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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 337 items for :
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This book offers an empirically grounded qualitative analysis of the 2018 Swedish consent-based rape law, and its implementation by legal professional actors. The theoretical framework combines feminist jurisprudence and the sociology of emotions, contributing to the fields of law and emotions and feminist rape research. The study followed 18 rape cases through observations of trials in districts and appeals courts and interviews with the legal professionals. Modern law and its notion of the rule of law are founded on a patriarchal point of view, which becomes particularly evident in gendered crimes like rape. The results demonstrate how legal professionals’ conventional understanding and practice of the core legal values of rationality, autonomy and objectivity obstruct effective implementation of the law. Conventional practice aligns legal logics with male common sense or hissense. Emphasizing the mutuality of the sex act and the active party’s responsibility to ascertain voluntariness/consent, the 2018 rape law open to legitimate alignment between hersense and legal logics. The dominant pattern in the results was to overlook this potential, hence a failure to achieve the objectives of the law. A few cases did showcase changed practice. Based on these, the book suggests concrete adaptations of professional roles and their collaborative doing of justice. Changed practice would achieve a more fair and just trial procedure; benefit the development of the legal system in democratic society; and strengthen the core legal values.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-ND licence.
When deciding who to treat, those engaged in priority setting and resource allocation in health care need to comply with their obligations under the Equality Act 2010.
This book provides an in-depth examination of how anti-discrimination laws intersect with health care rationing in the UK. It critiques how existing legal frameworks apply to resource allocation, questioning whether and when utilitarian principles should be adjusted to incorporate anti-discrimination norms. The author offers detailed cases studies in the contexts of fertility treatment, public health, and intensive care, highlighting practical implications and real-world challenges.
This is a timely legal analysis, providing crucial policy insights in the wake of recent global health crises.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Although non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancers, diabetes, and heart diseases are preventable, they have risen dramatically over the last 30 years. This is in part due to increased international trade and foreign direct investment in the tobacco, alcohol and food industries.
As governments attempt to regulate these industries, this book raises important and timely questions about the relationship between public health and international trade and investment law.
Providing a clear and succinct analysis of the relevant trade and investment regimes and the obligations they impose, this book identifies the key principles that must be considered when formulating and implementing NCD prevention strategies that are both effective and able to withstand legal challenges.
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.
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.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
