Holding the Child (and Practitioner) in Mind? Youth Justice Practitioners’ Experiences Supervising Young People Displaying Sexually Harmful Behavior

Participants

Two YOSs were approached in the south of England to recruit participants. All suitably qualified staff that could potentially work with sexually harmful young people were contacted (approximately 20 practitioners in each service). In terms of selection criteria, participants recruited to the study were required to be educated to a minimum of undergraduate degree level, be registered as social workers and/or probation officers within the United Kingdom, and have a minimum of 1 year of experience supervising young people with sexually harmful behavior. As convictions for sexual offending in young people are relatively rare (e.g., only 12 and three, respectively, were convicted in the year in question in the two regions in question), the latter criterion reduced the sampling frame further to likely around 10 practitioners in total. The achieved sample of five practitioners, while acceptable for a qualitative, exploratory enquiry, does support the possibility that there may have been anxiety in divulging experiences and emotions felt in relation to the client group, in line with Baker and Edwards’s (2012) notion of “hidden” or “hard to access” populations. The researcher had met with participants on a number of occasions previously, due to the being a freelance trainer in the field; this provided a suitable level of professional distance from participants, while having a highly developed understanding of issues that may arise for participants, all of which could be argued to increase the quality of narratives obtained. Practitioners’ ages ranged from 30 to 50 years old, with a mean age of 42 years. Of these, two practitioners were female and three were male. Regarding ethnicity, two practitioners defined themselves as White British, one as Sri Lankan, and two as Black Caribbean, with English as the first language of all practitioners.

Procedure

After ethical approval, two YOSs were approached to participate in the study. The purpose was to access authentic, “no holds barred” stories, with the researcher positioned as an “outsider” to each service. Participants in each service volunteered after being contacted via email following initial discussions with each respective Head of Service and were each provided with a “study briefing” outlining the nature of the study to be conducted and their potential role within the research process. All participants read the information briefing approved by the University of Portsmouth Scientific Ethics Committee prior to commencing each audiotaped interview in private office space within their respective service locations, and were each reminded of the content of the briefing before commencing the interview.

In addition, each participant read and signed an informed consent form to ensure adherence to ethical guidelines. Five interviews were conducted and audio-recorded, each ranging in length from 42 to 82 mins. Each interview aimed to be a collaborative venture in understanding a “conversation with a purpose” (Bingham & Moore, 1959), using a semistructured focused interview schedule (Merton, Fiske, & Kendall, 1990). In an effort to avoid directive or closed questions or interpretations, the interviewer adopted a stance of talking back to the interviewee (C. Griffin, 1990); in this way, questions were used to promote a reciprocal dialogue with which to explore key themes. Following completion of the interview, participants were thanked and debriefed, with the additional option of an informal conversation regarding the purpose of the study.

The rationale for ceasing data collection after interviews with five participants was underpinned by the notion that a small number of participants within qualitative research is justifiable when attempting to access hidden, or difficult to engage, populations. Given the nature of this study (i.e., exploring forensic practice with sexually harmful adolescents), the fact that practitioners may have felt to some degree that their experiences were being “exposed,” and the resulting possible anxiety that may have been ignited in some participants surrounding their perception of the researcher’s own views regarding practitioner competency/confidence, this small sample is arguably considered “hidden” or “hard to access.” In addition, this study aimed to acknowledge “multiple truths,” rather than a “universal truth”; therefore, the researcher identified with the notion proposed by Becker (2012) that “one interview is sometimes quite sufficient to establish that something is possible” (Baker & Edwards, 2012, p. 15). The richness within each narrative and the high level of consistency in issues raised between participants gave the authors confidence that they had more than enough data with which to develop meaningful themes.

Data Analysis

TA does not generally involve a microanalysis of language use; rather, this approach identified where consistent or variable themes existed as socially produced. Verbatim transcriptions were produced of the interviews, including pauses and repeated words used by either the interviewer or interviewee. Initial codes were identified and cross-referenced for emerging patterns of variability and consistency, and for the functions and effects of specific discourses. Overarching themes noted across the initially coded data were labeled and significant statements extracted and organized into clusters, then checked and rechecked against the taped interviews and examined for differences and commonalities both within and across themes.

The process of identifying and acknowledging the notion of “themes” identified within the data set under examination is open to potentially multiple interpretations, due to the fact that if they “ . . . ‘reside’ anywhere, they reside in our heads from our thinking about our data and creating links as we understand them” (Ely, Vinz, Downing, & Anzul, 1997, pp. 205-206). Given TA is considered to be a highly flexible approach, the study adhered to the 15-point checklist of criteria for good TA as proposed by Braun and Clarke (2006, p. 96) to act as a framework and instill “good practice” within the researcher.

Systemic Unease: Unease With the Self, and Wider YOS Personnel

All practitioners openly discussed their initial response when allocated their first young person displaying sexually harmful behavior to supervise. The extract below positions sexual harm as a specialized offense where the lack of knowledge evoked a sense of unease, illustrating this as a need to increase self-efficacy to supervise cases:

erm, I remember thinking, um, I don’t know how to deal with this because I haven’t got the, I, I thought it was a specialized area and I didn’t have the knowledge base to deal with it . . . you have to know what you’re doing or you have to have, um, a certain level of understanding. (Participant 1)

In contrast, comparing sexual offenses with “non-sexual” offenses was an alternative approach deployed by some practitioners to attempt to manage any sense of unease:

. . . I’d be quite happy to, to work with somebody who’s committed a violent robbery or a violent burglary, whereas somebody’s committed a sexual offense, oooooerrr, yeah, I’ve, I’ve still got those feelings of, I actually wouldn’t know what to do with you. (Participant 2)

Practitioners may therefore attempt to make meaning of sexually harmful behavior by exploring the relevance of their own knowledge base of other types of offending behavior in an effort to manage any unease experienced, while simultaneously questioning their own competency. While youth justice practice involves acquiring knowledge surrounding those factors that are associated with offending behavior more generally, and the development of empathic professional relationships with young people, practitioners did not acknowledge the value of their own general skills, experience, or existing knowledge base. Rather, both elements were of questionable relevance when supervising young people with sexually harmful behavior. This may serve the function of distancing the self from others (i.e., the young person) to regulate the level of unease felt, from “ . . . erm, just kind of like, the fear about if something went wrong erm” (Participant 1) to being “filled with . . . anxiety about it and feeling a bit out of my depth with that” (Participant 2).

One possible method to establish a sense of professional competency was conveyed by one practitioner as follows:

And I think that there might be some behaviors that, that are abhorrent to me personally, . . . but I have, the role that I have is to look at it based on the values and the underpinning principles that I have within my job. (Participant 4)

The “abhorrence” felt is countered through placing the young person within a wider value base regarding the role of the practitioner; negotiating professionalism through efforts to remove the “personal”, instead focusing upon their own functional role. The potential impact of this approach, however, may unhelpfully affect an authentic approach to the development and maintenance of a therapeutic relationship between the practitioner and the young person. One practitioner identified this notion in the following way:

. . . I mean erm, what’s said to reduce offending is, is the relationship they have with their, with, with their erm probation officer or YOS officer and certainly, you know, if [laughs] if erm the off, the young person senses that degree of disgust as it were, or, or abhorrence then, there not gonna, their work isn’t going to be as effective as it can be. (Participant 1)

The impact of unease felt by two practitioners was also expressed during interview as they reflected on approaches to providing practical support to young people through intervention:

. . . I might not be aware of it, maybe that’s my own naivety but what do we do with young people that sexually harm? What do I do when I’m sat in a room with a young person that’s sexually harmful? Do I have to cover certain things? Is there a program that I should be following? (Participant 4)

. . . I think because I’m more aware of my deficiencies in my own training needs that I would actually do more harm than good and wouldn’t be able to sufficiently manage the risk . . . and actually get somebody to gravitate from what would be perhaps a low level sexualized behavior to somebody who gravitates to the more serious ones. (Participant 2)

These extracts are positioned on a continuum from questioning how to intervene most effectively, to being reluctant to intervene to minimize the risk of doing more harm than good. This presents a dichotomous contrast between practitioners who self-question what may or can be done to provide support to young people, to those who feel a sense of unease regarding the potential to create further harm to possible future victims, beyond that of the victim(s) of the young person’s current offense, or the young person themselves.

Both accounts illustrate an implicit, underlying assumption; the young person may become a victim of ineffective or inappropriate supervision by practitioners. The risk of further sexual harm by the young person is internalized by practitioners, who may feel a sense of professional responsibility for any possible further offenses in the future, thus ultimately impacting upon the self as they develop a therapeutic alliance (i.e., being perceived as a credible human in an “enabling” profession). As a direct consequence, the positioning of responsibility for future risk of offending rests with the practitioner, rather than being positioned within a framework of psychological “self-management” by the young person through the development of internal “constructive” risk management control measures. Effective practice positions resistance, ambivalence, and motivation to adopt pro-social alternatives to offending within the young person (e.g., the internal conflict between where they are now in life and where they may wish to be in the future) facilitated by the practitioner, rather than the resistance or ambivalence to change being positioned between the practitioners’ own wishes and desires, and those of the young person (Miller & Rollnick, 2012). These extracts, however, highlight that the latter of these two approaches to practice in youth justice may be more common, with the consequence ultimately further perpetuating feelings of unease with the self as an effective and credible practitioner.

A wide range of coping strategies to manage unease with the self were expressed by practitioners:

I ask a million questions . . . as to right, how do I feel about working with you? Do I still feel upset? Am I angry? Am I, because in order to be able to be supportive to you I’ve gotta acknowledge that, to be able to move forward in supporting you . . . now I go in where it’s much more the level of I need to understand and then I can work my feelings and thoughts from there . . . rather than from disgust. (Participant 3)

This narrative illustrates the positive impact of personal reflection, demonstrating a noticeable shift from historically feeling “disgust” and consciously self-questioning anything practitioners may feel about the young person on first meeting, to developing a more empathic approach in their current practice, by “needing” to explore the young person’s perspective first. This places the young person at the center of developing an understanding of their life, and from there exploring the repertoire of emotions felt by the practitioner based on information disclosed by the young person during supervision. The capacity and scope for practitioners to find space to reflect after initial interaction with the client may therefore be key to the management of unease.

Other strategies to manage unease included emotional sidestepping, instead focusing upon the presenting behavior of the young person, rather than upon how the practitioner may feel at the time:

. . . for the people who are on the receiving end of it is that it will be a very distressing traumatic experience quite likely, but actually in terms of adolescent development is to put the horror of being horrified to one side and actually think about it as another adolescent behavior and think about how we work with that . . . in a more measured, and less horrified way. (Participant 5)

Or consciously normalizing the use of moral judgments by ranking sexual offenses against each other:

. . . we do put moral judgments on different types of behaviors that might not necessarily be acceptable in the general scheme of things but you will, in, you will morally rank them kind of like that’s worse than kind of like molesting a child is worse than kind of like, you know, potentially indecently assaulting an adult female for example. (Participant 2)

These strategies in the long run may ultimately impact unhelpfully upon the ability to develop meaningful interpersonal relationships with the young person.

The need for appropriate supportive environments was expressed by practitioners to cope with feeling unease, which was considered as a collaborative and mutually enriching experience for both themselves and management teams overseeing their practice:

I sometimes think that managers don’t, don’t understand their staff, that they can work with them for quite a long time but they don’t actually, and we will assume that everyone will have the same response to sexually harmful behavior and it’s just like oh, did you find that really difficult and was it . . . is actually is that understand us as individuals . . . managers seem to think it’s only staff who need to talk about stuff reflectively, I don’t know, maybe when you get to that level is somehow you don’t need that anymore. (Participant 5)

Practitioners identified that both themselves and their managers may also experience unease, and that while supervision may be done to practitioners, realigning to a position of collaborative supervision with practitioners may help to nurture practice. Developing a therapeutic alliance between managers and practitioners therefore has the potential to impact across all team members in a mutually beneficial way, although such opportunities need to be both created and utilized by service managers. This is of particular relevance, given a recent U.K. survey of social workers highlighted the distinct lack of appropriate supervision within their department, with over one third of participants feeling supervision was low on their own organizations’ priority list (McGregor, 2013). Supervision arrangements, however, may be best provided through mechanisms external to their own service:

. . . proper clinical supervision with somebody who is completely at ease with, yeah, talking about stuff that, that can feel quite uncomfortable and, and yeah, that we have that completely separate from line management quality assurance performance indicator type supervision, that we have a space where we can really go and sit in that we don’t do that for ourselves but that we have somebody who facilitates that for us. (Participant 5)

Exposing the core self as vulnerable requires sensitive negotiation during supervision. The separation of emotional responses to practice from line managers through the use of external clinical supervision may therefore be an effective approach to cope with unease. Feeling confident in line with managers’ capacity and skills to provide clinical supervision arrangements and questioning whether their skills are aligned to the requirements of practitioners to meet their emotional needs is a potentially contentious, yet vitally important debate if the supervision of young people by practitioners is to be meaningfully supported.

Systemic Unease: Unease With Working Practices in Partner Agencies

A recurring narrative during interview involved practitioner experiences of other agencies such as educational establishments/providers, housing departments, and the police perceiving young people who sexually harm as “different” from other young people who commit nonsexual offenses:

. . . I think that there’s a real strong message that if you are sexually harmful, there’s something wrong with you . . . there’s something wrong with you and you need to be helped, fixed, locked up, in a hospital, whatever it is, there’s something wrong with you and there’s some inherent . . . fuck up that needs to be . . . dealt with . . . whereas if you’ve just, if you’ve gone and beaten someone up or nicked a car or something, yeah you’ve made a mistake, you shouldn’t have done it . . . you can come back from that . . . (Participant 4)

This illustrates how the paucity of knowledge of empirical research across all partner agencies impacts unhelpfully upon perceptions of sexual harm as an inherent feature of the young person, according to practitioners. Partner agencies may attempt to resolve their own sense of unease by pathologizing the behavior of the young person.

Practitioners also conveyed narratives that incorporated feelings of “shame” and “embarrassment” among both YOS and wider partner agency professionals in the following way:

It’s the, it’s the, it’s the embarrassment and the shame that’s attached to sexually harmful behavior as opposed to the boy that’s gone out and stolen the car or beaten someone up. In some respects, you, there are, there is a thought process of, well, boys will be boys . . . but this young person, they’ve done something really bad that’s not normal and they need to be . . . fixed . . . there’s, there’s a mental issue there . . . that’s the difference actually, that’s the difference . . . right, we need to send them to CAMHS [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services] . . . (Participant 4)

There was evidence in interviews that some agencies (particularly legal professionals) approached the appraisal of these young people in an unsystematic and unprofessional way (as opposed to using structured professional judgment that is standard in assessing forensic risk). This may have been due to limited knowledge of the empirical literature:

. . . you can almost see magistrates turn their noses up, as it’s, it’s a, it’s a nasty smell . . . (Participant 5)

. . . you can see in the court they ask far less questions around sexual behavior than they do around other things . . . it’s like a silence in the court, it’s like no-one says anything . . . it’s something that they don’t wanna you know, let’s just deal with this and get it over and done with because it’s a bit uncomfortable. (Participant 4)

Practitioner observations indicate the explicit discomfort felt by Court officials regarding the young person’s behavior, and the resulting impact upon their experience of Court. As highlighted by one participant, the “very hostile” Court process positions young people as perpetrators, rather than balancing this view with the fact they are also highly vulnerable:

. . . these are all vulnerable children that we are working with, no matter what they’ve done, you know and they need to be safeguarded and to, to, the court environment is quite ho, very hostile, erm, . . . and I would urge . . . it to be more sensitive. (Participant 4)

This bias seen in sentencers echoes an international perspective proposed by Urban, St. Cyr, and Decker (2003), in that the Court process seems to give unequal consideration in practice to the fact that many young people are highly vulnerable due to aversive life experiences. It questions to what extent sentencing guidelines for young people charged with sexually harmful offending are fully operationalized, that is, to consider the circumstances of the offense and “the effect on young people of experiences of loss or of abuse” (Sentencing Guidelines Council, 2009, p. 6). Following sentencing, practitioners also identified their experiences of how other partner agencies attempt to jointly manage sexually harmful young people:

. . . they wanna just cut them off, they’re not good, cut them out of school, so then they lose that social “how to be normal with females or males,” you go to a youth club, or, no longer can you be anywhere without an adult or a staff member so again just drumming in all those “I am deviant,” so then what my kids start to do is “I’ll stay home, can’t go nowhere, school don’t want me, youth clubs don’t want me, nobody wants me” . . . (Participant 3)

. . . I think there’s a panic, there’s like a hysteria around sexual harm, sexually harmful behavior . . . particularly with schools . . . (Participant 4)

The illustration of “panic” and “hysteria” by other agencies may serve the function of rationalizing decisions to exclude young people as a robust risk management measure to protect other children within educational settings:

I think that sometimes we can, you can fall, well not you, I, anyone, can fall into the trap of saying, this is what you’ve done, you mustn’t do that and therefore we’ve told you not to do it, so therefore we’ve managed the risk, and . . . that doesn’t work . . . it doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t work for anyone probably to be told not to do something because it’s just like putting a fence around someone, you’re restricting them, but you’re not actually dealing with the issue. (Participant 4)

There is considerable scope for greater awareness of the background risks and needs associated with this vulnerable group of young people, starting with better training for the Youth Offending Service itself and clearly with all agencies with which the young person will be engaged, if effective intervention is to be achieved. The need for agency-wide reflective practice supervision as a vehicle to encourage self-challenge regarding decisions made would avoid falling into the “trap” of ineffective risk management practice through the use of external restrictive control measures alone. If the experience of practitioners highlights they themselves may lack the knowledge, skills, and experience to actively support internal constructive control measures, risk management practice becomes futile as external restrictive measures alone will be ineffective in supporting behavior change. This idea is clearly highlighted by one practitioner in the following way:

Well, look, we’re keeping everybody else ever so safe, because he can’t go anywhere and he can’t do anything, so we are doing that. Of course, the problem is, is, is at the point at which they are released into the wild, is those skills have been so undermined that actually they’re kind of going, well I don’t know what the fuck I should be doing anyway . . . um, and does it help? Yes, I suppose in some senses it helps, it helps us feel better about what we’re doing . . . (Participant 5)

The use of external restrictive control measures to manage the perceived risk of harm to others may serve the function of assisting agencies with meeting their own needs to manage unease, rather than meeting the needs of the young person. A contradiction with the available research base is therefore identified, as disengagement or detachment from education provision is an established protective factor for health (Carlson et al., 2008), mental health (Doll & Lyon, 1998), and against offending behavior (Yoshikawa, 1994). As a result, practitioners’ experiences of encountering unease by other agencies demonstrates variation in understanding of the role each agency should play in achieving the key aim of reducing recidivism. One practitioner further reinforced this point poignantly:

. . . they get completely ostracized, that frustrates me because, again, you have the criminal justice system where the kids, these kids are already criminalized, where they are already being punished for their behavior but in all other aspects, especially for kids where school, social, they then become even more punished than the criminal justice system could ever do to them . . . (Participant 3)

While agencies are primarily concerned with holding the child in mind, how this is translated into front-line practice with young people who sexually harm is open to further intense debate. If the narratives above exemplify the experience of youth justice practitioners, there is a strong possibility that these types of perceptions and feelings surrounding unease are likely to affect a much wider range of lesser trained or less experienced personnel from different agencies.

Study Limitations

The current study used a sample of five experienced social workers/probation officers practicing within two YOSs in England and Wales, as it did not seek to find a single “truth” or “knowledge.” Nevertheless, the study uncovered a number of issues which unfortunately echo rather than revoke recurrent findings over the last two decades in relation to lack of support and training (Griffin & Beech, 2004; Masson & Hackett, 2004). These issues should be explored with larger samples of professionals and paraprofessionals (i.e., professionals qualified in allied disciplines such as social work or probation, rather than being qualified in forensic and/or clinical psychology) working with under-18s in diverse forensic contexts (secure and community settings; health and criminal justice settings).

Implications

Three pertinent issues have been illuminated by this small but telling study, which need further investigation and elaboration. First is the need to explore the specific training, supervision, and support needs within the youth justice profession for those working directly with young people. Within the context of the current Youth Justice System in the United Kingdom (and potentially elsewhere), an obvious and significant omission in the setup of most services is that of adopting an evidence-based, psychologically informed perspective, underpinned by research evidence from the discipline of forensic psychology. This may well be a direct consequence of services consisting primarily of both unqualified youth justice practitioners and those holding qualifications within allied disciplines other than forensic psychology. Recent commentators would say that even in the world of correctional psychology itself, evidence-based practice is often neglected due to the pressures of focusing in an imbalanced way on risk management (Gannon & Ward, 2014). It may not be surprising then that knowledge, training, and an emphasis on the therapeutic alliance as the vehicle of change has been sacrificed in the allied field of youth justice. If these findings stand with larger samples of practitioners, the obvious way to remedy it is through greater investment in training, which may be unlikely to happen in the current atmosphere of financial austerity.

Second, there could well be a need to improve communication and training in allied professions such as sentencing and education. An improvement in relationships and a better knowledge and understanding of the client group among all involved is likely to yield a more ethical and effective approach to supporting these young people. A solution to this lies in relation to the third issue as follows.

A strong resonance can be seen between the narratives above and Gannon and Ward’s (2014) perspective regarding the “dual relationship.” There is clear evidence within this particular study of tensions between the delivery of psychologically informed interventions within services to promote evidence-based practice on the one hand, and that of risk indicators being “prioritized to the detriment of longer term psychological solutions to that risk” (p. 14). A particular dilemma exists for youth justice practitioners as they seek to fulfill their statutory responsibilities regarding the management of risk of future harmful behavior through rehabilitation practices; manage the imposition of Court ordered sanctions where necessary; and additionally manage young people’s personal vulnerability, safety, and well-being given the client group are below 18 years of age. This is all attempted within the hitherto described context of a perceived lack of training, supervision, and support. In addition, the “core normative conflict created by practitioners’ varying ethical allegiances” (Ward, 2013, p. 92) is even more prominent within the Youth Justice System in the United Kingdom. A diverse array of professionally qualified (and unqualified) practitioners from education, health, youth work, probation, and social work with differing ethical and moral perspectives and functional roles (as can be clearly seen in the narratives above) further compounds the challenge to finding ethical and moral unity in practice.

Ward (2013) suggested one way forward is to adopt a “moral acquaintance model” in which the needs/desires of all those involved in the management relationship (including the offender, therapist, sentencer, teacher, victim) are given voice, respect, and impact on the decisions regarding how to move the (in this case) young person toward a more pro-social life. Drawing from each distinct input, a set of common norms, aims, and principles is derived which all agencies and the young person themselves has bought in to. In addition to a more robust set of principles with which to work, this approach should have an enabling role in facilitating greater knowledge and understanding of the client group and a more coherent, effective multi-agency approach to supporting the young person.

Another useful approach for bolstering resilience in practitioners dealing with challenging clients is the model of dynamic adaptation (Clarke, 2004, 2008, 2011). It incorporates a range of individual static (e.g., age, gender), stable (e.g., coping style) and dynamic factors (e.g., changes to organizational structures), and critical occupation factors (e.g., colleague relationships, policies and procedures) all of which are important when also considering the current economic climate, with many services integrating resources to reduce expenditure. Those relevant factors for each practitioner are assessed and supportive interventions are put in place to maximize practitioner well-being, which has been considered to be an effective approach for those professionals working specifically with adult sex offenders (see Clarke & Roger, 2002), and within other professional occupations. Its features complement and support a holistic, responsive, and strengths-based approach now prioritized in working with clients in correctional services.

Diversity Considerations

Regarding participants, this research study engaged professionals who represented a diverse range of ages, length of experience, qualifications/backgrounds, gender, race, and ethnicity. This demonstrates the authors’ clear commitment to an inclusive approach when exploring practitioners’ experiences in forensic practice with young people displaying sexually harmful behavior, and to minimize any potential negative impact by presenting findings from a homogeneous sample.

The use of a qualitative methodological approach also facilitated participants to openly express their experiences, with no barriers in place to hinder communication. This was enhanced by the use of a clear preinterview briefing being sent to all interested participants in English (as this was the first/preferred language of all participants, as self-reported to the researcher prior to interviews commencing), using language which was Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) tested to ensure the text could be understood by an individual which reflected the U.K. national average reading age of 9 years old.

Given the nature of this study, questions surrounding the influence and/or impact of culture upon practitioner experiences in forensic practice were not fully explored. As a future study, this may be a helpful area to focus upon, when considering whether culture may impact (positively or negatively) upon forensic practice with young people who display sexually harmful behavior. As with all qualitative studies, the researcher offers their interpretation of narratives exposed during interview sessions, hence being subjective in nature. Therefore, future studies may benefit from reflecting more explicitly upon the potential impact of the researchers’ own experience, age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity when interpreting textual data. The advantage of adopting a qualitative approach to this research study is that a single truth was not sought. Therefore, it is proposed that the use of qualitative studies exploring sensitive, “hidden,” or “hard to reach” narratives, such as those highlighted within this research study, have the potential to provide a greater degree of consideration of the impact of diversity upon research findings, when compared with laboratory-based/simulated experiments which may not focus upon interpreting results with diversity issues in mind, such as sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, race, gender, or ethnicity, unless these were an integral feature of the original research question posed.