While the physical location of participants within a YOI may have an impact on the narratives they tell, as is explored further below, it can also impact on the process of carrying out the interviews themselves, and the data analysis process.
Access to participants within a prison setting will always be controlled by a gatekeeper. Ethical approval must be sought and granted by the Scottish Prison Service Research Access and Ethics Committee. Access must also be granted by the specific prison in which you wish to carry out the research. Once this is in place a further level of gatekeeping may come from a specific member of staff, or department, through which you recruit the participants. While it was a different process, it is not the case that there was no element of gatekeeping within KIN, and only in the YOI. For KIN, the ethics application only required ethical approval by the University but the application and its supporting documents were discussed with, and approved by, Vox Liminis prior to their submission. They required to permit me to join KIN in the first place and wished to speak to all of the young people about what an interview with me would involve and their right to decline to take part prior to me doing the same.
Therefore, aspects of gatekeeping were present for both groups but simply manifested themselves in different ways and processes.
Access to Glenview YOI took place through a youth worker who was employed by a third sector organisation, though based in the prison, rather than being a direct employee of the Scottish Prison Service. This potentially had an impact both from the point of view of recruitment of participants as well as the atmosphere of the interviews, which also took place in the youth work area of the prison. As Bosworth (1999) noted in her research within women’s prisons, where the recruitment often took place in education spaces, this was one of the more “relaxed” areas in the prison. While she recruited her own participants in these spaces, stating that the atmosphere provided her with “ideal moments for
me to participate in group discussions and try to interest them in me and my research” (p.87), the less ‘prison-like’ location of youth work within the YOI and participants’ associations with the space, compared to, for example, a visits area, office for meeting with a solicitor or location on the wing, may also have changed the dynamic of my interviews.
For all the participants to have been known to the gatekeeper, and therefore to be part of the research, they must have been attendees at youth work sessions and engaged in this way. There is therefore always some element of selection bias when participants are ‘chosen’ to take part rather than self-selecting to participate themselves. While in some cases this could rule out those not seen as
‘good’ participants or, in this case ‘good’ prisoners (James, 2013), going through youth workers rather than prison officers may be one way of at least mitigating this. For example, one participant in the research had been involved in a fight and had been kept in his cell at the time I had expected to interview him but still took part later that same day rather than being prevented from doing so.
The youth worker’s own selection bias may have played a part through having
‘better’ relationships with some prisoners rather than others, something again down to personality and the inherent nature of people and relationships.
Therefore where a gatekeeper, a person with their own individual disposition, is involved this will always be an element which must be reflected upon when considering participants and their recruitment.
In addition to the gatekeeping issue, the fact that you are within a prison and must obey certain rules and processes adds further layers of access and formality issues which must be navigated. One impact of this, alongside the power dynamics of working with the prison service, is that while the young people from KIN were all interviewed on separate days, often with at least weeks, if not months between them (due to their schedules and availability), the young people within Glenview were mainly interviewed on a single day (4 young people) or consecutive half days (2 each day). I took the decision to carry out multiple interviews in one day as this opportunity was offered to me by the youth worker and I wanted to cause the least disruption to staff. While I may have been able to do one or two interviews a day over a period of months, as a PhD researcher, particularly one who had had a long protracted recruitment
phase to her research, I found myself wishing to be accommodating and just take what was offered in the first instance.
Further elements specific to interviewing within a prison also affected these arrangements. On the first day, instead of carrying out the three interviews which I had planned I ended up carrying out four. The first participant, who had been kept in his cell due to being involved in a fight the previous day, was replaced with another participant, but later that day the original interviewee was allowed out of his cell and then came to speak to me. Although I could have said no to this, I decided to agree as I did not know if I would have the opportunity to carry out an interview with him on a future date if I did not do so at this time. I also did not want to say no to someone who was coming forward in this way as I was concerned that if I did so they would see this as a rejection, after volunteering to be part of the research, for whatever reason, and being willing to share a potentially difficult experience with me. Though this line of thinking is based on my own worries rather than any indication that the participants were so keen to take part they would have cared about not being able to do so. As I was still within the prison and many people who have never carried out a series of interviews in one day can see it as ‘just another interview’ I was also worried they would not understand my reasoning for not carrying it out at this time.
The consequence of these decisions however, was that while the interviews with KIN participants were able to be transcribed and an initial analysis take place between interviews, this was not the case with the interviews which took place in Glenview. In this instance four interviews had taken place before any real consideration of the information coming from them or the way they were carried out, could occur. Although there were short intervals between each of the interviews on a single day, this was not long enough for any real reflection to take place, or a more detailed consideration of the information coming from them or of the practical experience of carrying out these interviews. Particularly as my analysis draws on a grounded theory approach, the carrying out of multiple interviews in one day made this problematic at times. There was little or no opportunity to identify emerging themes between interviews, or to take on board learning picked up on through the reading of the transcripts in the same way with the interviews from Glenview as there was with the interviews from
KIN. As outlined in Chapter 3, I did not rigidly follow a grounded theory process for data analysis and instead drew on elements of it, but the practicalities of research within a prison may not always be conducive to this approach.
Further practical reflections around my participants being within a YOI involved their perception of my role within the interview and the prison. While I made it clear that I did not work for the Scottish Prison Service and was an independent researcher for the University of Glasgow, at times during the interviews I still felt like I was just another part of the system, another professional that this person had to tell their life story to, because that’s what people want to hear.
My links to the youth worker, being met by her in the morning and sitting within their office rather than with the prison officers outside, at least had the advantage of participants perhaps seeing me more allied with this department, provided by a third sector organisation, than the prison service itself.