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.
In Amsterdam, just like in 87 % of all municipalities in the Netherlands, integrated neighbourhood teams have been installed as an answer to the reform of the welfare state. During the last decade, the social domain has gone through its strongest change since 1945. Transitions by new national acts and policies have gone hand in hand with decentralisation, which has transferred most responsibilities in the social domain to municipalities, accompanied by less financial means. On the local level, these changes have been translated by municipalities into policies, responsibilities, interventions, and a repertoire that requires strong changes in the professional behaviour of all stakeholders. One of the newly implemented practices consists of interdisciplinary neighbourhood teams focussed on empowerment of people or families who are dealing with multiple challenges in their lives. Professionals from elder care, youth care, community development, and welfare organisations need to collaborate while they attempt to reconcile various professional perspectives on a specific problematic situation. At the same time, there is a shift for many professionals from solving problems for clients towards empowering the clients to solve problems themselves, based on their own strengths or their network. Most of the structural transitions and implementations might be finished; however, the transformation in professional behaviour following these changes, is just starting to develop. Despite a series of training courses in various methods, the Amsterdam neighbourhood team professionals strongly felt a need to deepen their experiences with situations in which the contact with a client or family had somehow stagnated.
This chapter examines how the use of Photovoice contributes to children in special education programmes in a post-hospitalisation programme. The Photovoice project allows these children to express their voices and points of view through photography, as well as their feelings and thoughts regarding the photographs they have taken.
The connection between arts and social work is a rapidly developing area. However, the specific advantages of arts-based research for social work have yet to be articulated. In research in general, arts are defined as less important than words, or numbers – a leitmotif, or illustration (Martinez-Brawley et al., 1997). Often ‘art’ is experienced as the opposite of ‘science’ and thus the opposite of ‘evidence’. In social work specifically, arts are experienced as a luxury, an illustration rather than content, peripheral rather than the ‘on the ground’ problems that social work deals with. Often social workers feel that they have not been trained in the arts and so cannot use it. This is based on a misunderstanding of what social art is. Indeed, arts-based research is most traditionally connected to education, where the use of images is a natural language for children (Eisner, 1997). Of late, however, we see a ‘visual turn’ in social sciences in general, and also in social work practice and research. This includes the use of community art, Photovoice, outsider art, arts for social change, arts and health, arts to humanise institutions, de-stigmatise minorities, and to give voice to silenced groups (Chamberlyne & Smith, 2008; Huss, 2012, Huss & Bos, 2019). This has extended the use of arts-based research in social work. This book aims to capture this promising process. It will show how arts-based research is in fact an especially effective methodology to embody, and will articulate many of the epistemological aims of, social work research.
‘A joint fate’ was the topic chosen by the co-researchers, young adults with disabilities, as one of the topics of the research that they wanted to study in-depth. In the preparatory meeting concerning collection of data on the topic they discussed that many songs, some of which are protest songs, were written by people who shared a joint fate and the desire to change their situation in society, like Bob Marley. Therefore, they decided that this would be the topic they would study by writing poems. In the research meeting, they invited the co-researchers to work in groups and to find people among them who shared a fate and to express this in a song/poem that they would present. The data that were collected included the poems, the discussion about them, and the ways in which people participated in the discourse. We used poems, stories, plays, photographs, cards, and other methods in the participatory action research (PAR) that we undertook together with young adults with disabilities. The study explored their lives in preparatory programmes for independent living that were run by the NGO, Gvanim. In our research, we explored together the meaning participation in Gvanim’s programmes had for the young adults. By employing different artistic instruments, we had a varied platform, which allowed the young adults to connect and to express their meaningful knowledge – their knowledge from experience, expressed through arts. Turning life experiences into expert and meaningful knowledge from which theoretical insights could be formulated, and actions that can have social impacts designed, was made possible via art.
This chapter describes how photography and mural methods help promote cross-disciplinary and community collaboration, enhance the experience of individual participants as well as that of the community, document university–community projects, and assess outcomes through constituent voices (film), photographs, and mural painting processes. Arts-based research methods and their applications for social work are exemplified by a project of an urban research university’s community engagement program: ArtsCorps.
The oppressive arrival of COVID-19 has had a significant socio-economic impact particularly on low- to middle-income families in the Philippines, leading to a plethora of mental health issues that exacerbate family living conditions. Psychosocial support has been a great need. Magis Creative Spaces, in partnership with ABJ Foundation, implemented an initiative to provide Duyan (‘cradle’ in English) groups: free online expressive arts-based psychosocial support groups for various groups of frontline workers. Focusing on the education, health care, and social welfare sectors, a total of 180 participants took part. In parallel, Magis also initiated a research project to document this initiative. A pool of ten facilitators was arranged in pairs to create a team for each Duyan support group. A general sample of each session’s process is as follows: (1) a moment of stillness and silence to offer prayers of healing and gratitude; (2) the introduction of facilitators and participants; (3) a grounding exercise; (4) an art activity (visual art, movement, music or a combination); (5) sharing and discussion; (6) discussion and questions; (7) group photo; (8) closing. Co-authors Alfonso and Atayde, supervising clinicians for the project, organised all stakeholders of the initiative and reviewed key components of the programme. After each of the Duyan support groups were completed, all facilitators were involved in a post-Duyan session group process to harvest stories through drawing and storytelling.
This book explores the rationale, methodologies, and results of arts-based approaches in social work research today.
It is the first dedicated analysis of its kind, providing practical examples of when to choose arts-based research, how the arts are used by social work researchers and integrated with additional methods, and ways to evaluate its efficacy. The multiple examples of arts-based research in social work in this book reveal how arts methods are inherently connected to the resilience and creativity of research participants, social workers, and social work researchers.
With international contributions from experts in their fields, this is a welcome overview of the arts in social work for anyone connected to the field.
This chapter presents an arts-based research method enabling the study of existential dilemmas regarding ageing by using the visual artwork as a medium to evoke a profound dialogue between researcher and respondent. The application of the method will be shown in an arts-educational setting – focusing on the existential dimensions of life. The method is based on Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS: Housen, 1997; Yenawine, 2013), an art education method for conducting conversations on attentive and conscious perceptions of visual artworks. To further enhance the focused engagement with artworks, VTS has been expanded with a set of eXisTential Reflective Additional questions (XTRA: Bruijn & Jansen, 2019). This allows the VTS XTRA method to be applied in social work settings for use by workers and researchers to gain insight into older people’s existential questions making use of visual artworks. The research setting for our case example is the application of VTS XTRA with ageing visitors of the ‘Special Award’ exhibition in the Dutch Nicolaïkerk in Utrecht. The Special Award is a national competition for visual artists with a disability, organised by the Special Arts foundation. In its peripheral programme, ageing visitors were invited to participate in conversations by looking at the artworks during a VTS XTRA session. These discussions generate data for an ongoing doctoral study of the first author (PB) on the pedagogical utility of art with respect to existential questions.
Creative art research approaches are gaining in popularity in recent years and are increasingly being used in social work, health, and other disciplines (Vanover et al., 2018). Arts-informed approaches can serve as expressive therapies, and have been successfully applied in psychotherapy, counselling, and rehabilitation for decades (Malchiodi, 2005). Creative art research approaches expand the domain of qualitative inquiry and enable social science researchers to incorporate and utilise arts-based methodologies to better understand human behaviour, perspectives, and experiences (Leavy, 2017). Arts-based scholarly research is located in the creation of art, based on extensive artistic training, while arts-informed research is used to express the experiences, perspectives, and emotions of research participants (Shannon-Baker, 2015). Arts-informed research mainly focuses on the advancement of knowledge rather than merely the production or creation of artwork or art craft for this purpose. It facilitates the possibility of establishing deeper and genuine human connections by capturing different perspectives and expressions due to its expressive qualities (Leavy, 2017). Art and creative methods in social work research are consistent with the philosophy, mission, and values of the profession (Peek et al., 2016). Shannon (2013) discusses several key components of social work research that includes active community participation, understanding of the local contexts, mutual dialogue and understanding, and facilitating social change leading to empowerment, equality, and social justice. The profession of social work strongly values and respects the inherent worth and dignity of all people (IFSW & IASSW, 2004), and arts-informed creative research approaches provide an ethical platform to inquire about the lived experiences of individuals and communities (Jarldon, 2016). Arts-informed approaches allow social workers to learn how service users develop their inner strength by recognising ‘the inherent worth and dignity’ of an individual person (Foster, 2012).
