Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Stigma has long been a central concern for social scientists studying health and illness. Yet, in existing work, stigma often escapes definition and clarification, is treated as universal and constant, and becomes a vague catch-all term for a range of conditions and situations.
This book initiates a process of recalibrating the conceptualisation of stigma. The book features original analyses from early- and mid-career scholars focusing on diverse issues, including mental health, racism, sex, HIV, reproduction, obesity, eating disorders, self-harm, exercise, drug use, COVID-19 and disability.
This ambitious book offers new perspectives to stimulate and intensify conversations around stigma, and highlights the valuable contributions of sociological approaches to the study of health and illness.
Available open access digitally under CC BY NC ND licence.
Preventing Violence argues that we can move towards safer and better societies by advancing holistic public health approaches to violence prevention.
It explores the serious limitations of contemporary public health approaches and proposes an alternative path forward. Based on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded project, Public Health, Youth and Violence Reduction, it also examines in-depth the work of 20 Violence Reduction Units in England and Wales.
The book makes clear recommendations for policy makers, practitioners and researchers working to prevent violence and improve the lives of children and young people.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Older adults’ civic engagement has become a key concern in academic and policy debates in recent years. However, existing studies on this topic remain fragmented across various conceptual and methodological approaches.
This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and multidimensional perspective on older adults’ civic engagement. It proposes a conceptual framework which understands civic engagement as a multidimensional concept encompassing a diversity of activities through which older adults contribute to their communities and wider society. Contributors explore the factors shaping older adults’ participation in various civic activities across the life course, considering their diversity in terms of social locations such as gender, health status, migrant background, socioeconomic background and residential arrangements.
By analysing past and current research, policy and practice, the book offers recommendations for future efforts to advance the field.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Health inequality has reached a crisis point. Your income or hometown can have a devastating impact on how well and how long you live. This injustice, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, continues as the cost of living rises and other sources of inequity grow. What can be done to make things better?
This book, written by the authors behind the award-winning The Unequal Pandemic, explores successful international case studies of governments reducing health inequalities – from the USA and Brazil to Germany and England – stretching over fifty years from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Essential reading for students and scholars of public health and the social sciences, and for health and social care professionals and policy makers, this book demonstrates that reducing health inequalities is possible and provides a roadmap for today’s governments to follow.
Vulnerability theory offers an alternative to social-contract and rights-based paradigms. Beginning with the corporeal body, the theory argues we are inevitably and constantly dependent on social institutions that are generated (and ideally monitored) through law. Accordingly, vulnerability theory argues for a state attentive to the needs of the universally ‘vulnerable subject’.
Based on lectures at Trinity College Dublin that focused on four foundational concepts, this book highlights how vulnerability theory differs from individualistic liberal frameworks.
Calling for a reorientation of law toward a collective responsibility-based approach, it is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social justice, and sociolegal scholarship.
As populations age around the world, there is an urgent need to address the inadequate and unequal provision of care and support to older and disabled people.
This book represents the first collective effort to use the concept of care poverty to analyse unmet needs and inequalities in care at an international level and from a social policy perspective. It presents pioneering empirical studies and novel theoretical and methodological approaches to unmet needs and care poverty.
This volume points the way forward for international care research and, in particular, for the growing field of research on inadequate care and support.
Following the highly respected first volume, this book continues to provide a holistic view of Julio Boltvinik’s vast and important work on poverty conceptualisation and measurement. While the previous book introduced the author’s widely adopted Integrated Poverty Measurement Method (IPMM), this new volume outlines his Marxian approach to poverty and human flourishing, focusing on what he conceptualises as human poverty.
Bringing together 20 years of research, this interdisciplinary book provides an alternative to Sen’s Capability approach and details its internal consistency, solid foundations and promising perspectives for applicability.
This book traces the origins of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the broader context of universalism since the beginning of the 20th century.
UHC aims to improve access to essential health services, provide financial protection and overcome health care inequities.
Drawing on rich first-hand data, including expert interviews and archival research, this book adopts a historical-sociological methodology to analyse some of UHC’s key political dynamics: consensus, conflicts, negotiations and struggles. It reveals that UHC is the result of a unique conjoining of movements in health, debates on human rights and concerns with development in a particular world context across the global North and global South.
In a world facing multiple intersecting crises, the push for healthier, more resilient societies has never been more urgent. This timely book reveals how empowered and organised communities can lead this change. It offers policy makers, academics and activists research-driven insights, decolonial perspectives and real-world examples of organising and collective actions from across the global North and South.
By centring on the power of community development, participation and social movements, the book delivers actionable frameworks to tackle inequality and advance the right to health, making it an essential resource for anyone committed to health justice and for building equitable and sustainable health systems worldwide.
The recovery movement has gained significant traction in both the mental health and addictions field in the last 20 years, as a strengths-based approach to building long-term wellbeing. From this transition has come a need for process and outcome measures that are strengths-based and that has resulted in the development initially of the concept of recovery capital and more recently, the operationalisation and quantification of this approach.
This book provides a clear and accessible history of the development of this concept, and then looks at how the concept has been operationalised and used for a range of purposes. The first main theme is around the conceptual origins of the term and its relationship to strengths-based approaches to addressing behavioural health issues. The second is around the idea that recovery, previously regarded as a subjective concept hard to quantify and capture, can be operationalised effectively through the concept of recovery capital. The third core theme will be the progress to date in mapping and measuring recovery capital – reviewing the multiple scales that have been developed and published in this area and the underlying evidence base for each of these. The final section will review the impact this has had on the field in terms of changing practice and improving the quality of services that are available to people at different stages of their recovery journey.
The core aim of the book is to bring all of the existing evidence on recovery capital measurement and its application together, and to become the definitive and ‘go to’ book on this topic for researchers, policy makers, practitioners and people in recovery.
