Introduction

This chapter focuses on 43 interviews with children and young people and the analysis of 38 short questionnaires completed during these interviews. These data were collected during the same two periods of fieldwork as the staff interviews: autumn 2006 and 2007. Short questionnaires (two sides of A4 paper) were completed either by the young people or researchers during face-to-face interviews. This approach had the advantage of enabling the researchers to explain the questions and giving young people the opportunity to expand on their answers. The questionnaires focused first on young people's perceptions of staff management of behaviour within the homes and second, on how a particular problem had been ‘sorted out’. We did not assume that all young people would know what restorative justice (RJ) meant, so we focused mainly on getting a picture of how behaviour was managed by staff. We did ask two direct questions about half way through the interviews, after we had explored perceptions of how staff set boundaries and responded to the behaviour of children and young people: first, the young people were asked whether they knew what RJ meant; they were then asked to give an example of a situation where staff had been involved in ‘sorting out a problem’ and whether they thought the staff response to ‘sorting out a problem’ constituted ‘restorative justice’. Questions about restorative justice were therefore asked within the broader framework of young people's perceptions of how problem behaviour and conflict was managed by staff within the residential care environment.

Researching children and young people in care

Including children and young people in research that concerns their welfare was an important principle in this study. Local authority managers were particularly keen to get young people's perspective. Some residential care staff were adamant about the right of young people to make their own decision to participate, rather than have the decision made by an adult before being approached for their consent. Heptinstall (2000) writes of the time-consuming process of gaining access to children in care as an external researcher, noting the tendency of a variety of adult ‘gatekeepers’ to protect children from the perceived adverse effects of participation in research. Clearly, there is ‘a potential conflict between children's rights to be heard and an adult's duty to promote the children's best interests’ (Heptinstall, 2000, p 872).