Vignettes are hypothetical but ‘typical’ cases, intended to provide a discursive ‘safe space’ for workers to explore what happens in practice in such cases. The vignettes were constructed to probe at the ‘boundaries’ and dilemmas of responses where possible, and were based on extensive prior qualitative and quantitative research in this field (for example, Fitzpatrick et al, 2013; Bramley et al, 2015).
By placing the person, rather than the services, at the heart of the analysis, vignette analysis is also intended to bring a whole system and its interactions into focus. By and large the participants in the focus groups found the vignette cases recognisable and relevant to their practice, and commented extensively on how such cases would typically be responded to by services37
