Teaching and Research use of the Victoria Climbi é Corpus

1. Teaching and Research use of the Victoria Climbié Corpus Graham Stone, Graham Gibbs, Chris Hall, Dawn Clarke, Antony Osborne and Andrew Teal Centre for Applied Childhood Studies & Centre for Research in the Social Sciences, School of Human and Health Sciences Library and Computing Services University of Huddersfield

2. Outline • Victoria Climbié Inquiry • The Huddersfield Corpus Project • The Website • Example of teaching retrieval • Hands on use of the corpus • Evaluation Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

3. The Victoria Climbié Corpus (VCC) • 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 • Issues still relevant today - Baby Peter, etc. Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

4. Relevance for child protection education and research • Single case • Inquiry talk v outside relevance • Inquiry talk itself – accounting, blaming, establishing credibility • Topics of interest themselves – supervision, child protection procedures, allocation in everyday contexts • Importance of Victoria Climbié Inquiry in child welfare policy and practice • Public inquiries as a mechanism of social policy Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

5. Witnesses • Social workers (54) • Police (22) • Nurses (19) • Doctors (16) • Housing officials (5) • Voluntary organisation (3) • Childminders (3) • Politicians/ civil servants(8) • Family and church members (10) • Others (16) Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

6. Testimony already on the Web • http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ero/browse.aspx?id=3121&level=5 • 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. Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

7. But: • HTML pages not amenable to analysis • Data set very large - too large for some uses/users • Needs a means of “navigation” • Like Medjedovic & Witzel (in FQS) we believe some basic coding of the corpus is helpful and compatible with further analysis done by other researchers. Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

8. The Huddersfield Victoria Climbié Corpus Project • Identify themes & topics in cross-examination required by or of use to a range of professional & educational users -> Delphi exercise (Univ. funding) • Catalogue and code data & establish system of data management & retrieval. (Using Atlas.ti software) • Establish an online data corpus available for future research/teaching use outside the University. (Using XML output from Atlas.ti in University Repository) (Jisc funding) Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

9. Themes for coding • From Delphi and other advice • 108 codes used to code the data thematically e.g. Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

10. Used Atlas.ti • Question from lawyer and answer from witness combined into single quotation • 47,352 quotations Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

11. Barriers to archive use (following Corti) • Problem of the implicit nature of qualitative data collection and analysis – context and reflexivity • Climbié corpus collected in a well documented, legal setting • Lack of time to get fully acquainted with research materials created by someone else • We are doing some of this work • Constraints of informed consent • Inquiry is matter of public record and already on Web. • Insecurity about the exposure of one’s own research practice; IPR or threat of misinterpretation • Delphi means coding reflects wide range of professional needs • Lack of publicly available research data • Similar inquiries (Bichard, Children in Instl. Care etc.) Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010

12. Demonstration of the website • http://victoriaclimbie.hud.ac.uk/index.html Victoria Climbié Corpus Launch Event. April 2010