A new methodology linking interactional and experiential approaches, and involving young people as co-analysts of mental health encounters.

想象一下，你是一名研究青少年心理健康的研究人员。你知道，青春期和成年期早期是干预措施的关键时期，以防止心理健康问题持续到成年。你想知道为什么相当多的年轻人不参与心理健康干预和服务，或者没有从心理健康干预和服务中受益。你可能想要使用定性的方法，因为它们通常更适合于捕捉含义、背景和复杂性。如果您对年轻人与服务的交互有时会出错感到好奇，这将是一个很好的方法。你可以记录下年轻人与专业人士会面时发生的事情。你可以用一种“互动”的方法来分析这些对话。它关注的是特定的社交互动是如何展开的--谁说了什么，以及这会导致什么？但你将缺乏关于你所记录的会议的重要背景信息。例如，你不会知道这些事件如何与年轻人试图寻求帮助的更广泛的故事相适应，或者年轻人对你刚刚观察到的事件的感受。相反，你可以采访年轻人，了解他们的背景，以及他们对寻求帮助的感受--对他们来说是什么感觉？你可以用现象学的方法来分析这些采访。它关注的是人们如何理解他们的经历。但这样你就不能非常准确地知道专业人士应该做什么不同的事情，因为你没有观察到它。我们在这个项目中建议开发的方法有两个重要的新特征。第一个特点是，我们将把这些方法与上述方法结合起来，以便表明，当我们结合年轻人的心理健康需求来审查他们寻求帮助时发生了什么，以及他们对此的想法和感受时，如何能够对年轻人的经历进行更有力和更有洞察力的分析。这可能看起来很明显，但这两种方法很少--如果曾经--结合在一起的，而且没有方法学框架可供研究人员帮助他们思考如何结合这两种方法。我们将做到这一点，然后展示其他人如何做到这一点。我们提议的新方法的第二个特点也同样重要。如果你是一名准备新项目的研究人员，我们希望你也会考虑如何让年轻人参与计划、实施、评估和分享该项目。你会发现，关于这种协作背后的一般原则，有很多可用的指导。但没有任何指导(发表的例子也很少)可以帮助你让年轻人参与分析和解释数据。这是研究人员决定他们发现了什么以及它意味着什么的阶段，所以这是非常重要的。我们在之前的工作中发现，在与年轻人谈论视频数据的过程中，如果有适当的准备和支持，年轻人将贡献非常重要的分析见解。我们已经证明，这种共同分析的原则对年轻人来说是可以接受的，对研究人员来说是可行的，并产生了有价值的研究。我们希望对此进行扩展和发展，以满足青年心理健康研究界的需求。通过将其他数据来源(访谈)纳入这一进程，并展示年轻人如何参与一种以上形式的分析(现象学和互动性)，我们将制定一种其他研究人员可以使用的方法，以便他们也能够与年轻人共同分析数据，并受益于年轻人的专业知识。这些方法的发展将对青年心理健康研究领域产生革命性的影响，使定性研究人员能够更全面地了解年轻人的经历，并与年轻人一起更公平地工作。

Imagine that you are a researcher working on youth mental health. You know that adolescence and early adulthood are a critical period for intervention to prevent mental health problems continuing into adulthood. You want to understand why a substantial number of young people don't engage with, or don't benefit from, mental health interventions and services. You might want to use 'qualitative' methods, because they are often better suited to capturing meaning, context and complexity. If you were curious about how interactions with services can sometimes go wrong for young people, this would be a good approach. You could record what happens when young people do meet with professionals. You could analyse those conversations using an 'interactional' method. This focuses on how a particular social interaction unfolds - who says what, and where does that lead? But you would be lacking important contextual information about the meetings you recorded. For example, you wouldn't know how these events fitted into the broader story of the young person's attempts to get help, or how the young person felt about the event that you had just observed. You could interview the young person instead, to find out about this context, and how they were feeling about their attempts to get help - what was it like for them? You could analyse these interviews using a 'phenomenological' method. This focuses on how people make sense of their experiences. But then you wouldn't be able to be very precise about what professionals should do differently, because you hadn't observed it. There are two important and new features to the methodology which we propose to develop in this project. The first of those features is that we will combine these the approaches above, in order to show how a more powerful and insightful analysis of young people's experiences can be developed when we examine both what happens to young people when they seek help, and what they think and feel about that, in the context of their mental health needs. This may seem obvious, but these two methods are rarely - if ever - combined, and there is no methodological framework available for researchers to help them to think about how to combine them. We will do this, and then show how it can be done by others.The second feature of our proposed new methodology is equally important. If you were a researcher preparing a new project, we hope that you would also be thinking about how to involve young people in planning, conducting, evaluating and sharing that project. You would find that there is plentiful guidance available about the general principles underlying this kind of collaboration. But there is no guidance (and there are very few published examples) which would help you to involve young people in analysing and interpreting data. This is the stage where researchers decide what they have found, and what it means, so it is very important.We have found in our previous work, talking with young people about video data, that with appropriate preparation and support, young people will contribute very important analytic insights. We have shown already that the principles of this co-analysis are acceptable to young people, feasible for researchers, and produce valuable research. We want to expand on this and develop it, to meet the needs of the youth mental health research community. By bringing other data sources (interviews) into the process, and showing how young people can engage with more than one form of analysis (phenomenological and interactional), we will develop a methodology that other researchers can use, in order that they can also co-analyse data with young people, and benefit from young people's expertise. These methodological developments will be transformative for the field of youth mental health research, enabling qualitative researchers to capture a much fuller picture of young people's experiences, and to work much more equitably alongside young people.