Participant observation in a secure unit: Care, conflict and control

Abstract

A participant observation study was carried out at a secure (forensic) unit called Delphi. This unit was one of several set up throughout Britain following the Report of the Butler Committee1. This particular unit announced in a series of statements that it now functioned as a therapeutic community of the kind described by Rapaport2. Given that conflict had always attended the relative weighting of custody and care within psychiatric institutions, it was decided to examine the veracity of their claim. It was anticipated that such a therapeutic undertaking would induce struggle and conflict among the staff. A feature of this study is its entrée strategy and style of observations: these were designed to minimise subjects' perceptions of the vigour of the research as well as to attain as uncontaminated a picture of the unit as possible. The ethics of this strategy are reviewed. Observational data were supported by interviews plus a small panel of independent verifiers. Consistent with ethnographic studies generally, results are presented as verbal statements of the participants. The discussion identifies some problems associated with qualitative research generally and suggests that further studies in this area be more specific and systematic.