Conference Agenda

The Gateway Access Plus (GAP) service, developed by North Tyneside Council in northern England, aims to address the health inequalities experienced by people with multiple, complex health and social needs – particularly those disengaged from healthcare services due to substance use, mental ill-health and homelessness. Delivered through a partnership model and funded via the NHS, the GAP service offers individualised support, holistic health planning and hardship funds to mitigate access barriers. This paper presents findings and reflections from an evaluation designed not only to understand the implementation and impact of the service, but to model participatory and trauma-informed research practices in contexts where traditional methods may reproduce harm or exclusion.

The evaluation design primarily involved semi-structured interviews with GAP clients, staff members and representatives of partner organisations, informed by insights from a series of lived experience workshops. Central to the methodology was a commitment to relational ethics, built through collaboration with people in recovery and frontline practitioners. The participatory workshops shaped ethical and practical decisions about how and when to engage individuals who may be in active addiction. Trauma-informed adaptations – such as practitioner-mediated recruitment, flexible consent and scaled-down sample sizes – were introduced to prioritise participant and researcher safety over data volume. These choices reflect a deliberate shift from extractive to caring research practice.

Findings highlight how the GAP service provides not only practical support but meaningful relational connection for people often isolated from both services and social networks. Gendered patterns in need illustrate the importance of intersectional, contextualised understanding of vulnerability. This paper argues for the centrality of ethical, participatory methods when working with structurally marginalised populations. Where people experience multiple disadvantage and associated stigma, co-produced and care-focused research approaches are vital for creating knowledge that is both impactful and just.

Background: Service providers offer trauma-informed care, and clergy provide informal and formal support to Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence (Nason-Clark et al., 2018). However, there is scarce research on how social workers, psychotherapists, managers of women's aid agencies (service providers), and Cameroonian and Nigerian clergy (clergy) collaborate to support African Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence in England.

Aim: One objective of this study was to explore how service providers and clergy collaborate to support these women, providing insights for practice, policy development, and research.

Method: The researcher employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2009) and conducted remote, semi-structured interviews with purposefully selected service providers (N = 9) and clergy (N = 9) in England. The data was collected between June 2020 and March 2021. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed.

Findings and discussion: Service providers and clergy reported a lack of collaboration and expressed a desire to collaborate to support these women. A collaboration guide was created to facilitate their collaboration.

Conclusion and implications: Service providers and clergy play a vital role in supporting African Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence. They need to collaborate to deliver comprehensive care to these women and the broader African Christian community. The study recommends that service providers and policymakers adopt an intersectional approach when addressing intimate partner violence within this community. Furthermore, future research should investigate how clergy and service providers can establish and sustain collaborative relationships.

References

Nason-Clark, N., Fisher-Townsend, B., Holtman, C., McMullin, S. (2018). Religion and Intimate Partner Violence: Understanding The Challenges and Proposing Solutions. New York, Oxford University Press.

Smith, J.A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London, Sage Publications Ltd.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) offers a powerful methodological framework for engaging with lived experience in its full complexity, especially when testimony extends beyond human voices to the symbolic meanings carried by objects.

This presentation discusses a study that employs IPA to explore the meanings of restored personal belongings of survivors of the October 7^th attack on Israel. Initially perceived as silent, everyday items such as chairs, photographs or musical instruments were transformed through a rehabilitative process of destruction and restoration into more than material remnants. Participants interpreted the rehabilitated objects as symbolic witnesses, telling stories of lost homes, fractured communities and enduring resilience. Research led by an IPA approach captures these layered meanings and illuminates how individuals make sense of trauma through their relationships with objects.

By treating objects as carriers of memory and meaning, the analysis demonstrates how objects become active participants in human experience, embodying personal, familial, community and cultural narratives. Metaphors, such as cracks, silence and resilience, provide participants with a language to express what resists direct articulation. Telling one's story through the stories of objects enabled participants to personify the abstract, render trauma tangible and project everyday life worlds into experiences of loss and trauma. For qualitative research, this highlights the importance of listening not only to what is said but also to the metaphors and silences through which meaning is constructed in relation to material objects.

Methodologically, the study foregrounds the double hermeneutic of IPA: participants interpret lived experience through the language of objects, while the researcher interprets that interpretation into a broader phenomenological account. This dual movement from idiographic attention to collective insight demonstrates how symbolic analysis of objects foregrounds how participants' narratives imbue the inanimate with voice and meaning and broaden epistemologies that prioritize human testimony alone.

This study explored the lived experiences of 3 women subjected to technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV), employing in-depth qualitative interviews and reflective thematic analysis. The themes that emerged included the forms of online abuse encountered, the impact on women’s psychological and social well-being, the coping strategies employed, and variables related to each abusive incident, such as the characteristics of the platform or the perpetrator’s relationship with the victim/survivor. Participants reported traumatic responses to the incidents, enduring emotional distress, hypervigilance, social isolation, emotions of fear and shame, and a profound erosion of trust in both digital environments and institutional support systems. Participant recruitment proved exceptionally challenging, reflecting the ethical, emotional, and contextual barriers that frequently refrain trauma survivors from participating in research. This presentation will critically reflect on these challenges emphasising the need for participant-led, flexible, and emotionally safe recruitment and interviewing practices. Establishing trust required prolonged engagement, transparency, and survivor control over disclosure depth and timing. On this basis, the empirical findings of the study will be discussed in relation to these methodological considerations, highlighting how participants' willingness to disclose sensitive experiences was shaped by their perceived control over the process and the researcher’s capacity to create a safe, empathetic space. The findings underscore the need for ethical, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered methodologies in qualitative research on TFSV. The presentation will conclude with methodological recommendations for future qualitative studies on TFSV. By integrating reflection on methodological issues with empirical insights, this study contributes to both the substantive and procedural understanding of researching TFSV.

Interpersonal violence in sport (including psychological, physical, sexual abuse, and neglect) has increasingly been recognized as a multifaceted social phenomenon with serious implications for athletes’ well-being. Although the concept of safe sport has gained international attention as an ethical and institutional imperative promoting respect, equity, and protection from violence, its implementation and related research continue to face significant challenges and remain inconsistent across cultural contexts.

This study situates the Greek experience within broader international efforts to advance transformative and culturally informed qualitative research. The presentation has two main aims: (1) to present findings from a qualitative study exploring the attitudes and perceptions of Greek sport administrators and coach educators regarding interpersonal violence and the promotion of safe sport, and (2) to discuss key methodological and ethical challenges arising from this work. Conducted within the larger multinational Erasmus+ project Culturally Informed Safe Sport Coach Education e-Toolbox (CICEE-T, 2022–2025), the study draws on ten semi-structured interviews analyzed thematically through a social constructionist lens.

Findings revealed diverse and often contradictory understandings of safe sport, accompanied by a frequent minimization of the phenomenon’s severity, conceptual ambiguity about what constitutes interpersonal violence, and limited awareness of safe sport principles. Participants often described incidents of violence as isolated or exceptional, disconnecting them from the systemic and cultural dynamics of sport. Narratives tended to individualize perpetrators and normalize unequal power relations, reflecting broader patriarchal and hierarchical structures. Organizational responsibility was frequently displaced onto external factors reinforcing a logic of responsibility avoidance.

In concluding this presentation, we discuss some of the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting qualitative research on interpersonal violence in sport. We also offer suggestions for future research that centers athletes’ voices and agency, emphasizing the importance of co-constructing knowledge that allow us to re-imagine sport organized in different, safer and more inclusive ways.