1. Ralph Morton r.morton@lboro.ac.uk
‘Exploring the language barrier to engagement in youth justice assessment interview practice’
Ralph Morton

2. Outline Project Team What are we planning to do?
How are we planning to do this?
Timetable
Numbers
What we need from you
What we hope to offer
Any questions and concerns?

3. Project Team
Stephen Case, Professor of Criminology, Loughborough University
research interests: youth justice; youth crime prevention; social justice, particularly the promotion of positive, children first ways of working with children in the Youth Justice System.
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, Professor of English and Applied Linguistics, Swansea University
-research interests: discourse analysis; media discourse; cross cultural communication.

4. Ralph Morton, Research Associate, Loughborough University
- Research interests: Corpus Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Professional Discourse
‘Exploring the language barrier to engagement in youth justice assessment interview practice’ project
-> Using linguistic analysis to examine communication in assessment interviews

5. What are we planning to do?
‘To identify and examine patterns of problematic discourse within assessment interviews’
‘To identify and examine patterns of effective management within assessment interviews’
Examine the interview context and how this might effect communication
Develop, test, and deliver a set of protocols to serve as ‘a model for effective communication’
Leicestershire, Gwynedd, Walsall, Surrey

6. How are we planning to do this?
Record assessment interviews
Linguistic analyses of interaction
Questionnaires re: experiences in the Youth Justice System (practitioners and young people)
Semi-structured interviews re: experiences in Youth Justice System (practitioners and young people), incorporating findings from analyses
Bring this information together to produce a ‘toolkit’ for effective communication in interviews
Pilot, refine, and finalise toolkit for application in assessments

7. Recording Video or audio?
Video would provide much more information
Gesture, Gaze, Posture, all ‘resources for making meaning’
Also some evidence that body language affects how meaning is perceived
Our intention is to be as unobtrusive as possible
- Do not want to affect assessments
- From a research perspective we do not want abnormal data
One recorder
- Researcher operated or practitioner operated?

8. Privacy
All data will be anonymised. Video and audio data will be masked. Identifying details such as names and locations will be removed before any results are shared
Focus of the study is interaction, not the details of individual cases
Real identities of participants will be stored on password-protected hard-drives only accessible to the three researchers on the project
Personal data will be processed in private locations
All personal data collected for the purposes of this project will be destroyed when it concludes in March 2019

9. Timetable Phase 1 Phase 3 Phase 2 Phase 4 August 2017- February 2018
- Observe and Record assessment interviews
Linguistic analysis
Phase 2
March-June 2018
Questionnaires
Interviews
Phase 1 + Phase 2 => Phase 3
Phase 3
July-August 2018
- Develop draft 1 of the toolkit
- Test toolkit
Phase 4
September 2018-February 2019
- Develop final toolkit
- Provide training sessions

10. Numbers Phase One: Assessment interviews
Overall target of 50 interviews between the two YOTs
20 assessment interviews per YOT
Initial AssetPlus assessments and review assessments
If possible at least some initial and review assessments of same case
5-10 other interview types
Phase Two: Questionnaires/Interviews
Questionnaires - all participants from Phase 1 (+?)
Interviews - as many participants from Phase 1 as possible

11. Phase Three: Focus Group
- 4 practitioners, 4 young people per YOT
Phase Four: Final toolkit and dissemination
- As many practitioners as can/want to attend workshop sessions

12. What we need from you Access to assessment interviews
Help to identify suitable cases
Help with approaching parents and securing permissions from them and the young people
Access to planning materials
Insight on the assessment process through questionnaire, interviews, focus group

13. What we will offer ‘Toolkit’ for supporting best practice
Linguistics/communicative insights into assessment interviews (useful beyond YJ context)
To map your concerns and experiences onto the research
Workshops
(Feedback for young people)
Dissemination

14. Any questions or concerns?
Contacts: Stephen Case
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
Ralph Morton