‘Violence is all he knew, and it seemed to work’: using the power threat meaning framework to explore prison officers’ understandings of violence in Irish prisons

The power threat meaning framework 5 years on − A scoping review of the emergent empirical literature

“…While most themes, sub-themes and codes contained a priori PTMF elements, the authors note some novel elements of particular relevance to this sample, including (1) the imposition/adoption of violent identities, (2) feeling hated, (3) a sense of normality in relation to adverse experiences, (4) identifying the positives out of adverse experiences, (5) feelings of tension and fearlessness as additional threat responses, (6) the use of violence as a learned survival strategy, ( 7) substance (ab)use as an exacerbating and ameliorating factor, and (8) self-belief and hope for the future as additional ameliorating factors. Gallagher et al (2024) applied the same methodology to a sample of prison officers working in the NVRU (n = 13), aiming instead to explore their understanding of the prisoners with whom they worked. The authors re-identified the same six themes, this time containing 39 sub-themes and 167 codes.…”

“…This is reflected in the variation between these approaches. For example, while most researchers conducted inductive analysis before deductive analysis, Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 conducted analysis in the opposite order. Some analytic results (Paradiso & Quinlan, 2021) were named according to the core components of the PTMF (e.g.…”

“…power, threat, meaning, response), while other themes appeared to have been developed from the broader ideas of the PTMF ( Jagasia et al, 2022). Studies also differed in what they considered to be core components of the PTMF, for example, with Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 including the function of threat response and moderating factors as distinct elements. While Devenney (2021aDevenney ( , 2021bDevenney ( , 2021c and Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 published the deductive PTMF codes they had developed a priori, others did not.…”

“…Studies also differed in what they considered to be core components of the PTMF, for example, with Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 including the function of threat response and moderating factors as distinct elements. While Devenney (2021aDevenney ( , 2021bDevenney ( , 2021c and Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 published the deductive PTMF codes they had developed a priori, others did not. Though most studies reported main themes and sub-themes (Leeming et al, 2022) some studies additionally reported overarching themes (Milligan, 2022), and some studies also reported the codes which made up their themes (Gallagher et al, 2023(Gallagher et al, , 2024.…”

“…While Devenney (2021aDevenney ( , 2021bDevenney ( , 2021c and Gallagher et al (2023Gallagher et al ( , 2024 published the deductive PTMF codes they had developed a priori, others did not. Though most studies reported main themes and sub-themes (Leeming et al, 2022) some studies additionally reported overarching themes (Milligan, 2022), and some studies also reported the codes which made up their themes (Gallagher et al, 2023(Gallagher et al, , 2024. The latter were also the only researchers to distinguish between a priori and novel PTMF elements in their results.…”