De Viggiani, N., Daykin, N., Moriarty, Y. and Pilkington, P. and ...

participant to self-harm, harm another named person, pose a threat to security, or signal any other
breach of the site’s rules. As stated, the decision to exclude an individual from the project on
account of risks they may have posed to safety or security was at the discretion of gatekeepers.
Project team members (musicians and researchers) all had previous experience of working with
prisoners or vulnerable individuals. Additionally, as stated, they had undertaken appropriate
security training before commencement of the project. A requirement within all the participating
sites was that music sessions and research interventions were supervised by appropriate site staff
or guardians. Project team members were accompanied at all times when in the presence of
project participants. This also meant that confidential one-to-one interviewing had to be conducted
in locations which guaranteed privacy but that were accessible and visible to security staff. In no
instances were researchers or musicians alone with research participants. Where data collection
was undertaken within the community, this was carried out in a public place and the respective
researcher was required to provide their location and to report in to the research team by mobile
phone pre- and post- data collection.
5.4 RECRUITMENT
Through communication with site gatekeepers, young people were then recruited to the project;
the key challenge was to convey to potential participants that they would be volunteering not only
for a programme of creative music workshops, but, more importantly, committing themselves to a
research study over a longer period of time. The research design therefore had to dovetail
effectively with the music programme. It was important to convey unambiguously to gatekeepers,
potential participants and musicians that the project would be conducted primarily for research
purposes, with the music programme embedded within the design. However, we anticipated that
participants and site staff would naturally perceive the research as somewhat peripheral to the
music programme. Conveying the project as primarily a research exercise could, furthermore,
dissuade individuals from willingly volunteering, yet it was essential that recruits volunteered fully
informed and without coercion. Conversely, such populations may not automatically recognise the
value and attraction of a participatory arts programme, and, for this reason, may be reluctant to
volunteer. By necessity, therefore, recruitment was restricted to a convenience sample of
volunteers. It was, moreover, dependent upon successful marketing of the music programme to
draw volunteers, and upon its credibility to the population and to institutional gatekeepers.
A further challenge to recruitment relates to the nature of the different research settings, where
participants were required to conform to compulsory regimes, sentences or programmes, making
recruitment on a purely voluntary basis unusual. Research within custody settings is also difficult
give the highly transient and potentially volatile, suspicious or vulnerable populations. In this
regard, different establishments’ security constraints and risk management requirements meant
recruitment numbers had to be limited to a maximum of ten per programme; in some cases, this
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