Nicola Parker

Doing mental health research with children and adolescents: A guide to qualitative methods.

Theory and background Theory and Utility of Qualitative Research The Need for Qualitative Evidence Clinical and Research Roles Getting Started Planning a Child Focussed Project Recruitment and Communication The Research Setting Data Collection Questionnaires, Observations and Ethnography Interviews and Focus Groups Naturally-Occuring Data Internet Methods Recording and Transcription Analysis and Writing Up Data Analysis Reflective Practice to Reflexive Research Dissemination

“We Are Alone in the House”: A Case Study Addressing Researcher Safety and Risk

Historically, the safety of research participants has taken precedence in health research. More recently, however, in response to anecdotal reports, there is growing concern for researcher safety, which has resulted in policy development. Also, there is a small body of empirical discussion emerging. In this article, we present a case study example of a particular incident that happened to one of the authors during the course of data collection. We present this as a case study using two sources of data to support the narrative. We utilise extracts from the original interview in which the threat to safety occurred, and this is supplemented by an interview with the transcriptionist who transcribed the threatening interview. Using thematic analysis, we found three key themes from the data: physical threat, emotional responses, and managing risk. Our findings suggest that despite reflectively considering and adhering to valuable protocols relating to risk assessment, unprecedented events may still occur. We recommend, therefore, that research teams develop strategies to manage the implications and impact of research involvement to maintain a healthy research team.

Ongoing processes of managing consent: the empirical ethics of using video-recording in clinical practice and research:

Using video to facilitate data collection has become increasingly common in health research. Using video in research, however, does raise additional ethical concerns. In this paper we utilize family therapy data to provide empirical evidence of how recording equipment is treated. We show that families made a distinction between what was observed through the video by the reflecting team and what was being recorded onto videotape. We show that all parties actively negotiated what should and should not go ‘on the record’, with particular attention to sensitive topics and the responsibility of the therapist. Our findings have important implications for both clinical professionals and researchers using video data. We maintain that informed consent should be an ongoing process and with this in mind we present some arguments pertaining to the current debates in this field of health-care practice.