La función exponencial
4.4 La serie de potencias del logaritmo
Fieldwork for this evaluation took place between September 2017 and March 2018.
The purpose of this element of the evaluation was to explore experiences of thePartnership Agreement specifically. In relation to the young people who took part, the aim was not to explore their reasons for running away or going missing, their engagement with return interviews, or their personal experiences generally – although some chose to discuss these experiences as part of their contribution.
Methods
In order to capture the experiences and opinions of those involved with the Partnership Agreement, we sought to hear directly from a range of relevant people, through semi- structured interviews. Initially, we hoped to engage with:
Young people in residential and foster care who had experience of being ‘absent’ or ‘missing’
Residential care workers (including managers and night shift workers)
Foster carers
Police officers
Other professionals, such as social workersParticipants were offered the opportunity to take part face-to-face or by phone, individually or with others. They could choose whether they were willing to be audio recorded, or whether they would prefer that the researcher take handwritten notes instead.
All the young people took part in individual interviews within their children’s house or school. Two young people chose to have a member of staff sit in during the discussion, but these individuals were not participants in the evaluation. The interviews with young people ranged from 10 to 22 minutes in length.
Interviews with those in the ‘professional’ category were conducted face-to-face with individuals, pairs and groups, mostly in participants’ workplaces. Interviews ranged from 28 minutes to 1 hour 10 minutes; the longest interview was with a group of 5.
All participants consented to be audio recorded. Interviews were fully or partially transcribed, and analysed thematically with the aid of the nVivo11 software package.
Participants
Potential participants were initially engaged mainly through email contact via members of the advisory group. In some cases, pre-existing meetings of relevant staff groups
provided a forum for researchers to describe the evaluation and highlight the call for participants. At the end of the first phase of fieldwork in December 2017, there had been
a good level of participation from residential care workers and police, and some participants from ‘other’ professional groups.
There were no young people involved in the first phase of fieldwork for this evaluation. The challenges of involving young people in residential care in research on sensitive topics have been recognised by researchers (e.g., Kendrick et al., 2008 and Vaswani, 2018) and, in order to ensure that the views of young people were included in the evaluation, we conducted a second phase of fieldwork. In the second phase, we broadened the scope of the study to include participants who did not have personal experience of being or responding to an absent or missing young person.
In addition to expanding the scope in this way, the approaches to involving young people in the study were altered to include:
More direct contact between researchers and managers/deputes in individual children’s houses
Stronger emphasis on young people’s rights to voice their opinions, and the opportunity offered by this study in relation to that
Amendments to the consent process, to try to make this more straightforward In order to explore the main topics and themes around the Partnership Agreement with those who did not have personal experience of it, we developed vignettes as a means of eliciting discussion.A total of 8 interviews with young people and 20 interviews with professional participants took place across the three local authority areas. The table below shows the number of interviews in each area. (The number of individual participants is given in the
Introduction and background section.)
Number of interviews in each local authority area
Dundee Edinburgh South
Lanarkshire TOTAL
Professionals 8 6 6 20
Young people 2 4 2 8
TOTALS 10 10 8 28
The young people who took part in interviews ranged in age from 10 to 16 years old. Some had personal experience of being reported missing, while others did not;
participants were not asked directly about their personal circumstances, but some chose to share this as part of the discussion. Others discussed their understanding and
Ethics process
This project was approved by the University Ethics Committee at the University of Strathclyde in July 2017. The project was also approved through the relevant processes in each of the three local authorities.
The inclusion criteria, recruitment approach and interview methods were amended to broaden the scope of the study and to address low participant numbers. These
amendments were submitted to the University Ethics Committee and approved in December 2017.
About CELCIS
CELCIS, based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, is committed to making positive and lasting improvements in the wellbeing of
Scotland’s children living in and on the edges of care. Ours is a truly collaborative agenda; we work alongside partners, professionals and systems with responsibility for nurturing our vulnerable children and families. Together we work to understand the issues, build on existing strengths, introduce best possible practice and develop solutions. What's more, to achieve effective, enduring and positive change across the board, we take an innovative, evidence-based improvement approach across complex systems.