Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete 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
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license.
The perpetuation of poverty across generations damages lives. It weakens social cohesion and the economy and undermines environmental sustainability. This book examines why poverty is carried on from one generation to the next and what needs to be done to eradicate it.
This book draws on a wide variety of sources and academic disciplines (social sciences, economics, law, community development, neuroscience and developmental psychology) along with the lived experience of people in poverty. Challenging the myths and prejudices about poverty that hinder progress, it calls for a comprehensive approach based on ensuring real equality of opportunity for all. It stresses the need to intervene early to combat child poverty and break the vicious cycles that perpetuate poverty and disadvantage.
International migration is a life-changing process, but do the migrants and their families fare economically better than those who stayed behind?
Drawing on the largest database available on labour migration to Europe, this book seeks to shed light upon this question through an exploration of poverty outcomes for three generations of settler migrants spanning multiple European destinations, as compared with their returnee and stayer counterparts living in Turkey.
As well as documenting generational trends, it investigates the transmission of poverty onto the younger generations. With its unique multi-site and intergenerational perspective, the book provides a rare insight into the economic consequences of international migration for migrants and their descendants.
Money was already tight for UK families living on a low income before the COVID-19 pandemic, but national lockdowns made life much harder.
Telling the stories of these families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic for families who were already in poverty before COVID-19, as well as those pushed into poverty by the economic fallout it created.
Drawing on the Covid Realities research programme, and developed in partnership with parents and carers, it explores experiences of home-schooling, social security receipt and government, community and charitable support. This book sets out all that is wrong with the status quo, while also offering a powerful agenda for change.
Also see ‘COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life during the Pandemic’ (Open Access) to find out more about the challenges of carrying out research during COVID-19.
In the past, youth has been seen as a transition into the labour market, but today young people’s identities are increasingly wrapped up in their value as workers.
In this book, young people describe the meaning of work in their own words. Drawing on these narratives, the author reveals how their identities are intertwined with the dynamics of labour and value in post-Fordist capitalism and how social inequalities are manifested through the practices and ethics that young people draw upon to cultivate an economically productive self.
Illuminating the rapidly changing social conditions that mould youth identities, this book represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of youth and work.
Child poverty is rising across affluent Western societies; how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses.
Seeking to redress this problem, Treanor places children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and to forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. What matters most in how poverty shapes children’s wellbeing and development? How can data inform social policy and practice approaches to improving the outcomes for poorer children?
Using life course analysis from the Young Lives study of 12,000 children growing up in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam over the past 15 years, this book draws on evidence on two cohorts of children, from 1 to 15 and from 8 to 22. It examines how poverty affects children’s development in low and middle income countries, and how policy has been used to improve their lives, then goes on to show when key developmental differences occur. It uses new evidence to develop a framework of what matters most and when and outlines effective policy approaches to inform the no-one left behind Sustainable Development Goal agenda.
Child poverty is a central and present part of global life, with hundreds of millions of children around the world enduring tremendous suffering and deprivation of their most basic needs. Despite its long history, research on poverty and development has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty. With a preface from Sir Richard Jolly, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, it examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents regional and national level portraits of child poverty around the world, in rich, middle income and poor countries. The book’s ultimate objective is to promote and influence policy, action and the research agenda to address one of the world’s great ongoing tragedies: child poverty, marginalization and inequality.
