Hearing underheard voices: A study engaged with mothers of children in social care

Claire Grant strives to develop an understanding of the mental health and support needs of women who have had their children placed into care through child protection processes within the English family court system. She is a is a third-year PhD student based in epidemiology and public health at UCL. 

A research area where Claire noticed a conspicuous absence of the voices of people with direct experience of child protection. Claire’s engagement work is about addressing this deficit and is therefore closely intertwined with the research itself. She spoke with Siân Aggett, who wrote this blog about how she engaged, and the impact this created.  

Determined that women with lived experience ought to inform research she explored mechanisms to make this possible. She found ways in which she could consult with women who might ordinarily represent her research subjects. They became advisors in her work, informing not only the questions that her research would ask but the research design itself. She managed this with a small amount of dedicated funding, just £1000. 

“It was a perfect small pot of money to just do what I was kind of already trying to do, but actually with some funding to really support and facilitate these discussions in a more structured way.” 

Claire connected with two small charities dedicated to supporting women. One was working to support survivors of domestic abuse, and another was specifically supporting mothers with children in social care. With the support of the second charity, Claire drew together willing participants who formed an advisory group which met every three months to hear updates on Claire’s research. In these meetings, they offered what has proven to be invaluable feedback: 

“In each meeting, something came up which either changed or slightly altered the interpretation of what I’ve done or, the sort of direction of where it was going!”  

Claire has also developed the ability to distil and communicate what she is doing throughout the process. She believes this has also helped her find clarity in how she communicated the work academically.   

‘I have to re-evaluate how I frame my research every three months when I speak to women who have lived experience. You can sometimes get lost in the specifics of the research process, but my lived experience group kept me grounded and gave me the opportunity to translate my work and see its impact in the real world’ 

By building trust and rapport with this group Claire has developed a deeper understanding and empathy for people in these incredibly stressful situations. She also identified some of the pitfalls she would have easily fallen into without their input. Advisors warned Claire that the word ‘interview’ itself could have negative associations for women who had been through child protection proceedings. 

“It’s allowed a bit of space to develop an ongoing relationship and trust and from that, you get a little bit more.” 

Claire now has a host of connections in the charities themselves to whom she can pick up the phone when she hits a particular question or needs immediate feedback. This proved a huge help when it came to designing an approach to recruit research participants. 

“I worked with the charities to recruit for my research interviews. We set up an agreement, outlining how women would be supported during and after our conversations. We also thought carefully about how to respond in circumstances where women became distressed or where there were safeguarding concerns.” 

Through her knowledge of the charities and their services Claire is now better able to signpost her research participants to sources of support. She feels that the participants also felt the benefit of convening and sharing their experiences with each other.  

On top of this, Claire’s career has been shaped by the experience. She has become an advocate for engagement with research and now teaches part of a master’s module in research engagement at the Social Research Institute. 

‘I’m fully invested in participatory research!’ 

Where her PhD supervisors might have felt hesitant about the time Claire needed to invest in this engagement work, they ended up hugely supportive seeing that it was strengthening the research. In fact, Claire included a full chapter on public engagement in her upgrade report, outlining the indisputable value of having interacted with the mothers, ensuring that the research was sensitive to their needs and increasing the chance of positive impact. 

Looking forward, Claire is dedicated to finding ways in which any future research will be able to directly feed into policy and practice, something she realises is becoming a standard request of funders. 

‘It [engagement] is becoming kind of increasingly normalised as part of these big grant applications It’s important to be able to have the resources to do meaningful engagement work at all stages of the research process!’ 

 

This blog was written by Siân Aggett.