Stephanie Crisp

Working Title of PhD: Reconceptualising Trauma Informed Practice Through Service Blueprinting: Exploring a Practice Perspective on Youth Justice

Year commenced PhD study: 2018 Institution/Organisation: University of Stirling

Funding Source: ESRC Full or part-time: Full time

PhD Supervisors: Dr Richard Simmons and Dr Paul Rigby (University of Stirling)

Synopsis of PhD 

Stephanie has a professional background in Community Safety, where she developed interests in Child Criminal Exploitation, transitions from juvenile to adult justice services, multi-agency working and trauma-informed practice (TIP). Her research explores the recent and rapid growth of interest in TIP in the youth justice arena.

Children in contact with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high levels of trauma in their backgrounds. TIP potentially has the capacity to challenge prevailing ‘ideal victim’ discourses by engaging with people’s histories of trauma and with the unequal distribution of its effects, as it intersects with historical and cultural factors, gender, race, sexuality and age. Instead, implementation tends to focus on individuals, through screening for trauma, specialist, medicalised models of intervention, seeking to change individuals’ behaviours, and the training of frontline staff. Furthermore, despite the emphasis within TIP literature, on designing trauma-informed services, there is little overlap between TIP and service design scholarship.

This PhD explores the potential of using service design methods, particularly Service Blueprinting (SB)(Shostack 1982, Kimbell 2013, Radnor et al 2014), to re-frame TIP. SB is a visual tool which can be used to map all elements of a service and the relationships between them, thus accommodating diverse perspectives within the same blueprint, and revealing dimensions of service delivery that are not usually seen. By pairing SB with social practice theories (Hui, Schatzki and Shove 2016) Stephanie hopes to foreground the emotional and socio-material dimensions often overlooked in narrowly rational and individualistic approaches to service design, thereby opening up new ways of envisioning and delivering services.

Keywords
Public Service Design, Trauma Informed Practice, Youth Justice, Child Criminal Exploitation