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 introductory chapter sets out the three main aims of the book. The first is to identify the defining characteristics of the five concepts of child well-being — need, rights, poverty, quality of life, and social exclusion — and to explore the relationships between them. The second aim is to measure the prevalence of the conditions to which the concepts refer for a population of children representative of a particular community, and to compare the overlap between them. The third aim is to consider the implications of the findings for policy and practice in children’s services, defined here as those interventions organised and provided on behalf of children by agencies such as social services, health, education, youth justice, the benefits agency, housing, leisure providers and the voluntary sector. This is followed by discussions of child well-being in policy and practice, studies of childhood, and research on the five concepts. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
One of the main contentions of this book is that the way in which children’s well-being is conceptualised will shape the service response to which it gives rise. The aim here, therefore, is not to detail what quantities of which service are required to match particular problems in order to achieve specified outcomes. To do this would require in-depth descriptions of specific interventions. Rather, the purpose of this chapter is to deduce the contrasting styles of service that the five conditions (or types of ill-being) require — in other words, the features that services should have logically if they are to have the potential to be effective in addressing a designated condition.
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 begins with a discussion of the concept of need, distinguishing between thick and thin definitions of need. A child is considered ‘in need’ if their health or development is actually impaired or likely to become so without some remedial intervention. Impairment refers to the absence of normal healthy development; that is, when a condition usually interferes with daily social functioning and performance. Need is linked explicitly to the existence or likelihood of harm, which in turn is connected, critically, to the ability (or inability) to act in society. It is dependent on seven points of context, which are outlined. The chapter then considers the different approaches for measuring different types of need: expressed need, comparative need, and normative need.
This chapter discusses the concept of property and different approaches to measure it. Poverty is defined as poor living standards owing to deficient resources. Children are poor if, because their family’s income is inadequate, they cannot enjoy the goods, services and activities that most children in the society concerned take for granted. Two ideas cut across all of the poverty measures described in the chapter. The first is the distinction between the poverty rate — the number of people who are poor against a specified standard; and the poverty gap — the aggregate shortfall of income of all the poor from the selected poverty line. The second important idea is equivalisation.
This chapter discusses the concept of quality of life (QoL) property and different approaches to measure it. QoL is defined as ‘subjective well-being and personal growth in a healthy and prosperous environment’. The study described in this book used a holistic measure of QoL that is multidimensional, and goes further than financial and material items to include recreation, enrichment, and happiness. Attention is focused on factors known to contribute to subjective well-being, as well as on evidence of emotional state visible to parents or carers, for instance distress or depression.
Chapters Two to Six have looked in turn at how each of the five concepts of well-being (need, rights, poverty, quality of life, social exclusion) are defined and measured. This chapter explores how far each one makes a unique contribution to the understanding of child well-being. It starts by aiming to get to the heart or essence of each concept. The research drawn on in this chapter lends support to the second general hypothesis explored by the study described in this book. There is overlap between groups of people affected by different conditions, and, without exception, it appears that individuals with condition X are disproportionately likely to exhibit condition Y. However, there are also disjunctions; different concepts do draw attention to different groups of people.
This chapter continues to use the data analysed in Chapter Eight to examine relationships between the five conditions (or types of ill-being). The main findings are that the conditions (or type of ill-being) are not as closely related as is often thought. All two-way correlations were weak with one exception (need and QoL = 0.470, p 〈 0.01), and most of the relative risk ratios were also low, indicating that in most cases children with one condition are not disproportionately likely to have another. The reasons for these disjunctions are elaborated in the case studies and show how each concept taps different aspects of children’s lives.
This chapter sketches out some of the key points of agreement and debate concerning rights. It examines different approaches to measuring rights, but first it looks at what rights are and why they are important, how they become violated, what they cover (their substance), and what makes something a right (or how one obtains a right). Rights are the interests and liberties to which humans are entitled. Violated rights are therefore identified by establishing, first, the freedoms and resources to which an individual is entitled and, second, how that individual has been treated by the third party (person or body/organisation) with the corresponding duty to forbear or assist.
This chapter examines the origins of the concept of social exclusion and its defining features. It then considers different approaches to measuring social exclusion. Social exclusion is defined as an individual’s involuntary and somewhat catastrophic detachment from mainstream society owing to an accumulation of relational disadvantages. In order to operationalise the definition of social exclusion it is necessary to combine indicators of impaired participation from several dimensions of the child’s life to capture cumulative, chronic disadvantage. The measure used in this study used indicators for: the labour market/education (economy); families (domestic sphere); various leisure and cultural groups (civil society); and the nation state (citizenship).
