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How not to talk about it: Using digital storytelling with children with anxiety

This paper explores the benefits and challenges of using digital storytelling (DST) in mental health research with children. By using DST to centre children's experiences, the study empathetically deepens our understanding of children's complex mental health issues. DST involves a gradual process that fosters safe self-expression and imaginative storytelling. The DST process can help convey difficult or stressful stories coherently and creatively to support both researchers and participants in understanding mental health issues. However, a narrow focus on neat endings and resolutions may limit authentic expression, indicating a need for more open-ended narrative structures to capture the complexities of children's mental health experiences.This is a story about three stories. This is also a story about the discoveries and challenges of working alongside children (ages 10–13) as they used digital storytelling to share their anxiety experiences through short self-made videos. Our journey began with two questions: How would children portray their anxiety through digital storytelling? What aspects of the digital storytelling process would be the most fruitful for both participants and researchers, and why? In this paper, we weave three of the children's stories within our own narrative of using digital storytelling as a research tool to better understand children's experiences of anxiety. Rather than present the children's stories as the results of our research, we use their stories as springboards for articulating and interrogating digital storytelling as a tool for understanding anxiety. We intertwine the first-person accounts of each child with our academic prose, deliberately highlighting the different ways of knowing that our approach enables.

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How do you solve a problem like COREQ? A critique of Tong et al.’s (2007) Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research

In this paper, we argue that COREQ – the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (Tong et al., 2007) – is a problem, and a problem in need of a solution. COREQ is not just a problem because – as Buus and Perron (2020) argued – there are important questions about the credibility of the development of the checklist. COREQ is a problem because some in the (qualitative) research community treat it as generic and universally applicable, and maintain that the use of COREQ by authors and evaluators will result in better – more transparent and complete – reporting. But, as we will show, COREQ is far from generic, and its use can contribute to methodologically incongruent reporting. We develop our argument that the use of COREQ should be confined to the reporting and evaluation of what we term ‘small q’ qualitative research, by critically discussing the definition of qualitative research in COREQ, the conflation of reflexivity and bias, and the presumed universality of saturation, certain analytic practices and outputs, and participant validation. However, even demarcating a limited frame of ‘qualitative’ for the application of COREQ doesn't eliminate all the problems. We contend that COREQ needs extensive refinement to ensure it promotes more transparent and complete reporting, especially when used by less experienced researchers and evaluators. In the absence of such revision, we invite journal editors to consider whether the flaws in COREQ render it untrustworthy as a reporting quality tool. Going forward, we suggest research values, rather than consolidation or consensus, offer a sounder foundation for developing assessment tools for reporting quality.

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A critical and interpretive synthesis of arts-based methods used by dance therapy researchers: A perspective from the creative arts therapies

The creative arts therapies are a group of modality specific disciplines that include dance, music, drama and art. Creative arts therapists take an arts-based approach to practice which often results in the privileging of alternate ways of knowing, such as non-verbal, artistic, and embodied forms of expression and meaning-making. The rising interest in arts-based research in our field, as well as within psychology, has prompted us – a dance therapist and music therapist - to take a closer look at the research literature to ascertain the function and purpose of existing arts-based research approaches in the creative arts therapies. Using dance therapy as an example, we conducted a rigorous interpretive review of 12 dance therapy arts-based research articles to help answer the question - ‘what is the function and purpose of arts-based research in dance therapy?‘. As part of our review, we used an arts-based process to synthesise data and to strengthen our analytic process in a manner congruent with artistic ‘ways of knowing.’ Our exploration led us to recognise that arts-based processes appear to enable the ‘illustration’ and ‘illumination’ of novel understanding in ways that are often more difficult to arrive at when using other qualitative research methods. Furthermore, arts-based research can be useful for facilitating researcher reflexivity, which may be used in service of deepening the interpretive process in qualitative research. However, our involvement with the dance therapy publications also revealed a clear shortcoming for the field: at present there appears to be a clear lack of focus on direct client engagement in the arts-based research literature. As such, arts-based research in the field of dance therapy seems to be somewhat removed from professional practice and appears to instead fulfil a more scholarly or self-reflective purpose. Based on this discovery, we offer some recommendations for those interested in pursuing arts-based research within both psychology as well as creative arts therapies, and in doing so highlight the importance of client voice and experience in health-focused research.

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