Exploring Children’s Journeys into the Youth Justice System from Multiple Perspectives: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a well-written and detailed account of a study devoted to preventing children's involvement with the Youth Justice system. Based on the "child first approach", it offers two empirical perspectives on the children's "journeys" - of children themselves and of adults, the latter perspective being complementary.

The article goes through a more or less classical procedure for semi-structured interviews in which the specific thing is the use of timelines. The data analysis highlights experiential themes and subthemes which provide rich opportunities for explaining behaviour, comparing experiences, and suggesting solutions to problems.

The results include several interesting observations. Among them, I could outline the following ones which perhaps could be emphasised more clearly in the Discussion or Conclusions sections:

1. The importance of the idea of "bad luck" in self-reflecting on offending behaviour. It expands to (and summarizes) perceptions of limited control over general life situations which is widespread in our fluid modernity times.

2. The idea of "personal responsibility" which emerges as a pillar in the accounts of the children. See, particularly, the dilemmas of "receiving external support" or "coping independently", and of "acting on peer influence" or "acting on their own responsibility". It is interesting how the children defend their agency by accepting the sovereignty of their own decisions, even when detrimental to them.

3. The blurred boundary between "criminal" and "non-criminal" which apparently seems arbitrary to "offenders" (including in cases of biased practices towards people from lower socio-economic backgrounds). It could be guessed that pro-social behaviour is more difficult to be adopted when the legitimacy of legal actions is not entirely clear.

4. The idea of "adult constructs". It is mentioned just once (line 446) but may be developed further as it is of crucial importance for specifying the individual "voices" of the children. How do we approach "adult constructs" in narratives and what part of the analysis do they take? To put it otherwise, is it possible to distinguish between young people's own experiences and the imposition of adult people's evaluations of these same experiences?

Finally, the article cites very carefully its limitations, including the risks of generalising on a sample of just five people. However, the statement that "if the study was repeated with another five children an entirely different set of themes may have been found" (lines 782-4) is perhaps a little exaggerated. Having in mind the topic (offensive behaviour), the institutional arrangements of the Youth Justice system, and the essence of the method of semi-structured interviews, similarities could easily be predicted.

If the author(s) consider some of these remarks useful, I believe a revision can be prepared in a short time.
 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are several instances in the text where the phrasing is a bit difficult to follow.

Here are 2 examples:

line 317: "... while his CM they were signs..."

line 373: "... both boys both spoke.."

Perhaps a minor editing of the text would be beneficial.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for taking the time to review our manuscript and for their positive feedback. We have spent some time amending the manuscript in line with the comments provided, particularly reflecting on the interesting points made regarding discussion of the findings of the study. We have copied each of the reviewer’s comments below and provided a narrative of the changes made. We have also used ‘tracked changes’ to highlight all changes made to the original manuscript. We hope that these revisions are sufficient, but would be open to further feedback if there are any areas that require further development. Within the comments below, we have made reference to line numbers, please note that these numbers refer to the document with all tracked changes  accepted (‘simple markup’) and may appear differently depending what mode the tracking is displayed.   

• Comment 1: The importance of the idea of "bad luck" in self-reflecting on offending behaviour. It expands to (and summarizes) perceptions of limited control over general life situations which is widespread in our fluid modernity times.
• Response 1: We agree this is an important discussion point but found it difficult to incorporate into the manuscript without taking the discussion section on a tangent. We have amended the paragraph beginning Line 639 (3^rd paragraph of discussion section) to emphasise this point more clearly and hope this is sufficient to cover this comment.
• Comment 2: The idea of "personal responsibility" which emerges as a pillar in the accounts of the children. See, particularly, the dilemmas of "receiving external support" or "coping independently", and of "acting on peer influence" or "acting on their own responsibility". It is interesting how the children defend their agency by accepting the sovereignty of their own decisions, even when detrimental to them.
• Response 2: We agree this is an important theme within the research that had not been explicitly stated. We have added discussion of personal responsibility within the paragraph beginning Line 747 (10^th paragraph of discussion section), linking this to the concept of responsibilisation of children. We hope our amendments successfully capture this idea.
• Comment 3: The blurred boundary between "criminal" and "non-criminal" which apparently seems arbitrary to "offenders" (including in cases of biased practices towards people from lower socio-economic backgrounds). It could be guessed that pro-social behaviour is more difficult to be adopted when the legitimacy of legal actions is not entirely clear.
• Response 3: We have added to the second half of the paragraph beginning Line 639 (3^rd paragraph of discussion section) to include the concept of questioning legitimacy of youth justice processes.
• Comment 4: The idea of "adult constructs". It is mentioned just once (line 446) but may be developed further as it is of crucial importance for specifying the individual "voices" of the children. How do we approach "adult constructs" in narratives and what part of the analysis do they take? To put it otherwise, is it possible to distinguish between young people's own experiences and the imposition of adult people's evaluations of these same experiences?
• Response 4: We agree the concept of adult constructs is important and was not sufficiently covered within the original manuscript. We have included reference to adult constructs within the paragraph beginning Line 747 (10^th paragraph of discussion section). We have also amended the first paragraph of the strengths and limitations section (4.1, Line 793) to include reference to adult constructs with respect to the use of multiple perspectives within the research.
• Comment 5: Finally, the article cites very carefully its limitations, including the risks of generalising on a sample of just five people. However, the statement that "if the study was repeated with another five children an entirely different set of themes may have been found" (lines 782-4) is perhaps a little exaggerated. Having in mind the topic (offensive behaviour), the institutional arrangements of the Youth Justice system, and the essence of the method of semi-structured interviews, similarities could easily be predicted.
• Response 5: We agree that this sentence was exaggerated and unnecessary and have therefore removed it and rearranged this paragraph to improve flow (Line 806, 3rd paragraph of section 4.1).
• Comment 6: Comments regarding the quality of English Language (including lines 317 and 373).
• Response 6: We have corrected the mistakes identified and have also made other changes throughout the manuscript to correct grammatical mistakes or improve the flow of the writing. These are highlighted using tracked changes throughout the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

_{Please correct English grammar and syntax, and please keep verb tenses consistent, only changing them when appropriate.}

I’m concerned about the very small number of participants. If you indicate this to be a pilot study, the small sample size would be more acceptable. Or, provide acceptable rationale for the small sample size.

It would be good to pull in some literature/research related to the themes in your Results section.

Please see attached notes I made.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I made comments that they should revise English grammar and syntax, and I gave some examples in the uploaded attachment I provided.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for taking the time to review our manuscript and provide feedback. We apologise for the grammatical errors found within the manuscript and have endeavoured to improve the paper in this regard.  We have copied the reviewer’s comments below and provided a narrative of the changes made. We have also used ‘tracked changes’ to highlight all changes made to the original manuscript. We hope that these revisions are sufficient, but would be open to further feedback if there are any areas that require further improvement. Within the comments below, we have made reference to line numbers, please note that these numbers refer to the document with all tracked changes accepted (‘simple markup’) and may appear differently depending how the tracking is displayed.   

• Comment 1: Several grammar and syntax revisions were highlighted within the review document.
• Response 1: We have corrected the mistakes identified and have also made other changes throughout the manuscript to correct grammatical mistakes/verb tenses or improve the flow of the writing. These are highlighted using tracked changes throughout the manuscript. The only comment we did not change is ‘experiences of the system’ to ‘experiences in the system’ (Line 67 original manuscript, Line 68 revised manuscript) as we felt ‘of’ was the appropriate word to use here.
• Comment 2: Comments regarding the first sentence of the abstract - ‘reword the first sentence as the syntax is not correct’ and ‘note something about the children in that sentence that leads us to know they have been convicted or cautioned’.
• Response 2: We agree this sentence was unclear so have reworded it and added ‘in conflict with the law’ (Line 6).
• Comment 3: Line 7: reword this sentence, to note the number of children first.
• Response 3: We have not followed this suggestion as the participants include the children, case managers and parents/guardians so it was not possible to change the order of the sentence without losing this meaning.
• Comment 4: Line 60: I’m not sure what you mean by “alternative evidence-base”
• Response 4: We agree this was ambiguous so have reworded this sentence to provide greater clarity (Line 61).
• Comment 5: Line 249-250: sounds a bit awkward. Please rephrase this first sentences. And, specify “….common themes were apparent....”.
• Response 5: We agree this sounded awkward and have reworded the first two sentences of the results section to improve the flow. We have used the IPA terminology ‘group experiential themes’ rather than ‘common’ (line 248, first paragraph section 3).
• Comment 6: It would be good to pull in some literature/research related to the themes in your Results
• Response 6: We have not added any literature into the Results section as this is not typical when reporting IPA research (Smith et al., 2022). Furthermore, the Results section is already long due to the large number of themes discussed. We therefore feel that this section would become very difficult to navigate if literature was also included.
• Comment 7: I’m concerned about the very small number of participants. If you indicate this to be a pilot study, the small sample size would be more acceptable. Or, provide acceptable rationale for the small sample size.
• Response 7: We understand concern regarding sample size, given much research in this field is large scale quantitative research. However, what we felt was missing in this area, and what this research attempts to achieve, is an in-depth study of children’s experiences prior to involvement with the system. It would not be possible to do this type of research on a much bigger scale, as we would lose the in-depth analysis of the individual experience. This is in line with practice of IPA, which generally advocates for relatively small sample sizes. In their book entitled ‘Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research’, Smith et al. (2022) recommend a sample of 3 for undergraduate studies, 5 for masters and between 6 and 10 for a doctorate-level study. They specify that this should be 6-10 interviews, not necessarily this many participants. Therefore, our sample of 5 groups (12 participants) is sufficient for the requirements of IPA. Smith et al., (2022) clarify that ‘the issue is quality, not quantity...IPA studies usually benefit from a concentrated focus on a small number of cases’ (p.46). We hope this clarifies the rationale for the small sample size.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

No recommendations. All suggestions in my previous review seem convincingly addressed. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you!