Gathering voices introduces the six participants who gifted their stories for this research, and explains how those stories came to be shared with me. It provides the background information necessary to place the participants’ comments into context and to assist understanding of their lived experiences. A sample of six is small in comparison with other qualitative approaches, but is usual and anticipated in an IPA study (Brocki and Wearden, 2006). Instead of a broad range of views, IPA seeks intensive, detailed accounts, providing a space for the individual voice of a participant to be heard (Smith and Osborn, 2008). For this IPA study, these contributions were gathered through a novel approach of conducting assisted questionnaires (Holt and Pamment, 2011), prior to semi-structured interviews. Semi-structured interviews are not the sole means of achieving accounts from participants, but they are the principal means of gathering data in IPA studies (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2014). They are also widely used by feminist researchers (Reinharz and Davidman, 1992; Roulston, 2010). In this IPA study, the feasibility and relevance of the interviews were enhanced by building upon the information gathered through the assisted questionnaire. This chapter therefore presents each participant individually, providing an outline of their situation as well as the content of their questionnaire, and an explanation as to how information was gathered through their interview. Each participant has been allocated a pseudonym, the name by which they are referred to here.

It would not have been possible to conduct this research without the contributions of the ISVAs, both from an ethical perspective and a practical one. All participants were accessing, or had recently accessed, ISVA services with the charity with whom I collaborated for this research. Rather than a blanket approach, each ISVA used their professional experience to determine when it was suitable to approach a client. In this way, we were seeking to minimise the potential impact that this might have on the clients’ accessing of services. Once clients had agreed to take part in the research then they completed an assisted questionnaire with their ISVA. (A copy of the questionnaire is provided in Appendix A). The questionnaire was designed to capture some case information about the participant, including the nature of the abuse, the outcome from any investigation, and any contact they have since had.