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

Professor Secker, we decided to remove questions 2 and 3 altogether and rephrase question 9 from
‘I have felt that some people look down on me because of my mental health needs’ to ‘I have felt
that some people look down on me because of my criminal record’. This slight alteration has
implications on the overall reliability of the tool; however, the changes were deemed necessary to
allow for further feasibility testing. As such, the tool used for this study consisted of 14 items in
total.
We selected these measures with two primary objectives. Firstly, we identified four wellestablished
questionnaires commonly used to score health, wellbeing, mental health and social
inclusion, which have high external validity when used with the general adult population. However,
given the age, social status and circumstances of our study population, we anticipated that these
tools would have questionable validity; we therefore proposed to undertake a feasibility study
using these measures, to establish whether they were appropriate for measuring health, wellbeing
and social inclusion with this population of potentially vulnerable and volatile young people. This
could then inform future research on the efficacy of arts interventions within youth justice
settings. 3 Secondly, these questionnaires were used to provide baseline data on self-reported
health and wellbeing for each of the participants, summarised at programme and site level. Where
feasible, outcomes were measured at three time intervals to discover whether, for certain
individuals, there was any ‘direction of travel’ consistent with qualitative findings. We were
primarily interested in individuals’ outcomes and what, if anything, could be inferred from these. It
may also have been possible to extrapolate outcomes for specific programme groups (‘case
studies’), although such data would likely be unreliable as a form of quantitative evidence.
One concern we had with using these measures was that participants might find it difficult to
complete the questionnaires, for a range of reasons, and would therefore require significant oneto-one
support. For this reason, we ensured that each individual was supported by a researcher
while they completed the questionnaires. We anticipated that the wording of questions could be
difficult to interpret, that some questions could be inappropriate for younger participants or for
participants in custody settings, and that the number of questions across the four tools would be
onerous. We intentionally selected four questionnaires that were relatively short, and which all
used a Likert scale.
The questionnaires were arranged into a single pack, each pack labelled with the respective
participant’s anonymised alpha-numeric code. Each participant was then presented with this single
pack which was always prepared in the same way for each data collection episode. The pack
comprised the following items in this order: consent from, a biographical data entry sheet, the
WEMWBS, the SIS, GHQ-12, the CORE. This order was selected in an effort to make the pack
accessible and to enable straightforward completion.
3 Since we began the research, new scores have emerged for measuring mental health, wellbeing and social inclusion.
At the time of the fieldwork, the Social Inclusion Score was the only tool available for measuring social inclusion within
arts contexts. The CORE-OM has since been supplemented with the CORE-YP for use with young people.
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