were included for this reason; to strengthen a validity that is inevitably and always tentative and open to interpretation.

Banal generalisation (Payne and Williams, 2005) that focuses on everyday social practices and relies upon actors’ own generalising through their interactions. It is then for the researcher to base future on what has been observed. The observations made from the MASH site in the two week period generated enough observation of repetitive practices to be able transfer these observations into candidate findings for further exploration as they might apply to other similar MASH settings.

There are some everyday practices that were observed that will be replicated in every MASH; for example practitioners sit at desks and work on desk top computer screens every day; they input data in to databases; they answer phone calls (in this MASH via headsets) and they have conversations. It is these practices that form modest generalisations (Payne and Williams, 2006) that were open to interrogation for the purpose of conceptualising design principles. However, there are some practices that remain inconstant, such as the content of conversations, the behaviours and exchanges between specific MASH members. By adopting a mix-methods approach I aimed to amplify and support generalisations made from the observations by validating them through re-presenting these to focus groups comprised of the MASH members. The observations were made purely for design purposes; to begin to understand how a new technology would potentially impact the professional practices of that setting. For example, how the child’s information in a new format that reflected the child’s world would enter or join with the MASH. Making generalisations into conceptualizations is to ensure that evidence is identified from the data to defend that conceptualisation (Firestone, 1993).

In relation to reflexivity, ‘that social researchers are part of the social world they study’ (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995, p 16), I adopted ANT as a lens to view the MASH in a way that differed from reflexivity as it is understood from my social work background. However I could possibly have been seen as an insider - researcher conducting research within my own profession (Innes, 2009; Kanuha, 2000). The biography of the researcher from a similar professional background is a consideration when the primary goal of the research is the production of new knowledge (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). My insider status is clearly recognised as having commonalities with some the MASH practitioners such as a shared profession, qualifications, and shared language. Although I was privy to familiar language and professional characteristics and other parallels (DeLyser, 2001) I was able to overcome many of these challenges and take on more of a novice outsider role (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). This is due to the fact that the observations were not directly about understanding the participant’s behaviours but how their actions connected with the technology, the technical processes and data flows. Therefore this gave my position as the researcher more distance whilst in the research site which can enhance the research outcomes (Bryan and Deyhle, 2000).This was supported by daily telephone calls and discussions to my supervisor to ensure I retained an observer position.

Workshops

There are two main research methodologies for working with children as partners in design technology, namely cooperative enquiry (Druin, 1999; Guha et al., 2005) and the KidReporter (Bekker et al., 2003). Both approaches place responsibility on the role of children as design partners. As Mazzone notes, ‘Participatory design and co-operative enquiry, which are closer to the ideal of design partner, suggest greater equality between children and adults, more involvement by the children, and a democracy of ideas’ (Mazzone, 2007, p. 197).

This research project included children as informants at the earliest stage possible to enable a plethora of new ideas and as principle for innovation and creativity for technology-facilitated engagement. Co-operative enquiry is a creative process (Druin, 1999; Guha et al., 2004) that originated at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. The process has produced a range of storytelling technologies. Children aged seven to eleven years old have taken part by being invited to the Lab after school twice a week during term time and for two weeks during the summer holidays for six hours per day (Druin, 2009, p. 131). Co- operative inquiry uses a variety of research methods depending on which stage of the design process is taking place. For example, at an exploratory stage, adults and children may observe and/or conduct interviews in local public places. A frequently used feature is where the team (children and adults) write one idea, like and dislike on a single post-it note each and then collectively analyse the notes grouping them into themes. For low-tech prototyping, a range of art materials are used with groups to create models or drawings of the new technology, then once a group has created a model, it is fed back in a whole group process, naming and generating big ideas (Druin, 2009). Co-operative inquiry requires an intergenerational team of researchers to generate a large quantity of ideas rather than interrogating individual children to solve complete design solutions. Druin (2010) has found that,

Over the years, I have found that the most important goal of any partnership between adults and children is idea collaboration. The children I have had the opportunity to work with have not been my ‘sample’ or ‘subject pool’ but partners in understanding their world (p. 37).

Unfortunately, there are limitations to the use of adopting cooperative inquiry for this research; however, the validity of this process in which adults work with children to create innovative new technology used by children is proven. The constraints were that there was not an intergenerational research team available, nor was there access to children over a long

period of time.

However including participatory design was an option that would offer children a space for the democracy of their ideas (Mazzone, 2007; Landoi et al., 2016). Novel approaches to participatory design are The KidReporter method (Bekker et al., 2003), Mission from Mars and the design of the eBag (Dindler et al., 2005). These methodological approaches allowed the participants to be innovative within a creative process. Such frameworks are usually chosen for specific project driven research (Mezzone, 2007; Landoi et al., 2016). As Fittion and Read (2016) explain that ‘The contexts of use, and therefore desired designs, of new and novel technologies will likely be dynamic and context sensitive, more closely resembling a user journey that an single static scenario of use’ (p. 50.)

An alternative is The KidReporter method, used by Bekker et al. (2003) for early design requirements for an Electronic Educational Interactive Game (EEIG) in which children can learn about animals during a visit to the zoo. They particularly wanted to gain information directly from the children and sought views from the children’s perspectives, including their interests, use of language and vocabulary. Moreover, to enrich the standard of the data, they chose method-based activities such as taking photos, making lists and writing articles that would engage their audience as well as produce different kinds of data sources. The KidReporter methodology can be adapted to a range of age groups and other groups of children, for example, children that have had experience of the child protection system or children in universal mainstream education. Furthermore, the research activity is best undertaken in familiar surroundings in which children feel safe to explore their experiences (Druin, 1999). When working with children in the context of HCI, it is about understanding the complexities of their world and how these connect or interface with technologies. ‘These techniques do not necessarily offer a magic formula for working with children, but rather a philosophy and approach to research that can be used to gather data, developing prototypes and forging new research directions’ (Druin, 1999, p. 94).

It is via the use of these creative methods that the adult and child begin to share a narrative space. This style of participatory design located within the HCI field, works reflexively with the end user, shifting the power onto the end user to allow them to create and contribute their own thoughts and vision for the design of (in this case) an application. Children in this field are working as an influential and credible knowledge source and voice, with a collective right as end users in design and development of ideas for the integration of the technology being

investigated (Fuchs and Obrist, 2010).

In the conception of new technologies in child protection networks the aim was to build upon scenarios that reach the personal space of the child or young person, as safeguarding is both personal and emotive. This is why participatory design workshops were selected in preference to more customary methods in order to investigate how children would identify with the application and what would be expected from it (Fleury, 2012).

Making pictures, drawing and narrative have the potential for participants to establish their creative scenarios for the application’s design and children can connect with drawings as a tool for self-expression. The challenge for the researcher is to allow children to construct and form their own mental pictures, for example, on paper or through photography, to strengthen the unfolding of the new technology and processes that go beyond familiar and recurring concepts (Brouwer-Janse et al., 1997). Drawing can also assist with the methodological challenge of gaining an in-depth perspective of the child’s world in a less formal way with a larger group (Fleury, 2012):

In their first years of life, children learn to use drawings as a communication mediator. At the same time, the child gradually includes writing in the drawings, enhancing clarity in the ideas expressed. The important role drawings play in human development explains the vast academic literature available related to children’s drawings and their interpretation (Fleury, 2012, p. 270).

Using drawing as a research tool requires minimal training for the participants compared with a lab observation.20 Analysis can be challenging but if drawings are facilitated in a structured way by using a framework, the ideas and expressed opinion can produce good quality data. Fleury (2012) was able to analyse drawings and understand there to be five essential functions for a mobile phone device, proposing that drawings promoted the expression of what mattered most to the children.21 Drawings can be used in triangulation with other research methods supporting the multi-method approach taken for this research; for example, Guilliemin (2004) and Kearny and Hyle (2004) who both advocate drawings complemented and contributed to the findings of their studies. Allowing children to express relevant issues and problems does not eradicate the need for technical expertise but respects them as experts

20 _{Fleury (2012) found that storyboards were interpreted and understood without the author in all cases except one.}

21 _{In average each participant of the study thought about a little less than 5 functions to be essential for both devices (TV and}

mobile phone). The 56 functions named were then categorized into eight clusters: Access to information, Specific use, Communication, Design & specification, Entertainment & relaxation, Secondary function, Music & sound and others (unspecific, excreta).

who need to contribute to the design.

When including children in research groupings, their age ranges need to be considered. The cooperative inquiry approach involves partnership with seven to eleven year olds, as they are competent at prototyping. This age group are more verbal than younger children and able to be self-reflective as well as participate in discussions of critical thinking (Druin, 1999; Guha et al., 2005).

The qualitative study by Kaare et al. (2007) that examined the social connections and relationships of different types of communication technologies with children aged between ten and twelve years old helped show that there is a possibility to survey younger children within the primary school catchment age. Ethical considerations on the issue of consent regarding children demand that they should be given permission not to answer questions and / or be able to stop at any time. The size of the focus groups for younger children needs to be taken into account. Furthermore, to enable more participation when undertaking qualitative interviews with children, the interviews should be related to ‘themes’ (Kaare et al., 2007). The KidReporter method was adopted to emphasise that children are experts in their own right, sharing their ideas from their own viewpoint (Dindler et al., 2005). The framework is activity-based, mixing a variety of data sources that should enhance the value of the data. The techniques have been chosen as they motivate and stimulate children; taking place in a guided workshop it offers a safe process (which is essential in the context of safeguarding).

The version of KidReporter adopted for this project is based on an adaptation from Bekker et al. (2003) to make the activities relevant to the current subject regarding the sharing of information between children and professionals, whilst considering being safe.

• Drawing pictures and writing augmentations about their pictures and ‘being safe’ and ‘who would be a safe person to tell if you felt unsafe?’

• Partnering to create a list of questions and answers intended to tease out information on