Elsevier

The Arts in Psychotherapy

Volume 63, April 2019, Pages 77-83
The Arts in Psychotherapy

Research Article
Re-animating vulnerable children’s voices through secondary analysis of their play therapist’s interview narratives

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2019.02.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Secondary analysis is a useful research method to review data.

  • Reviewing data helps to obtain a greater depth of understanding through reflection and resonance.

  • The voice of the vulnerable child can be re-animated to present meaningful narratives.

  • Play therapy, a well-established form of psychotherapy, captures complex stories from the vulnerable child.

Abstract

Inclusion of the voice of the child is key to quality research processes focused on their needs and interests. The authors contend that when the voice of the child is unavailable, secondary analysis of data generated with sensitive, highly trained, child-oriented adults may provide a useful way to include aspects of the child’s experiences and views. This study reports an innovative secondary analysis process in which therapy practitioner narratives were used to re-animate the lived experiences and challenges of vulnerable children. The results indicated that attending therapy was experienced as supportive for children; in being able to make choices, in being informed about decisions relating to their current circumstances and future, and the role of attendance at therapy in supporting their needs.

Introduction

This paper presents a secondary analysis of the interview data from an original study about child play therapist’s understandings of the rights of the child (Edwards, Parson, & O’Brien, 2016). This follow up study used the original interview data; focusing on the question what do children experience when they attend play therapy? Five interviews and a written account from the original data set provided the narrative for analysis. These narratives recounted specialist therapy work with highly vulnerable children experiencing family conflict or problematic home circumstances in which life changes had occurred, or were about to ensue (Edwards et al., 2016).

The follow-up analysis resulted in the creation of four vignettes animated from the child’s perspective based on stories the practitioners told when recounting their practice experiences. The method engaged the techniques and procedures of narrative inquiry (Bochner, 2012), with emphasis on the performative affordances of qualitative inquiry (Bochner, 2018). This paper presents a. the approach taken, b. the vignettes that emerged, and c. reflection on the findings.

We contend that play therapy is a well-established method for working with vulnerable children (Myers, 2017). Therefore, this paper does not seek to explain play therapy, or justify its inclusion as a therapeutic practice in child mental health service provision. The focus of the paper is the presentation of an innovative methodology for the exploration of children’s experiences within, in this case, narratives of highly trained, child-oriented adults.

Narrative research represents “the struggles of ordinary people coping with difficult contingencies of lived experience” (Bochner, 2012, 160). Narrative analysis offers multiple ways to honour and acknowledge human experience as a site of learning and understanding (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007) resting on an epistemological foundation that multiple narrations and interpretations of experiences are possible (Bhattacharya, 2016).

The narrative inquiry text presents “emotional, dialogic, and collaborative truths” (Bochner, 2012, 161). Rather than investigating and ascertaining facts, the researcher’s interest focuses on the telling of the story, along with the narrative process engaged by the teller. Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) proposed that narrative research is a vital and energizing way to engage complex topics because,

…the narrative inquirer focuses on the way the relational, temporal, and continuous features of a pragmatic ontology of experience can manifest in narrative form, not just in retrospective representations of human experience but also in the lived immediacy of that experience.

(Clandinin & Rosiek p. 44)

Narrative inquiry is an accepted research method used to engage complex topics involving children, by accessing experiences of families and practitioners (for example, Moore, Russell, Arnell, & Ford, 2017; Navot, Jorgenson, & Webb, 2017). The researcher uses their expert understanding, and prior experiences, to elaborate meaning and engage the complexity presented.

There is no one way to undertake narrative inquiry. Every decision or step in working with the materials generated remains open-ended, or even ad hoc, including the decision about when or how the analysis might be considered complete. This aspect of narrative inquiry has been described as a journey with a “maze of roads and paths” (Robert & Shenhav, 2014, p. 13). This iterative and organic process is crucial to the development of a narrative inquiry project. However, it is recognised this can impact the challenge of demonstrating the trustworthiness of the study. The validity of qualitative studies is based on both the communicative and pragmatic relevance of the materials and findings (Kvale, 1996). Therefore, relevance can be used as one criterion of validity in research with a narrative inquiry focus. Narrative reports gain their trustworthiness from the relevance of their sources and the relevance of the findings to real-world problems.

Secondary analysis – also termed secondary data analysis - uses an existing data set to answer a different question than that of the original study. Long-Sutehall, Sque, and Addington-Hall, (2011) proposed that a strength of secondary analysis is its capacity to capture information about an elusive population where issues of sensitivity may preclude direct research with the potential participants (see also Jackson, Newall, & Backett‐Milburn, 2015). Mitchell (2015) similarly endorsed the efficiencies in secondary analysis, along with the benefits of its non-intrusive nature.

Much of the literature and guidance on implementing secondary analysis involves managing large data sets; for example, information from longitudinal studies (Vartanian, 2010), or from archived widely available data sets (Tarrant, 2017). Interview based secondary analysis studies tend to have relatively large participant numbers (for example, Tarrant, Windridge, Baker, Freeman, & Boulton, 2014). However, some secondary analyses have smaller numbers of participants, and there does not seem to be a prescribed number of participants to reach saturation. Rather, the richness of the data set and the reason for the secondary analysis provide the rationale for the size of the data set.

One of the ethical challenges reported in that literature about secondary analysis of qualitative data, is data sharing (Ruggiano & Perry, 2017). The secondary analysis reported here was undertaken by the researchers from the original study. We contend that our professional experience as child therapy practitioners and researchers with children and families strengthened our undertaking of this process of analysis.

Section snippets

Procedures for the research

After ethical approval from the relevant ethical board at Deakin University, Registered Play Therapy members of the Australasia Pacific Play Therapy Association were contacted via an email message sent from the association advising that the research study was recruiting participants.

Six play therapists made contact and agreed to participate in the original study. Five interviews by phone or in person were completed, and one respondent provided written answers to questions. Guiding questions

Results: animating the experiences of vulnerable children

Please note that in the following vignettes the play therapy approach of each practitioner has not been elaborated. Play therapists work from multiple methods and approaches, depending on the needs of the child and the training school the practitioner attended. As described above the study which included the interviews on which this secondary analysis is based did not request this information as it would likely have led to the researchers not involved in interviewing knowing who the

Discussion

These vignettes emerged from a secondary analysis of the narratives of play therapists explaining how they work with children experiencing complex and adverse life events. The proposal to engage secondary analysis to consider the child’s view was a spontaneous idea developed enthusiastically within the research team.

Told from the child’s perspective through the process of secondary analysis the cumulative narratives indicate that play therapy provides a space where things that can be batted and

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Dr Wendy O’Brien, our collaborator in the original study on which this secondary analysis is based.

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