Sharing Stories, Building Bridges, Moving Mountains: An Action-Oriented Inquiry with Children of Incarcerated Parents
Date
2020-04-30
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Most people rarely think about children of incarcerated parents (COIPs) and when they do, these children are usually dismissed as not worth the effort. However, in Canada there are likely more than 400,000 children affected by parental incarceration. This became apparent to me when I was working with women recently out of prison, most of them mothers, who mentioned the hardest part of their experience was being separated from their children and the lack of support. There is a body of predominantly quantitative research that tells a bleak story of how COIPs are destined to have trouble in school, misuse substances, be gang involved, have contact with the justice system, and likely be incarcerated themselves. I was curious about a different, and less problem-saturated, life story that COIPs might tell. In this research I invited seven adult COIPs to share their experiences in a collaborative relationship that would privilege strength and resilience with the hope that we could turn toward some type of advocacy through action-oriented practices. Informed by Collaborative Therapy and Allan Wade’s Response-Based Practice, and the ethical guideposts of Vikki Reynolds, I joined participants in creating safe spaces for their stories to emerge. The research design unfolded in three stages. Stage I included two individual interviews and a focus group: Seven participants engaged in at least one interview, five completed a second interview, and four joined together for the focus group. The four participants who agreed to join the focus group chose to engage in discussion around ways to engage in advocacy for COIPs. Consequently, Stage II consisted of 10 group meetings that culminated in the planning and filming for a documentary. Stage III became the editing processes with the eventual release of the documentary Bonds that Hurt; Bonds that Heal to the public. This is the story of our journey.
Description
Keywords
Dialogical, Narrative, Children of Incarcerated parents, Action Oriented Research, Participatory, Visual Data
Citation
Pickering, B. J. (2020). Sharing Stories, Building Bridges, Moving Mountains: An Action-Oriented Inquiry with Children of Incarcerated Parents (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.