Scrapbook interviewing and children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Abstract

Interviewing children about their physical activity (PA) experiences can be a challenging research undertaking. A new visual research method in qualitative research, scrapbook interviewing, was created to explore the PA experiences of children. Six children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder shared their PA stories in semi-structured interviews through the use of a PA scrapbook. A comparison of a consecutive and concurrent scrapbook interviewing techniques was performed between two groups of three children. The concurrent technique produced substantially more data than the consecutive technique to address problems of limited data to analyse when performing child-PA interviews. Since children in the concurrent technique expressed themselves at greater lengths, their PA voices emerged in a deeper and richer fashion. Preliminary findings suggested both groups spoke about similar PA experiences but differences in positive outcomes and planning were revealed. Challenges of using this new and exciting hybrid method in qualitative research methods are discussed.

Keywords:

• visual methods
• children
• stimulated recall
• stimulated reflection
• physical activity participation

Acknowledgements

William expresses thanks to Dr Bradley Young (School of Human Kinetics, University of Ottawa) for his suggestions related to this manuscript. This pilot project was funded through a standard research grant awarded by the Sport Canada – Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Sport Participation Research Initiative Program.

Notes

1. Readers are encouraged to consult (Harvey and Reid 2003) for a brief review about the challenges experienced by (a) clinicians in the identification, diagnoses and comorbidity of ADHD and (b) children with ADHD in PA.

2. Children may be identified with a movement problem but they are not always formally diagnosed by their medical doctor. This was also the case in this study. Readers are also referred to Harvey and Reid (2005) for a thorough discussion about the challenges of performing PA research with populations of people with ADHD.

3. The scrapbook method is not an attempt to develop ‘an exact reflection of life as lived’ or to uncover ‘the truth’ (Randall and Phoenix 2009). The technique is meant to assist children with ADHD to tell their PA stories.

4. The authors express their thanks to the reviewers for the valuable feedback on this manuscript. We have attempted to make our trustworthiness procedures transparent and not wade into the debate whether criteria should or should not exist in qualitative research as it may be deemed beyond the scope and purpose of this paper. We concur with the notions that (a) our project was driven by the research question, (b) qualitative research methods help to answer different questions than quantitative research methods and (c) the researcher’s positioning is important to clarify in the research process (Brustad 2009, Tenenbaum et al. 2009).