Building the evidence base for supporting late entrants to care: Part III
In the first and second blog posts in this series, I highlighted our strategic approach to understanding the experiences of late entrants to care in Brent, so that we could derive meaningful insights to make young people’s care journeys better.
In this final post, I reflect on the final part of the Discovery process and what it has taught us, key findings from the research, and a preview of what’s coming next for Brent Care Journeys.
Turning 27 hours of data into insights
As a team, the Innovation Lab uses Dovetail as a tool for analysing qualitative research data. This is a great online tool which we have invested in, that helps us label and categorise text, drawing on these to create insights.
One analytical lens for qualitative research findings is to look for repeat patterns, common themes, and issues that come up repeatedly across several interviews. We sliced the interviews by different segments of the care journey: from entering; to being in care; to leaving care. This way we got an overview of key themes emerging at different points in time (linear analysis) and it helped provide a clear framework to report the findings back.
When all the data had been analysed, we sorted themes by volume, which meant we were looking for the most common themes first. Sometimes these presented as the top 3, while others had more of a spread and the top themes spanned across 7–8 key points.
For example, professionals’ understanding of the strengths of late entrants clustered around three main themes, whereas young people’s descriptions of their experiences of entering care were varied, and several themes/issues cropped up in the research.
We also ran two exercises in the interviews to test hypotheses about the size/shape of young people’s networks, and to understand their ‘timelines’ of being in care, showing where they remember having more positive and more negative experiences. We used composite timelines and networks to represent the average across young people’s answers.
Each segment gave us reason to pause and reflect: if we are using this as a method to create systems change, what were the systems considerations emerging from each section? Had the evidence gathered supported or disproved our hypotheses? What problem areas do we need to know more about, in order to unlock barriers at an individual, community, policy or systems level?
These were all questions that we wanted to explore in the playback sessions. However due to the pandemic we had to run playback sessions over Zoom, and will go into more detail during the next phase (more on that below!).
Show your working
As part of the research process, I worked with a service designer in the team to help me code and categorise the data gathered at interview, in a way this helped reduce single coder bias. However bias arguably always remains; our epistemological positions flexing out to what we consider to be known and knowable, our political and social lenses and our attitudes all colour how we, as researchers, see evidence.
One of the tools I use to check for these types of biases is to play back research findings after the first stage of analysis and ask participants three fundamental questions:
- Have I accurately captured what you said to me?
- If not, what have I missed?
- What could be captured differently?
In any other circumstance this involves bringing together a group of participants for an interactive playback and feedback session. With young people we have previously produced literature with the findings, so they can keep this as a take-home. It has on several occasions resulted in participants saying it made them feel valued and heard; so there is huge merit in this activity.
Again owing to the pandemic, I had to take a new approach. I recorded a video of myself talking through the research findings twice; once for professionals and once for young people who took part in the research.
As a result of playing back the video to young people, two things emerged:
- The young people were happy with the research findings and felt it was a fair representation of what they had said
- However they wanted to make their own video playing back the research findings, so that it would be in their own voices as well as being more appealing to other young people. They also asked for a simple infographic to explain the research findings as a complementary product to the video.
So, we listened to young people and got them together to produce a video and infographic
What’s next?
When we started this work we knew there was a gap in the evidence on how best to support late entrants to care to reach their own positive destinations.
We have now done a significant piece of work to start that evidence base, but we know we need to build and grow so that, like any good research, it is a reflection of the present context.
However this is not just about understanding the problems, but doing something to create meaningful changes for the better; so that these young people are able to reach their positive destinations.
There are several really important areas to explore from the Discovery research, which make for great opportunities or problems to take into an Alpha phase:
“Alpha is where you try out different solutions to the problems you learnt about during discovery.” — GDS
Our commitment to working with young people as experts by experience remains unbridled.
In previous work we have created design labs, or groups and spaces where young people work with us to design and prototype solutions — see our service designer Amy Ricketts’ blog here for how we did that with a group of young people in Plymouth.
We know the world looks vastly different to when the Plymouth design lab started, and it might be for some time yet. As we design and scope out what the Alpha phase looks like, we know we need to stick to our principles:
- We work in an open, honest and transparent way with our collaboration partners
- We unite behind a clear purpose
- We focus on long-term, meaningful and sustainable change, even if that means we have to start small and encourage the ripple effects of change
As we continue to work in the open and share progress we will be writing about it in our blog and @barnardoslab on Twitter.
