Why the Research Was Conducted
It is always beneficial to provide end-users with research that has some meaningful behaviours that they are familiar with. Providing results in meaningful terms for the people wanting to use them should be a priority in research. Behaviour Sequence Analysis (BSA) is by no means a new method; but, it is still relatively underused and can take some time to explain, especially if abstract examples are given. Therefore, if you are an academic wishing to work in more applied fields, or if you are in an applied field and attempting to pass a new method for analysing your datasets, it can often be useful to run a smaller study to outline how BSA can be useful in an area relevant to the one you are attempting to research. This was the underlying reason for the drinking alcohol and driving a vehicle research (Keatley, Barsky, & Clarke, 2017).
Police and legal documents are obviously not written in a way that immediately lends themselves to BSA. Most information is recorded via interviews or interrogations , and written statements and reports. This is wholly understandable, given the different focus, time restraints, and goals of legal professionals. The benefit of BSA, however, is that it can be applied to a variety of datasets. However, to more closely map the type of files related to illegal driving activities, it was important to mimic the type of information available to police, as closely as possible. Obviously, arresting people and bringing them in for interrogation was beyond the scope of the research process; though many studies do opt to use a faux scenario. The current study, however, attempted to gain confession style data that closely matched legal scenarios. Therefore, interviews were given to a number of individuals who had identified themselves as having previously consumed alcohol and driven a vehicle.
Research has shown that heuristics and rules-of-thumb like “two drinks are acceptable to still legally drink and drive” are not always accurate (Collins, Dickson, Eynon, Kniver, & Macleod, 2008; Rowe et al., 2016). Therefore, the current research focused on multiple alcoholic drinks individuals consumed and the effect on driving behaviours. The bigger picture of this research, however, was that an output would be provided that would be more meaningful to end-users, and clarify what happens in BSA research. Although drink driving was used in the current example, any form of police or legal interrogation data that is derived from verbal reports could be analysed using the same approach as outlined in this research. Furthermore, any written reports (diaries, case studies, patient/inmate records) could also be analysed in a similar approach to the current research. In short: if the data is in the form of qualitative accounts of episodes in individuals’ life histories, then this chapter will outline how to take those paragraphs or pages of written accounts and turn them into BSA research.
Collecting Qualitative Interview Data
To make the data collected in the current study more similar to police investigations, participants were interviewed regarding their drink driving behaviour, resulting in statements similar to those police might obtain. For obvious ethical reasons, participants were not asked to drink and drive, or pretend/imagine that they had. Instead, purposive sampling was used to select only those participants who had a history of consuming alcoholic drinks and then driving a vehicle, while under the influence of alcohol. A limitation was obviously the fact that memory may have distorted or affected their accounts; however, as a proxy for police reports, this was consid...