Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus Online
This is an archive of transcriptions
of the examination of witnesses at a child protection inquiry after an
8-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast, Victoria Climbié, was murdered by
her great aunt and her partner in February 2000.
Visit the Inquiry Website
Background
The Climbie inquiry was held in public in London from September 2001 to July 2002 and a report (Laming 2003) was presented to the Government in January 2003.
There is detailed testimony about professional practice,
decisionmaking, inter-agency working, the context of service delivery
and policy-making across all agencies.
Witnesses were questioned about the day-to-day contact with Victoria
and her great aunt but also policy and practice more generally.
A previous project at the University of Huddersfield undertook work coding and annotating the witness statements from the Inquiry in such a way that users can search for topics across the entire verbal evidence. The examination of witnesses provides a large and complex body of data about the state of child protection services in the late 1990s.
Project aims
This project proposes to take this large, analysed data set (currently in the form of an Atlas.ti project) and make it available via the University repository.
This data is of central interest to researchers in child welfare, professional and legal studies, public administration and politics as well as teachers and students of a range of subjects, such as health care and social work, who deal with child welfare and to professionals needing to develop management and administrative skills in child welfare.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
- This
project will develop a number of ‘snapshots’ of the data set that can
be used by students in projects and studies about child protection.
- It
will develop style sheets that reflect the kinds of educational use
identified in the Delphi exercise with teachers and trainers.
- The
project team intend to publish a paper on the appropriateness of the
work on the Climbié corpus to other public inquiry archives and
recommendations for the design of such developments in the University’s
peer reviewed, open access journal.
- A key task of the project will be to evaluate the learning resources and the possible uses of the Corpus
Lead site: University of Huddersfield
Download Final Report (PDF)
Download Project Plan (PDF)