Life Story Work in the Looked-after Children Population - Version 1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Process, Product and Meaning of Life Story Work in the Looked-After and Adopted Children Population
IRAS ID
134418
Contact name
Katherine Hooley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Staffordshire University
Research summary
This research aims to investigate the commonalities and differences in the views of people who have been involved in Life-story work, specifically within the looked-after/ adopted population.
Life-story work is an intervention used with children who have entered care or who are being adopted as a way of providing a narrative about the child’s life. Life-story work takes many different forms, such as memory boxes, life books and individual work. It also has many different purposes, such as to promote identity or to give information to families and children. Life-story work is recommended by NICE and SCIE as a tool for promoting identity in looked-after children and completing this work is often set as a target for professionals. Despite this, there is actually very little evidence base demonstrating what life-story work accomplishes and how well it achieves these aims. One possible reason for this lack of evidence appears to be the ambiguity around what constitutes life story work. In order to start building this evidence there needs to be some clear agreement about what individuals feel the key components of the intervention are. Once established, life-story work comprising of these components can then be empirically tested for effectiveness.
This research seeks to provide clarity around what life story work is and what it aims to achieve. It will do this by seeking the views of different people who may be involved in life-story work in the looked-after population, including professionals, carers and young adults. The research uses Q-methodology as the method of data collection, whereby each participant will sort statements relating to life-story work into those they think are most and least important to the intervention. The analysis then looks for similarities and differences in people’s views and should help to define some key aspects of the intervention.
REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Leeds East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/YH/0154
Date of REC Opinion
2 May 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion