Positive Youth Justice by Haines Kevin Case Stephen

Author:Haines, Kevin, Case, Stephen [Haines, Kevin, Case, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781447321736
Google: v6oICgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2015-06-29T05:18:14+00:00

Promoting engagement with practitioners through Reflective Friend Research

The evidence-based practice promoted by the CFOS model is driven by a partnership between children (and their families), adult professionals (practitioners, managers, policy makers, politicians) and a much neglected, yet potentially influential, key stakeholder, university-based researchers (including undergraduate students on research internships – see Case and Haines in 2015b). The development of child-friendly, promotional, inclusionary and legitimate youth justice policy and practice under CFOS eschews quasi-experimental positivist social science research conducted on inanimate subjects and instead pursues more valid and nuanced understandings of the practical realities of the youth justice context through research partnerships with key stakeholders as participant partners in the process. A CFOS approach to working with children in the YJS is facilitated by Reflective Friend Research (RFR), a model of social science research that emphasises the relational aspects of meaningful, valid and context-specific knowledge development and which facilitates engagement with practitioner expertise and their exercise of discretion (which in turn can be employed to engage children and families). RFR evolves through five central relational processes between the researcher and the ‘researched’ (see Case and Haines 2014a), the latter of whom are reframed as active research partners:

• Situated learning – researchers actively immerse themselves in the everyday contexts of the research partners (for example the practice environments of YOT staff and children attending the YOT, including decision-making structures and processes), working with research partners to co-construct their learning, knowledge and understanding of the practical realities of the YJS. This can involve the co-development of research agendas, explanatory frameworks and the design, implementation and evaluation of youth justice services, disposals, assessments and interventions. As such, key stakeholders (for example children in the YJS, YOT staff) can participate and have their voices heard at all stages of the research process, rather than serving as inanimate, passive subjects and recipients of the research.

• Research partnerships – situating research within the everyday contexts of participants can foster the co-construction of knowledge and understanding through equitable and participative research partnerships. These RFR partnerships can resemble ‘communities of practice’ (see Lave and Wenger 2002; Bredo 2005) to the extent that they enable participants to contribute their expert knowledge, experiences, subjective interpretations and meanings to every aspect of the research (knowledge-generation) process, from initial foci to design to methodology to analysis to the interpretation, dissemination and application of results.

• Enhanced access – situated research partnerships can facilitate researcher access to vital facets of the research process, which, in the context of CFOS, can include: research participants/partners (for example children, parents/carers, teachers, YOT staff, government ministers, policy makers, other researchers), key data sets locally and nationally (for example performance-monitoring databases, crime and antisocial behaviour statistics, education and social services databases), internal documentation (minutes, policies, (drafts of) local authority and governmental papers) and knowledge-generation processes (meetings, steering groups, committees, advisory panels). This privileged access to a broader range of data sources than is typically possible through the traditional didactic researcher-subject research model of positivism promotes more context-sensitive and detailed knowledge that is faithful to the expert perspectives of research partners.

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