Establishing an accessible data corpus based on evidence to the Victoria Climbié inquiry: Merging user needs and research dimensions Rachel Balen, Graham Gibbs, Chris Hall, Sue Hanson, Helen Masson, Andrew Teal Centre for Applied Childhood Studies School of Human and Health Sciences University of Huddersfield

2 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Climbié The Victoria Climbié Inquiry (Laming Report) Major review of the child protection system in England and Wales -> Green Paper Every Child Matters Inquiry investigated circumstances surrounding the death of Victoria Climbié Took evidence on wider aspects of the child protection system through a series of seminars Reported to both the Home Office and the Department of Health

3 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Evidence collected on Internet 64 days of the verbatim cross-examination of witnesses (up to 200 pages per day) Written submissions (image pdf – not part of current study) Evidence about state of child protection services in late 1990s detailed testimony about: day-to-day practice decision-making inter-agency working the context of service delivery policy making across all agencies: social services, police, health, voluntary groups.

4 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan

5 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Three stages of research Identify themes & topics in cross-examination required by or of use to a range of professional & educational users Catalogue and code data & establish system of data management & retrieval Establish a data corpus available for future research outside the University

6 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Themes and topics from potential users Using Delphi technique to do this. a method for structuring a group communication process which facilitates a group of experts to deal with a complex problem by focusing on a set of predetermined tasks Policy Delphi gets an informed group to examine all the options and supporting evidence on a particular topic. more qualitative responses not necessarily a consensus of experts views neutralizes the power imbalances does not need expensive face-to-face meetings or focus groups

7 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Four stages 1. Panel of experts selected and exploratory questionnaire completed. 2. Through sequential questionnaires, a review of experts opinions is undertaken. Look for areas of agreement and/or disagreement. 3. Areas of agreement and/or disagreement presented back to panel. Stages 2 and 3 of process repeated. 4. The experts responses evaluated.

8 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Our experts Professionals with specialist knowledge in child welfare issues in the fields of social work, nursing, paediatrics, policing, law, housing and education Early ideas for themes Cross disciplinary/professional work Dealing with lying/omission/obfuscation

9 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Different from archived data set & language corpus Themes not just research led Extra forms of data presentation needed (e.g. Exemplars/key cases) May include coding for language use (e.g. CA or DA) Users may want complex searching (may need to re-import data to CAQDAS) Education users want subsets of data for teaching use (e.g. research projects) Data set not representative - in sense of random sample of child protection mgt. & talk Or in sense of comprehensive examples of the range of child protection mgt. & talk

10 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Coding and data prep. Using Atlas-ti – XML output Keeping to page layout as on Website (and inquiry documents) Available as XML and as web pages Dynamic display of results via web site.

11 On-line Access to Qualitative Data: Opportunities and Challenges. Jan Issues for XML based data archiving Needs format that can be imported into various CAQDAS How to represent hyper-linking of quotations/text Linking of memos to documents and codes How to represent code hierarchies and network/model views of coding