Noltes on:  Nkasi Stoll ,Yannick Yalipende, Jason Arday, Dominic Smithies, Nicola C. Byrom  Heidi Lempp  Stephani L. Hatch (2021)  Protocol for black student well-being study: a multi-site qualitative study on the mental health and well-being experiences of black UK university students  BMJ Open 2022;12:e051818. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2021-051818 Dave Harris [How to do a proper study. Useful to compare it with some of Arday's] They used a 'biographical narrative interpretive method', 'an interpretative phenomenological approach' to gain accounts of the participants own perspectives and language. They started data collection in October 20 and expect to complete collection and analysis by January 2022. The got ethical approval from KCl ethics subcommittee. Mental health and mental well-being university students is of increasing concern because young adults are vulnerable. HEI's are in the best position to provide prevention and intervention. HE is itself high risk — 'individuation, separation from family, increased autonomy and responsibility, academic -related stress, financial concerns, sleep disruption, balancing conflicting demands of studying with personal and family life, and exposure to risky behaviours including recreational drug use and alcohol bingeing' (2). Mental health problems are associated with disorders self-harm and suicide ideation and attempts. There are inequalities by race, gender, class and (dis) ability, revealed in student admissions experiences and outcomes. Black students with mental health problems are less likely to complete courses, achieve good degrees of progress to further education. OFS reports suggest that they are being failed throughout the cycle. There is limited data to explain how and why, although existing research points to 'racism, structural racism, discrimination, mental health stigma, sexism, cultural incompetence and insensitivity of health care professionals'. We need to know more about experiences and risk factors and challenges. CRT offers to explain and challenge racial inequality by seeing racism as normal practice. Race is socially constructed and used by white people to further their own interests leading to racial bias and discrimination in law employment housing healthcare politics in education. The educational context it leads to white supremacist patriarchal structures that have shaped education.  there are racial inequalities in 'admissions curriculum and pedagogy teaching and learning, institutional culture, compass racial climate, and policy and finance within UK further and higher education [refs here include general stuff on CRT, Warmington, Bhopal and article in Education, philosophy, and theory, Qualitative Enquiry, and Race, Ethnicity and Education — all worth looking up, but obviously all qualitative]. CRT is also a conceptual lens and will guide the direction of the current study 'by providing a framework to support the study team to interrogate the methodology, analyses and interpretation throughout the research process' [referencing Arday in Whiteness and Education 2018]. They particularly want to investigate transitions and turning points in biographies as students move through the cycle. They are going to use biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) and interpretative phenomenological approach (IPA) to get in depth understanding. [References to BNIM are provided by two pieces by Wengraf, one not very well referenced, some sort of guide. IPA is provided by a couple of qualitative research pieces by JA Smith, including two books and two articles]. They have 2 research questions in particular – what life events and experiences do black university students perceive as affecting their mental health? 'How does institutional and structural racism within UK education systems affect the mental health and well-being experiences and outcomes of black university students?' [How the funk will students be able to answer that from their own experiences?] They did BNIM interviews focusing on students own perspectives and choice of language then IPA insights into how students reported what affected their mental health [they must have added stuff about institutional and structural racism from CRT]. They set up a special webpage to monitor complaints and describe the study. They also described it on social media and then sent recruitment emails to student unions groups and student services. Interest forms were sent to a KCL student mailbox monitored twice a day. Participants were screened and then survivors contacted and asked to complete a consent form. There were two reminder emails. They used purposive sampling (3) and ended with 15 to 20 students from nine Russell and non-Russell group universities. They got data from HESA on enrolments by provider and ethnicity and used that to decide which universities to recruit from, focusing on providers with the highest and lowest percentage of black students and dividing the rest into quartiles, with three representatives in each. Two universities were in Ireland, one Scotland, seven in England. Of English universities, three were in London, one in the East Midlands, one of the south-east, one in the West Midlands and one in East of England, five were Russell group. Data from NSS said no significant differences in student satisfaction. Russell group universities are less likely to offer places to ethnic students however. They wanted to include students who self identified as black who were currently studying within the year of graduation dropping out, self identified as struggling with mental health, aged 18 or over. This provides a wide enough range for an IPA study. They excluded people who have never been enrolled, are enrolled at university outside of the UK, do not identify as black, graduated and dropped at the University a year ago, aged 17 or over [these exclusions are necessary because of their purposive sampling? They give no details of how they did this — usual black networks?]. Stoll [NS] did all the interviews. She adapted BNIM after consultation with the other authors. The approach involves open narrative interviews with the interviewer encouraged to participate, not be interrupted with questions. Students are asked a single question to describe their life — in effect to tell the researcher the story of the mental health experiences before and while studying at university, in a nice relaxed supportive way, including all the events and experiences that were personally important. The researcher says they were taking notes, especially of Wengraf's '"particular incident narratives"' [significant events] (3). In a break, the interview identifies further questions to pick up on these and students are asked to reflect back on them. Interviews last up to 2 hours and end with a request to talk about anything else. Two transcripts are derived. Interviews were virtual on Microsoft Teams and were recorded. All were transcribed by hand using speech to text transcript programs provided by Microsoft. A pilot study on 2 black university students was conducted. Some sort of intercoder reliability was conducted with the authors to see if they agreed that the study objectives were being achieved. No amendments were produced. NVivo was used for analysis, following 'an inductive analysis' for each account and then group analysis. Stoll seems to have done this making notes after multiple readings looking at language and structure emotional responses and '"codes'", 'insights into the student's experience and perspective on their world' (4). She looked for further patterns in these codes to create emerging themes '(ideas, thoughts, feelings, topics of importance or concern) presented by the student and interpreted by NS'. Themes will be linked and grouped to create subordinate themes and the final set will be summarised, arranged into clusters to produce master things. Quotations will be selected to illustrate each theme. There will be a final collation and examination by Stoll, focusing on thematic overlap and differences, and 'linked to existing psychological and sociological literature, concepts and theories' [including CRT, which 'the authors will be careful to apply… On the existing theoretical knowledge']. With IPA the participants are trying to make sense of their world and the researcher is trying to make sense of how they do this. The dialogue between researcher and participant is therefore 'a double hermeneutic', requiring 'constant self-awareness and reflexivity'.  [implications for earlier coding and NVivo?] This leads to a reflective diary by the main researcher about the interview experience. There is also a second coder, a black university student who coded 20% of the interviews 'for cross validation of the themes', and the authors themselves formed a 'multidisciplinary coding team' and discussed validation of the data. Luckily they all have extensive knowledge and experience [and all agree on the wonders of CRT]. NS evidently seem to chair the 'conversation circle'. It was audio recorded. Separate conversation circles were arranged for main and subordinate themes. Confidential data are kept for 10 years stored securely recordings are anonymized before using NVivo, and recordings destroyed after transcription. Full ethical approval has been granted by a nursing and midwifery research ethics subcommittee of KCL. Consent was obtained from all participants. All procedures were tested to confirm to general ethical procedures. Safety considerations were borne in mind including potential risks of disclosing distressing experiences. NS informed participants that she might have to break confidentiality if personal details were disclosed that were raised concerns about safety of self or others or serious crimes and if such disclosures occurred the interviewer stopped and a subsequent conversation was engaged in. If distress occurred, a break or cessation of the interview followed. Debriefing followed each interview together with the list of available support services.  There there will be an internal report in the form of a doctoral thesis and journal articles and conference presentations. They are seeking funding to deliver public engagement events and an anthology book, a collection of the participants stories in order to disseminate the findings more widely and contribute to the evidence base. This will be the first multisite UK study exploring from the perspectives of the university students themselves, using a particular qualitative approach they have worked hard on the multidisciplinary coding team. IPA seems appropriate and they are confident they can combine narrative enquiry with phenomenology and hermeneutics. This will also encourage black students to tell their own stories. Interpretation of the studies were adaptable and of limitations including the limitations of the sample: they are not concerned to generate generalisable theories, however with single samples and they would like to get mixed methods studies in the future, comparing multiple forms of marginalisation to include 'disabled; first-generation; carers and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer – identifying community (LGBT plus) black students' (5).