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
This chapter presents conventional poverty estimates for Australia to show its magnitude and how its incidence varies across socioeconomic groups. It compares Estimates of Australian poverty with estimates for other OECD countries, as a way of highlighting what is different about Australia and, in a rudimentary way, to reflect on how these differences relate to different welfare state regimes and policy approaches. It notes that a key component of any poverty study is a poverty line, which provides a benchmark that is used to identify who is poor according to whether income is below or above the line. It mentions one of Australia’s oldest welfare agencies, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, established during the Great Depression with the goal of ending social injustice by fighting for an Australia free of poverty. It notes that the agency conducts and sponsors research on poverty and disadvantage with a view to developing new measures that can inform and assist in these tasks.
This chapter provides an overview of three of the main forms of social disadvantage — poverty, deprivation, and exclusion. It discusses what these terms mean, how we think about them, how we measure them, how they related to each other, and what needs to be done about them. It draws on international (mainly European) ideas and policy debates and although the evidence presented is Australian, the arguments, findings, and their interpretation apply more generally. It explores the similarities and differences between poverty, deprivation, and exclusion and identifies the factors that connect them together in circumstances, in order to understand the nature of social disadvantage in modern societies like Australia.
This chapter compares alternative approaches to the measurement of deprivation and examines how they differ and the merits of each. It explains that the estimates of the overall incidence and structure of deprivation are presented and examined statistically to see if it is possible to identify a small number of items (‘basic deprivation’) that can capture the essence of the problem. It examines the use of alternative weighting schemes to assess the sensitivity of the estimates to the methods used to derive them. It uses the estimates to examine and compare the adequacy of the Australian age pension and other income support payments as a way of highlighting the valuable role that deprivation research can play in informing policy in the vexed and challenging area of income support adequacy.
This chapter brings together the analysis presented in chapters Two and Six to examine the relationship between deprivation and poverty in more depth. It compares the two concepts in terms of how well each is able to identify those who are most disadvantaged. It uses the relationship of poverty and deprivation to several indicators of well-being to assess how well each indicator captures a situation that is harmful to those who experience it. It examines the overlap between who is poor but not deprived, who is deprived but not poor, and who is both deprived and poor in order to show that they differ empirically. It emphasises that this third (overlap) category forms the basis for the measure of consistent poverty that is explained and applied for the first time in Australia using the CUPSE data.
This chapter has set out the prevalence of the five conditions for a cross-section of children living in a deprived inner-London community. The analysis shows that the number and identity of children affected by each condition is different, and by comparing the profiles of children with each condition against that of the rest of the sample, it has also clarified ways in which the five conditions resemble but are distinct from one another. It demonstrates that different sets of risk factors are independently predictive of each condition, and it also showed why single factors are unsuitable as proxy indicators of the conditions.
This chapter summarises the main findings of the study and presents overall conclusions. This book began by observing the growth of concern in children’s services with child well-being and arguing that this risks overlooking the fact that child ‘ill-being’ has long been a cause for concern, albeit conceptualised in several different ways, including unmet need, violated rights, poverty, poor quality of life and social exclusion. Each condition has its distinguishing features but overlaps with the others to varying degrees. Because they are different, the services required to tackle each one also require different orientations, despite the synergy that sometimes exists between them. Used carefully, therefore, all five concepts can act as useful lenses through which to view and understand children’s well-being, and so, hopefully, inform improved services.
Policy reforms to children’s services in the UK and elsewhere encourage a greater focus on outcomes defined in terms of child well-being. Yet for this to happen, we need not only a better understanding of what child well-being is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being in order to evaluate success. This book investigates the main approaches to conceptualising child well-being, applies them to the child population using household survey and agency audit data, then considers the implications for children’s services. The book provides a clear conceptual understanding of five perspectives on well-being: need, rights, poverty, quality of life and social exclusion; demonstrates the value of each perspective; charts levels of child well-being in an inner-London community; including violated rights and social exclusion; and sets out the features that children’s services must have if they are to improve child well-being defined in these terms.
This chapter highlights possible contradictions between different service responses, and suggests how these might be minimised. It sets out a theoretical framework and some practical steps aimed at helping different stakeholders in children’s services to use the findings to improve the fit or ‘congruence’ of children’s services. This is particularly salient given the twin dangers of policy-makers either speaking with a forked tongue by bolting together several potentially incompatible initiatives or discarding a perfectly useful perspective in favour of one that is shiny and new.
Policy reforms to children’s services in the UK and elsewhere encourage a greater focus on outcomes defined in terms of child well-being. Yet for this to happen, we need not only a better understanding of what child well-being is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being in order to evaluate success.
This book investigates the main approaches to conceptualising child well-being, applies them to the child population using household survey and agency audit data, then considers the implications for children’s services. The author:
provides a clear conceptual understanding of five perspectives on well-being: need, rights, poverty, quality of life and social exclusion
demonstrates the value of each perspective
charts levels of child well-being in an inner-London community, including violated rights and social exclusion
sets out the features that children’s services must have if they are to improve child well-being defined in these terms
This book should be read by everyone involved in developing, implementing and evaluating children’s services, including researchers, policy makers and practitioners.
Policy reforms to children’s services in the UK and elsewhere encourage a greater focus on outcomes defined in terms of child well-being. Yet for this to happen, we need not only a better understanding of what child well-being is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being in order to evaluate success. This book investigates the main approaches to conceptualising child well-being, applies them to the child population using household survey and agency audit data, then considers the implications for children’s services. The book provides a clear conceptual understanding of five perspectives on well-being: need, rights, poverty, quality of life and social exclusion; demonstrates the value of each perspective; charts levels of child well-being in an inner-London community; including violated rights and social exclusion; and sets out the features that children’s services must have if they are to improve child well-being defined in these terms.
