Design background

The Healthy Relationship Transitions (HeaRT) study was a distinct strand of a wider interdisciplinary research project, Transforming Relationships and Relationship Transitions with and for the Next Generation, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust as a Beacon Project of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (Grant Ref: 203109/Z/16/Z). It was conducted in 2020 and 2021 and used qualitative methods adjusted due to the COVID-19 restrictions operating at the time.

The objectives for the project as a whole were to:

• Explore the desired content and outcomes of relationship education (RE) from the perspectives of young people.

• Support young people to become resilient adults capable of making positive choices and maintaining happy, health-promoting, intimate relationships.

• Reduce the adverse consequences of parental conflict on child (and parental) health by exploring the value of promoting greater child consultation through child-inclusive mediation (CIM) to improve wellbeing and agency for young people whose parents separate.

The project comprised two strands: Healthy Relationship Education (HeaRE), led by Exeter Medical School colleagues, Newlove-Delgado and Benham-Clarke, and HeaRT, led by the authors. The HeaRE strand focused on the role of RE in schools and explored the desired content and outcomes of RE from young people’s perspectives, including their views on whether parental separation should be addressed as part of the curriculum in RE. The HeaRE strand methods and findings are not relevant to this book’s focus and are not directly discussed, save where they inform aspects of the HeaRT study. Full details of HeaRE are published elsewhere (Barlow et al, 2022; Benham-Clarke et al, 2022a; 2022b).

The HeaRT strand of the project was focused on practice, experiences and views relating to CIM. Its aim was to reduce the adverse consequences of parental conflict on child and parental health by collecting and analysing evidence on whether more child consultation through greater CIM uptake could improve wellbeing and agency for young people in the context of parental separation. The findings from both strands came together to suggest ways to support young people to become resilient adults, capable of making positive choices and maintaining happy, health-promoting, intimate and family relationships, with greater understanding of transitions into and out of such relationships. In accordance with the co-creation approach of the project, all findings from both strands were presented for critique and discussion at an online workshop with a combined youth panel comprising young people participants from both HeaRE and HeaRT in February 2021, which helped challenge and confirm our thematic analysis (Barlow et al, 2022).

The HeaRT study: research ethics approach and approval

Research ethics approval was applied for HeaRT in accordance with the University of Exeter research ethics procedures and was approved on 20 December 2019 (Ethics approval no. 201920–017 [adults] and 201920–040 [young people]). Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and child-friendly information sheets about the project were provided for our child participants. The names of all participants were anonymized, and any names referred to in this book are pseudonyms. Adults were ascribed surnames to distinguish them from young people. As we were interviewing parents and siblings from the same families, there was a risk to internal confidentiality – the risk that those inside a group may identify other group members (Tolich, 2004: 101). To avoid jigsaw identification of family groups, young people were given first names only, adults who shared a surname were given different surnames and the gender of siblings was anonymized.

The HeaRT study: purposive sampling and data collection methods

The HeaRT study was conducted in two phases. The first focused on collecting data from relationship experts and family mediators. The second on members of separated families who had undertaken CIM.

To understand the CIM process and models of good and bad practice more thoroughly, first a reflexive workshop was held with 11 CIM mediators and three family justice professionals from the Ministry of Justice, Cafcass and the Family Justice Young People’s Board (FJYPB) to pool knowledge and expertise about the process, including identifying their collective understanding of the risks and benefits of the process to separating parents and their children. The workshop, and the first two focus groups with the FJYPB (discussed in what follows), took place in February 2020, shortly before the first COVID-19 lockdown, and were conducted face-to-face. All subsequent focus groups, workshops and interviews undertaken for the HeaRT study were conducted online.

In order to understand how older children can learn skills needed to identify healthy and unhealthy relationships and cope better with relationship transitions across the life course, including from an intact to a separated family, we used qualitative semi-structured telephone interviews with ten relationship professionals (psychotherapists, counsellors and researchers; seven women and three men) purposively sampled for their known expertise in supporting couple relationships or counselling young people following parental separation. For the HeaRT strand, their views on the wellbeing benefits (and risks) of giving young people a voice in the decision-making when parents separate, and the role that CIM might play in this, were explored. We report the findings from the HeaRT strand in Chapter Two.

Next, we conducted two focus groups with ten members of the FJYPB to consider their views on the risks and benefits of CIM. The first focus group comprised those aged 11–16, and the second, 16 years and over. We then conducted two mixed-age focus groups with a total of eight FJYPB members to gather their views on young people’s information and support needs following parental separation. An interview was also conducted with a young adult family law campaigner using the same focus group schedule. All had experienced parental separation. Three groups included a mix of genders and one contained girls only. The groups had a mix of ethnic backgrounds.

Following this, we undertook qualitative semi-structured interviews with a sample of 20 family mediators, CIM qualified for an average of 16 years. All were Family Mediation Council (FMC)-accredited, and all FMC member organizations were represented. Recruitment was undertaken in layers. First, we re-approached CIM-qualified mediators identified in the earlier Mapping study in 2012 (Barlow et al, 2017b). Here, we found many mediators were CIM qualified yet were reluctant to undertake CIM due to a lack of confidence and/or parental objections to their child participating (Barlow et al, 2017b: 77). This approach enabled a judgement of whether their CIM practice (and confidence in the process) had increased, declined or remained stable over the intervening ten years. The additional mediators were recruited through adverts in the FMC and its member organizations’ newsletters. This resulted in a sample of 17 women and three men, reflecting the female bias within the family mediation profession.

Our parent sample comprised 12 parents (five fathers and seven mothers) each of whom we interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach to allow comparability within the sample as well as space to capture the individual narrative. These parents had all engaged an FMC-accredited mediator and, as with the mediator sample, all FMC member organizations were represented. Some parents had been legally aided; others had paid privately. We asked parents to score their conflict level with the other parents out of ten and triangulated their score with their description of the conflict in interview. Seven parents self-identified as high-conflict disputes (scoring eight or higher out of ten). The others were classified as ‘mid-range’ conflict, with scores of between five and seven. We also interviewed 20 young people (nine girls and 11 boys, aged 9–19). We interviewed one or more children plus one or both of their parents in all but two cases, with 12 different families represented. Recruitment of parents and children was through contacts with FMC-accredited mediators or the FJYPB.

The post-separation child arrangements prior to engaging in the CIM process for the 12 family situations within our sample varied as summarized in Table AI.1.

Finally, in July 2021, we brought together an engaged research panel of 21 relationship and education professionals with one now-adult family justice campaigner to discuss the findings and next steps.

The HeaRT study: approach to analysis

The semi-structured interviews and focus groups were recorded, transcribed and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of thematic analysis and inductive approach in NVivo with a codebook per sample developed by Ewing. A blind double-coding process was employed to ensure consistency of the thematic approach, with two research team members coding one interview from each sample. We ran a coding comparison query in NVivo for each interview double coded. Any codes with a Kappa co-efficiency score of ≤0.75 (0.75 and over being considered ‘very good’, Fleiss et al, 2003) were discussed to agreement and codes refined before coding the remaining interviews to ensure inter-coder reliability and demonstrate the trustworthiness of the findings.

In line with the research objectives, we sought throughout to capture the experiences of CIM from the perspective of different actors, identify the benefits and risks of CIM as well as the barriers and facilitators to achieving engagement in the CIM process by parents and children. We present the findings in Chapters Two to Five inclusive.