Vulnerability and involvement in drug use and ... - Sex Work Europe

u n d e rtaken by the first and second authors of this re p o rt and conducted between April
2001 and May 2002.
The structured questionnaire comprised both common measures included by other projects
on the Vulnerable Groups and Problematic Drug Use Research Programme and measures
specific to the Vulnerability and Involvement in Drug Use and Sex Work study. Four main
areas were covered in the questionnaire: (i) drug use; (ii) sex work; (iii) use of services; and
(iv) offending and involvement in the criminal justice system (see Appendix D). A pilot
version of the questionnaire was prepared prior to fieldwork and refined early on in this
phase of the study. The qualitative interview covered five main areas: (i) routes into drug use
and sex work; (ii) links between drug use and sex work; (iii) lifestyles associated with drug
use and sex work; (iv) use and experience of services (including criminal justice services);
and (v) exiting from drug use and sex work (where applicable).
The interview as a whole sought to yield both quantitative data and depth qualitative data.
Quantitative data were obtained from participants’ responses to both closed and open-
ended items on the stru c t u red questionnaire. Responses to open-ended questions were
subject to content analysis and thereby transformed into quantitative data. Qualitative data
w e re gathered by means of depth interviewing. The re s e a rchers aimed to elicit detailed
accounts of participants’ experiences using open-ended questions, supplementary
questions and prompts as appropriate. Interview guides were used to check re s e a rc h e r s ’
lines of enquiry such that they sought broadly comparable information from each
p a rticipant. However, interviews were sufficiently flexible to allow data collection to flow
inductively thro u g h o u t .
Data collected for this study were further complemented by data that had previously been
collected for three other Home Office funded studies:
● ‘Selling sex in the city: An evaluation of a targeted arrest referral scheme for sex
workers in Kings Cross’ (2001);
● ‘For Love or Money: Pimping and the management of sex work’ (2000); and
● ‘Street Business: The links between sex and drug markets’ (1999).
These three studies were conducted between 1998 and 2001 by re s e a rchers from the
Criminal Policy Research Unit at South Bank University, London. They yielded 158
interviews with sex workers. Their datasets were merged and new analyses conducted.
Method
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