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2 Methodology
Aim of the study
The main aim of the study is to provide a snapshot of the daily lives of a small number of looked after children across Scotland.
We aimed:
- to find out how looked after children in different settings spend their time in order to inform the adult agenda of concerns about the well-being of looked after children and the state's role in exercising parental responsibility towards children looked after by the local authority
- to look at children's daily activities from the perspective of children themselves in order to gain an insight into what they enjoy doing and why
Sample
The sample consists of 24 children, 11 female and 13 male, ranging from seven to 18 years of age. Children were located in four Scottish local authorities representing both rural and urban areas. They had been in their placements for at least three months. The children were in the following placements:
- six living at home who were the subject of a supervision requirement, including one child who spent time partly at home and partly with foster carers
- seven accommodated in full-time residential care
- eleven accommodated in foster care, including one young person who was in the process of making a transition to independent living
The study was severely limited by the constraints of time, being carried out in four months. A further major limitation was that the sample was purposive, not representative. The views presented here are those of only 24 children and are unlikely to reflect the whole population of looked after children in Scotland. A major omission was the exclusion of any children with severe disabilities because of the constraints on the development of suitable research instruments in the time available. Nevertheless, the children's views do give an insight into the lives of the 24 children, and provide a starting point for child-centred investigations of this type.
Another constraint imposed by time was that the study does not place children's activities in the context of their background, nor their experiences of adversity and resilience. It was outwith the context of the study to explore children's backgrounds, length of time of their placement or their care plans.
Children were identified anonymously by local authorities if they fulfilled the criteria of being in a placement over three months and were aged seven years or older. The research team sent information about the study to local authorities who then asked the children and their carers to participate. Permissions were sought from the main carers of all the children, on an opt out basis. Once children and carers had agreed to participate, names and addresses were released to the research team, who then arranged interviews.
Children were interviewed on a first come first served basis, ensuring that at least four children were seen from each local authority. Even though children and families had agreed to participate before being approached by the research team, the refusal rate for this study, at about 40%, was quite high. The highest refusals were in the home supervision and foster care groups although it was unclear why this was so. Had there been more time, it would have been possible for the research team to have conducted introductory interviews to inform respondents about the study, and to return at an agreed date for the main interview. This might have prevented some refusals.
Measuring activities
In order to measure children's activities, we drew (albeit fairly loosely because of the severe constraints of time) on Ben-Arieh's work (2002) on measuring children's daily activities. We thought it important to look at children's daily activities from the perspective of the children themselves.
It has been suggested by Ben-Arieh (2002) that children's activities are diverse. We have adapted Ben-Arieh's preliminary scheme for classifying activities as follows:
- sleep
- productive activities: schoolwork, personal creative work, paid work, care of others and domestic/household work
- other activities that contribute to the community
- spiritual activities
- travel time
- personal care: eating, getting ready
- social interaction: interacting socially with others not for explicitly productive purposes (such as hanging out, listening to music and talking)
- leisure/recreation: such as play, sports, reading, watching television, arts and crafts
(Adapted from Ben-Arieh 2002).
The meaning and application of each of the categories is explained as they are dealt with in the findings.
The study used two research instruments. The first was a semi-structured interview schedule where children were asked to identify the frequency and duration of a range of child-centred activities, broadly based on Ben-Arieh's characterisation of children's activities. It was thought important that children should have the opportunity of contributing to the definition of the range of activities and this was done during the interviews. However, in order to give children a starting point, some activities were preselected by the researchers to reflect the adult agenda of children's well-being.
The second was a time diary, which children were asked to fill in. Ben-Arieh's main thesis is that children are active in a range of circumstances each day, including being with their families, with their friends, in schools and community and recreation settings. They are also consumers and 'users and creators of information networks and other media' (Ben-Arieh 2002, p.155). Consequently, the use of time diaries over a specified period can show the pattern, including the duration, frequency and context of children's daily activities.
In this study, diaries were developed in such a way as to be attractive to young people and were relatively simple to complete. We asked children to describe in their diaries what they did over a period of 48 hours, which included a weekday and a weekend day and to fill a diary a few days before their interview. Children were asked to give information about the nature of activities, where they occurred and whether the child was alone or with others. The interviewer then checked the content of the diary with the child and helped them complete it if necessary.
The combination of the two approaches used in the study gave us a general overview of the range of activities that made up the daily lives of the 24 children. The diaries gave us material to capture two days in the life of the children. This snapshot could be cross-referenced with the schedules to make sure no activities had been missed. They also provided us with case studies of children's daily lives in different looked after settings.
It was beyond the scope of the study to explore in depth children's perceptions of the relative contribution that different activities made to their lives but we were able to explore the range of activities and the degree to which children had control over their leisure time.
Although this study can only be seen as a pilot, it does provide, for the first time, an insight into the daily activities of looked after children in Scotland.
Ethical issues
As in any study undertaken with children, special attention has to be paid to ethical issues to ensure the study is child friendly. Accordingly, the same ethical procedures were adopted as in Aldgate and McIntosh's (2006) study of kinship care, paying particular attention to transparency about the process of the study, avoiding any coercion and giving children the opportunity to end the interview at any stage. Ethical standards developed by Barnardo's were adopted for use with young people in the study. Additionally, the research instruments were scrutinised and approved by the University of Glasgow's ethics committee.
Because the study was trying to be child-centred, children were given the opportunity to add their own ideas and categories to the research tools. Children were also asked to evaluate their participation and the use of time diaries as a means of understanding children's daily lives. Children's evaluations of the study are reported briefly in Chapter 6.
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