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.
This chapter is interested in the journey of young people who came off the streets into residential care and, instead of moving out into adult independent life, transitioned back onto the streets. Previous research in Bolivia found that 97 per cent of street-connected children who entered care programmes left care before reaching adulthood to return to the street for a variety of reasons. However, there has been no research on children who came into care from the street and then transitioned out of care at the age of 18 back onto the street, rather than towards independent living. This research, therefore, aims to understand what leads young adults with a street past to transition back onto the streets when they aged out of care. This chapter explores the factors that drove five street-connected looked-after young adults – three men and two women – back to the streets. In light of the findings, the author questions if there are real possibilities for social integration, after a street-connected and care history, for young adults who have lived for many years at the margins of society or within institutional walls.
Placement instability correlates with problematic outcomes in a number of areas, including mental health, criminal behaviour and sexual behaviour. Conversely, the existing empirical literature has not found close links between placement stability and positive outcomes. To date, stability has been examined via a placements-over-time paradigm, meaning that the continuity of a placement has been used as an operationalisation of stability. Such an operationalisation does not take into account the internal experience of the placement nor the many moving parts in residential care. Our conceptualisation of stability provides a new understanding of what contributes to stability and how we can enact it. We examined stability in residential care-leavers using semi-structured interviews. Eight young care-leavers from New South Wales, Australia, were interviewed regarding their experiences to ascertain the essential elements of stability. These elements included a consistent care team, consistent rules within the house, a sense of safety and a perception that the staff genuinely care for the young people. The young people’s relationships were the main drivers of them feeling stable. Without close and meaningful relationships, particularly with the staff members, the continuity of a placement was insufficient to bring about a sense of stability.
This chapter explores ways that research dealing with different disengaged or ‘hard to reach’ cohorts can be more engaging and therefore more representative. Most care-leavers want their research participation to have a positive impact for other peers, such as improving care systems for young people in the future. Minimising tokenism and employing trauma-informed approaches are important, as well as maximising reach and impact. The author’s reflections on methodology and young people’s engagement in transitions from care research, combined with understandings of strengths and limitations of youth participation theories, have led to the development of a model to assist in research and consultation design. The adaptive participation model presented identifies several key considerations for choosing approaches to research with young people ‘on the edge’ of different fields who may be difficult to engage
This chapter focuses on the situation, needs and experiences related to the transition to adulthood from care of a particularly vulnerable group of care-leavers in Spain: unaccompanied migrant young people (UMYP). A quantitative analysis approach is used to study data from semi-structured interviews and standardised tests and compare UMYP’s results to those of other care-leavers without this background. Findings show very specific profile characteristics of UMYP: they are less likely to have experienced abuse or neglect in their families, but at the same time, they seem to be more vulnerable as care-leavers to find stability and move on to in(ter)dependence as young adults. Important implications can be derived from this for practice and policies.
Care-experienced young people are considered to be at higher risk of suicidal thoughts and attempting suicide. Previous research on this topic has largely neglected considering existing theories of suicide to explain the elevated risk among this group. Bringing together the two fields of theoretical suicidology and leaving-care research may provide a rich theoretical foundation for empirical and practical work with young people in and leaving care. This chapter discusses how applying theories of suicide, with the example of Joiner’s Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide, can help better understand the risk of suicidal ideation and behaviour among care-leavers. Previous empirical studies show that key factors of the Interpersonal-Psychological Theory of Suicide match with the experience of leaving care, as reported by care-leavers from several different countries. A socio-ecological perspective expands this theoretical understanding of the risk of suicide to multiple levels. These results highlight the relevance of a theoretical understanding of young people’s experiences in the context of leaving care. The author discusses how far the practical application of theories of suicide could advance future empirical research on suicidal ideation and behaviour among care-leavers and inform guidelines for suicide prevention tailored to care-experienced young people.
Children living in a Swiss cantonal asylum centre repeatedly asked the researcher studying their everyday lives to ‘come to my house’ and were also often talking about that they did not belong and couldn’t feel at home. What does it mean for children to live in a place where they don’t want to and cannot feel home? In order to answer this question, this chapter explores the ‘houses’ of the ‘camp’ – rooms that children live with their parent(s). The children’s homing strategies (Winther, 2009) in a non-place (Augé, 1995/2010) will be examined using examples from an ethnographic study that took place between 2019 and 2020 in a ‘cantonal center’ – or as the children put it ‘camp’. This examination reveals how homing strategies are deployed within the adversarial structural conditions of Swiss cantonal camps.
Social work, both as a profession and as an academic discipline, is – at least theoretically – in a privileged position to capture the nuances of migration, given that social workers are present during the different stages of migration and asylum processes as well as at academic, practitioner and policy-making levels. However, the mere presence of social workers in the field is not necessarily a synonym of commitment and/or social transformation, as practitioners and academics may just replicate, unquestioningly, the guidelines dictated by governments and/or funding institutions or – quite the opposite – foster a critical perspective in their daily routines.
In this chapter, we reflect on the possibilities of social work research to influence migration policies, and more specifically, EU migration policies. To this end, we look at the past to get inspired by social work pioneers, but also to the future by reflecting on what is needed to raise awareness about issues that can be challenging for social work research from a critical perspective. We also reflect on the roles that academia, public institutions and organisations play by enabling or blocking this kind of research. Last but not least, we explore to what extent social work (and social work research) is present at decision-making levels.
We anticipate that social work research plays a very limited role in influencing migration policies and that it could play a much greater role in case some changes were operationalised. This chapter aims, thus, to highlight the root causes of this lack of influence and stimulate reflection that encompasses academia, organisations, institutions and individuals in making sure research is more influential in the future.
In the epilogue, the editors of the book highlight three main points: the key themes discussed in the previous chapters through a European perspective; the intended use of the book offering more than one views for practice, education and research; a reference to the particular times of the production and publishing of the book, mentioning the new crises and challenges linked to the cOVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Lastly, the best way to complete this book is recalling the commitment, the vision and the sense of hope shared by all involved authors. From different countries and with different backgrounds, they have shown, and will show, before and after this contribution, passion, critical thinking and responsibility towards the life of migrant people and the role of social work.
On the night of 8 September 2020, the Lesvos’ Reception and Identification Centre (RIC) – better known as Moria-hotspot – was set on fire by its inhabitants. After two days of consecutive fires, ‘the worst refugee camp on earth’, according to MSF, was burned to the ground. At that moment, the camp and the surrounding olive groves were the residence of circa 12,500 people, among which more than 400 unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) living in inhumane conditions. A few days later, the URMs from Moria were poised to be relocated to other EU countries, providing an Aristotelian catharsis after the ongoing tragedy. This event was followed by another attempted arson, that of the overcrowded Samos Reception and Identification Centre. It started from the URMs’ quarters, a desperate attempt to make themselves visible by setting their living space on fire. The purpose of this chapter is to see how international, European and national legislation on unaccompanied minors are translated into actual reception practices in the RICs on the Greek islands. We hereto examine relevant international, EU and Greek legislation, describe the evolution of the Greek refugee camps on the islands of Lesvos and Samos, and analyse interviews with URMs about their experiences in these hotspots.
