3.5.1 Rationale
Although this thesis acknowledges the usefulness of quantitative research (as demonstrated by the previous studies), it also recognises the value of qualitative research, and how this can enable us to better understand what it is like to experience childhood adversity, personality difficulties, and sexual preoccupation from individuals that have experienced it first-hand. This thesis also aligns with McAdams’ (1994) triarchic model of personality, and therefore, a mixed-methods approach enables all three levels of personality to be explored among IPSO, with the qualitative study exploring an individual’s narrative identity. It was always the intention of this thesis to be a mixed-methods project in order to provide a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the relationships between PD, SP,
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and ACEs, however, the need for a qualitative study was reinforced during data collection for study three. Whilst conducting the ACE scale with participants it became evident that some participants sought to discuss their childhood experiences and adversity (rather than answering just yes or no), and according to Law and Ward (2010) IPSO typically want to tell their story, however, in the past this may have been to disbelieving audiences. Therefore, this study intended to provide individuals with the opportunity to tell their story in a non-judgemental, non-threatening environment. The previous quantitative studies explored dispositional traits, but failed to explore an individual’s narrative, or the subjective meanings of experiences and how they interpret the world (Walliman, 2015). This study gives IPSO a voice and enables them to tell their story, whereby a focus on idiosyncratic meaning making enables the exploration of how past experiences can impact an individual’s present (Riessman, 2008).
3.5.2 Participant recruitment and sampling
Purposive sampling was also employed for this study due to participants being selected according to pre-determined criteria in relation to the research aims (Guest el al., 2006). Participants from study three that demonstrated signs of personality disorder, sexual preoccupation, and adverse childhood experiences were invited to take part in the qualitative study (if they consented to being contacted for future research purposes; see section 3.6.1). Purposive sampling enabled the selection of ‘experts’ in this particular area (Henn et al., 2005), and participants consisted of five adult male IPSO recruited from across both prison establishments.
3.5.3 Sample size
Sample size in qualitative research is a debated topic within the literature, however, the overall consensus is that quality is far better than quantity (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009; Terry, Hayfield, Clarke & Braun, 2017). Rich data enables researchers to gain detailed and nuanced insights (Terry et al., 2017), whereby the level of depth required for analysis means that small sample sizes are often accepted and considered the norm (Smith & Osborn, 2003). The aims of these studies are not to produce generalisable results, but, to provide an in-depth exploration and understanding of an understudied topic (Blagden, Winder, Gregson & Thorne, 2014; Howitt, 2016). Maruna and Matravers (2007) argue that even single participant samples hold psychological truth as they can provide meaning to an individual’s experiences. With regard to life stories, Reichenbach (1983) states that there are two ways of studying life narratives: the context of discovery and the context of justification. In the context of discovery, researchers examine life stories for patterns, themes, images, and qualitative characterisations in order to understand a single life in full, or to generate new theories. Whereas, in the context of justification, researchers aim to see how hypotheses play out in multiple lives, utilising well-validated coding systems and statistical analysis. It has been suggested that narrative interviews result in rich, detailed stories, and therefore, life experiences of an individual or a few individuals is
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adequate, rather than large sample sizes (Muylaert, Sarubbi Jr, Gallo, Neto & Reis, 2014). Given that this thesis aims to explore an understudied area it falls under the context of discovery, and the sample size (n = 5) can be considered appropriate for such thorough and detailed life story interviews (discussed further in section 3.5.5).
3.5.4 Data collection
In order to explore the internalised and evolving life stories of IPSO that experienced ACEs, PD, and SP, a narrative psychological approach was taken, which involved conducting life story interviews with participants. This aligns with McAdams’ (1994) triarchic model of personality as this approach enables the second and third levels of personality to be explored (character adaptations and narrative identity). In-depth life story interviews were conducted with participants over several sessions in private assessment rooms. Interviews were recorded using a password protected dictaphone, and the researcher was able to monitor participant fatigue throughout the interview, as well as watching out for any signs of distress.
3.5.5 Methodological approach
A narrative psychological approach was a logical choice for the qualitative study given that the aim was to explore the life stories of IPSO, in order to delve deeper into their personality and understand how they make sense of their experiences. This approach offers an alternative way of exploring personality compared to the quantitative approach used throughout the earlier studies, which only focuses on personality functioning and dispositional traits. Narrative research (sometimes referred to as life story research or autobiographical research) attempts to understand the lives of people as told through their own narratives (Langdridge & Hagger-Johnson, 2013), which allows for the exploration of character adaptations and narrative identity (levels two and three of McAdams’ [1994] personality model). McAdams (2003) argues that personality and identity are constructed narratively, and states that narratives are more than simple stories, as ‘life stories speak directly to how people come to terms with their interpersonal worlds, with society, and with history and culture’ (McAdams, 2008, p. 257). The self-narrative is often understood as a crucial part of an individual’s personality and inner self (Maruna, 2001), and these narratives that people have about their lives impose an order on their actions, and explain their behaviour using a sequence of events which relate to goals, motivations, and feelings (McAdams, 1985). These self-narratives then shape and guide an individual’s future behaviour, as they act in accordance with the stories they have created about themselves (McAdams, 1985). Furthermore, McAdams (1993) argues that an individual’s narrative identity (unlike personality traits, which tend to be largely stable over time) can change throughout their life course, whereby individuals continuously restructure their identity in light of new experiences.
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In 2000, Crossley developed a narrative psychological approach when addressing traumatic experiences, which is concerned with subjectivity and experience, assuming a chain of connection between what a person says and how they think, feel, and reflect about themselves, others, and the world (Crossley, 2007). Furthermore, a life story approach is a valuable method for including marginalised voices in the research process, as the main focus enables participants to ‘tell their story’, and participants are able to give an account of how and why their life took the form it did. As Maruna (2001) points out, narrative researchers are not concerned with the facts contained within these narratives (whether they are true or false), but rather the meanings that individuals attach to these facts, and how they choose to frame these specific events. Although narrative analysis is concerned with the function of linguistic practices, this is not it’s only interest, as it also has a strong focus on the content of the narrative (Crossley, 2000). The narratives that participants tell about their lives are thought to represent their meaning making, whereby how they connect and integrate these experiences, and select which information to tell or omit, are all aspects of how they understand their lives (Josselson, 2011). Researchers conducting narrative research pay interest to both the content of the story (‘the told’), and the structure of the story (‘the telling’; Josselson, 2011), as well as what is unsaid or unsayable (Rogers et al., 1999).
This narrative approach was deemed appropriate for this study for several reasons. Firstly, it enables IPSO to tell their stories, and for us as researchers to explore the deepest levels of their personality and sense-making without directly asking them about PD, SP, or traumatic childhood experiences. This allowed IPSO to describe what events and moments in their lives were meaningful for them, rather than being influenced by any predetermined thoughts or preconceptions from the researcher. For example, if the researcher developed an interview schedule they may ask questions around child sexual abuse, which may place a focus on these events and assumes that they were meaningful, whereas, a narrative approach allows participants to include moments in their life that they find important and pivotal in their own life history. This was similar to research by Gibson and Morgan (2013) who chose not to directly ask about child sexual abuse but allowed participants to decide whether or not to include the abuse in their accounts, and to represent these experiences in any way they chose.
Secondly, IPSO are a marginalised group (Tewksbury, 2012) and their voices are rarely heard, whereby there is minimal research which explores the life stories of IPSO. Previously, Maruna (2001) explored the life stories of individuals who have committed crime, Cowburn (2005) explored the life histories of IPSO, and Farmer, McAlinden and Maruna (2016) considered the life stories of IPSO with a focus on desistance. However, to the best of the author’s knowledge, no previous research has explored the life stories of IPSO with PD, SP, and ACEs. The researcher thought it was important for these individuals to be given an opportunity to tell their story and allow their voice to be heard in a non-judgemental, non- threatening environment. Furthermore, by focusing on idiosyncratic meaning making, narrative research is able to explore how past experiences can be understood to impact on a participant’s present
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(Riessman, 2008), which in relation to this study means that it is possible to explore how earlier stages of life (and potentially childhood adversity) may impact an individual’s life, as well as how personality difficulties and an obsession with sex play out throughout their lives. Therefore, the decision to take a narrative approach for the qualitative element of this thesis was also based on a pragmatic decision as it was considered the most appropriate method for exploring the deepest layers of personality and sense-making among IPSO, whilst also allowing individuals to have a voice and tell their story.
3.5.6 Philosophical stance in relation to study four
Social constructionist approaches (such as postmodernism, discourse analysis, and feminist psychological approaches) view the self as dependent on language and linguistic practices that we use every day in order to make sense of ourselves (Crossley, 2007). One of the main problems with these approaches is that they omit the ability of participants to be reflexive, whereas, Parker (1991) argues that the capacity to be reflexive (to think about oneself) is central to human agency and understanding. IPA differs from these approaches as it is based on ‘realist’ assumptions, whereby it assumes that there is a domain of facts regarding human experience which can be discovered (Augustinous & Walker, 1995), as well as believing there is a ‘chain of connection’ between what somebody says, and how they think and feel (Crossley, 2000). Crossley (2007) suggests that there is a need for an approach which appreciates the linguistic practices, as well as maintaining a sense of the personal, coherent, and ‘real’ nature of subjectivity, which is where narrative psychology fits in. However, within narrative psychology, there is not only one approach (Langdridge & Hagger-Johnson, 2013). Some researchers focus on understanding the content of narratives, whereas, others emphasise the practice and form (linguistic practices) of narratives (Bamberg, 2006). Furthermore, there are researchers attempting to bring together both content and form (Crossley, 2000; Langdridge, 2007), which is the approach that this study aligns with.
According to Hiles and Cermak (2008), narrative analysis has its roots in both social constructionism and phenomenology, whereas Josselson (2011) argues that it is grounded in hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethnography, and literacy analysis. Narrative analysis is an interpretive method, which shares with discourse analysis an appreciation for the importance of and function of language (Crossley, 2007). However, narrative analysis differs from discourse analysis regarding the status they both afford to subjectivity and experience. Discourse analysis is dubious of mapping people’s narratives onto underlying subjective experiences, whereas, narrative analysis (like IPA) is interested in retrieving the subjectivity of participants by focusing on lived experiences. Therefore, narrative psychology also operates within a ‘realist’ epistemology which affords sufficient respect to individuals’ experiences (Crossley, 2000). These ‘realist’ assumptions are typically associated with more traditional psychological approaches. These approaches are commonly limited by their over-reliance on quantitative methods, and it has been argued that qualitative methods and analysis are required to
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achieve greater depth (Crossley, 2000). Furthermore, Josselson (2011) proposes that narrative analysis ‘eschews methodological orthodoxy in favor of doing what is necessary to capture the lived experience of people in terms of their own meaning making’ (p. 225). This philosophical stance of narrative analysis aligns with the overarching research paradigm adopted in this thesis (pragmatism) in that it encourages a ‘what works’ approach, which enables the most efficient data to be gathered in order to understand the phenomena under investigation, as well as the ‘realist’ perspective aligning with the previous quantitative studies.
As mentioned previously, narrative analysis is grounded in phenomenology (Josselson, 2011) which is a philosophical stance usually related to an interpretivist research paradigm, and concerns the subjective meanings that participants assign to their lived experiences (Aresti, Eatough & Brooks- Gordon, 2010). Participants are viewed as ‘experts’ with regard to the phenomenon under investigation, and the researcher aims to gain an insight into their understanding and perspectives (Larkin, Watts & Clifton, 2006). Furthermore, narrative analysis acknowledges that meaning is co- constructed, in that it is an active process which the storyteller (participant) and audience (researcher) are part of, therefore, story tellers may shape their narratives with the intended audience in mind (Griffin & May, 2017). Not only are researchers implicated during the interview process, but they also have an active participation in the analysis and interpretation of the narratives. A double hermeneutic process is used whereby participants attempt to make sense of their world, and the researcher attempts to make sense of participants’ sense making (Aresti et al., 2010), in which there is always an act of re-construction when a researcher writes about a participants’ experience (Griffin & May, 2017). Therefore, this study will attempt to re-construct the reality of participants, whilst also bearing in mind that their narratives may not offer a direct representation of reality.
3.5.7 Life story interviews
When it comes to narrative research, there are various sources of data that can be utilised, including pre-existing documentation or self-documentation (i.e. diary entries), unstructured interviews, semi- structured interviews, and observation (Langdridge & Hagger-Johnson, 2013). The main focus of this study was to explore the self-narrative of participants, and although a variety of methods have been proposed in order to access these internalised stories (Denzin, 1989; Singer & Salovey, 1993), semi- structured interviews are the most common (Maruna, 2001). The transcribed life stories are not the self-narratives directly, however, the stories which participants tell social scientists are assumed to entail the outlines of their internalised narrative, in a similar way that answers on a personality test are thought to represent an individual’s personality (McAdams, 1993).
Life story interviews encourage interviewees to talk about their life, whereby Murray (2018) suggests that researchers should provide some guidelines for participants in order to provide some structure to
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the interview process, whilst also allowing the narrator to have control over their story. Several life story guides or interview protocols have been developed, with McAdams’ (1995) life story protocol being the most popular (Murray, 2018). These protocols start by asking the participant to describe their life as if it were a book, and includes additional guiding questions relating to key experiences, getting participants to structure their account as if it consisted of several chapters. A modified version of McAdams (2008) life story interview (LSI) was utilised in this study, which is described in further detail in chapter seven, section 7.3.2 (also see appendix 4). This specific interview protocol was chosen as it has previously been used with prisoners (Maruna, 2001), has been advocated for use with IPSO (Law & Ward, 2010), is one of the most common interview protocols used in narrative psychology (Murray, 2018), and enables character adaptations and narrative identity to be explored in depth (McAdams, 1994).
3.5.8 Quality control
The traditional concepts of reliability (the stability of a measure) and validity (the extent to which it measures what it is intended to measure) are easily applied to positivist research which is based on the notion that there is a single objective truth, which can be measured through quantitative methods (Bryman, 2016; Howitt, 2016; Sandberg, 2005). However, this is often neglected in qualitative research as there is no universal criteria for how to assess the reliability and validity of qualitative data (Bryman, 2016; Howitt, 2016; Kornbluh, 2015), given that an interpretivist approach believes that there are many different subjective truths. However, some researchers argue that reliability and validity can be assessed in qualitative research by using a criterion of ‘trustworthiness’, which consists of four criteria: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). These four criteria (discussed below) were considered throughout this study in order to ensure the trustworthiness of the research.
3.5.8.1 Credibility
Credibility is thought to be the parallel of internal validity in quantitative research (Bryman, 2016). Within qualitative research the results should reflect one of many possible interpretations, whereby credibility is the extent to which this holds true (Brocki & Wearden, 2006; Reid, Flowers & Larkin, 2005). One way of ensuring credibility is by conducting research in line with principles and guidance of good practice (Bryman, 2016), which this study attempted to do by adhering to all ethical procedures, ensuring that the most appropriate methods of data collection were utilised, and analysing in line with relevant procedures. Data triangulation is another way of ensuring credibility, which involves collecting multiple sources of data exploring the same phenomenon, which has been achieved within this thesis through the collection of both quantitative (psychometric scales) and qualitative (life story accounts) data. Having an analysis that is viewed as interpretative (the results are not facts but transparent,
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grounded examples from the data, which are reasonable to other readers) is considered to be a successful analysis (Houston & Mullan-Jensen, 2012). Finally, respondent validation (providing participants with a copy of the findings and assessing their reactions of accuracy) is another way of confirming credibility (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). However, although there are several advantages of doing this, there are also multiple disadvantages, such as: participants not understanding the findings, participants not feeling able to express their disagreement due to participant-researcher power dynamics, and the researcher having to restrain their results to a more descriptive level so that they are understood by participants (Kornbluh, 2015; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Morse, Barrett, Mayan, Olsen & Spiers, 2002). Therefore, this process was not formally implemented within the current study, on the other hand, two of the participants did request a copy of the findings, therefore credibility was informally achieved on these two occasions as both participants agreed with the findings.
3.5.8.2 Transferability
In quantitative research, generalisation (or external validity) is examined, whereby the results are used to make predictions regarding other samples. However, due to the nature of qualitative research (developing an in-depth understanding of small, targeted groups of participants) it is not possible to generalise to the whole population (Bryman, 2016; Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014). Instead, the concept of transferability is used within qualitative research, which refers to the extent that findings can be applied to similar contexts from which the results originated (Henwood & Pidgeon, 1992). It has been proposed that this can be achieved by providing description rich accounts regarding the context of the research and ensuring that this is sufficiently explained during any dissemination of the findings. This research was conducted within prisons that house IPSO, and the qualitative element was conducted specifically with IPSO that demonstrated signs of PD, SP, and ACEs, therefore, the transferability of these findings can only be applied to other IPSO with PD, SP, and ACEs. The climate of the prison settings may also