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 an analysis of child poverty in Morocco using three different methods for identifying poor children: a monetary approach using the national poverty line methodology; a deprivation approach based on a child deprivation index; and a combined multidimensional measure, including both monetary and deprivation dimensions. The results are based on secondary data analysis of the 2001 Household Expenditure and Consumption Survey (HECS). The chapter looks at how poverty has been measured in Morocco, presents and discusses analysis of the HECS, and makes policy recommendations for both improving poverty measurement and reducing child poverty in Morocco.
Two decades of transition have seen growing diversity in economic and social development across Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Living conditions have changed rapidly during this period, bringing both new opportunities and greater vulnerabilities for families and children. Rapidly changing living conditions in countries require monitoring systems that are sensitive to qualitative changes in the lives of children. So far, monitoring of child well-being has mainly focused on access to services while changes in the quality of service provision and the subjective well-being of children are less well captured. The index of child well-being for 21 countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia presented in this chapter brings together existing cross-national data on a range of child well-being indicators to provide an overview of countries’ performance across different dimensions of children’s life. Based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and international developments in child indicators research, child well-being is assessed across the following dimensions: material well-being, housing, health, education, personal & social well-being, family and risk & safety.
This chapter draws on the legacy of Eleanor Rathbone, an early twentieth-century British campaigner for family allowances, and her aspirations for a society without child poverty. It deploys ‘utopia as method’ both to explore the inadequacy of current policies aimed at reducing child poverty and to consider the principles on which society would have to be organised to ensure the effective eradication, rather than merely alleviation, of child poverty. Utopia as method entails looking systemically and holistically at social institutions, social processes and their outcomes. The core principles identified as necessary to eliminating child poverty are: promoting equality; revaluing care, and considering the total social organisation of labour in society both within and beyond the market; rethinking what counts as production and wealth; universal child benefit and a guaranteed basic income or citizen’s income; making sustainability central; and prioritising human flourishing and well-being. The chapter focuses primarily on the UK, but the framework has general relevance. It broadens out into a global perspective on the kind of society that would secure the rights of children to economic and social security and the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.
This chapter extends the analysis of income poverty by combining income-based estimates with other (primarily economic) information that is designed to establish whether those with incomes below the poverty line are indeed poor. It notes that the analysis represents a first step along the path from an indirect (income-based) approach to a more direct approach that seeks to incorporate information about the living standards actually achieved, and opens up several issues and methods. It explores one approach that uses data on household spending patterns, wealth holdings, and the incidence of financial hardship to refine income-based poverty estimates. It illustrates the potential of the underlying ideas to extend and improve poverty line studies, but the precise methods adopted are indicative and the estimates presented are best regarded as experimental.
This chapter examines the main implications of the findings for research and policy, where it argues that better data are needed to gain a more complete understanding of the nature of deprivation and exclusion, how they relate to poverty, and what this implies for policies designed to address social disadvantage. It suggests that the data gathered by quantitative surveys must be complemented by the information gathered in qualitative research that explores the processes, attitudes, and behaviours that give rise to different forms of disadvantage and shapes the underlying dynamics, within and across generations. It focuses its discussion on the role of dissemination, a much-neglected topic that can play an important role in determining whether or not research has an impact. It argues that more effort is needed to bridge the gulf that currently exists between researchers and policy makers and that better dissemination has a critical role to play in achieving this goal.
This chapter examines the concept of social exclusion, and explains how it relates to other major policy themes, including poverty and inequality. It discusses what is unique about social exclusion, along with its salience for current and emerging policy priorities. It identifies the different dimensions (or domains) of exclusion and examines the role of social exclusion/inclusion in informing social policy. It focuses the discussion on the emergence and evolution of the social inclusion policy agenda in Australia.
This landmark study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the nature and associations between the three main forms of social disadvantage in Australia: poverty, deprivation and social exclusion.
Drawing on the author’s extensive research expertise and his links with welfare practitioners, it explains the limitations of existing approaches and presents new findings that build on the insights of disadvantaged Australians and views about the essentials of life, providing the basis for a new deprivation-based poverty measure.
This chapter describes the research that forms the basis of the empirical material presented in later chapters. It notes that the Left Out and Missing Out Project was built on a unique partnership between researchers, policy analysts, and practitioners that developed a set of indicators of disadvantage which reflect and embody the insights of those experiencing poverty. It specifies that the project facilitated the collection of the data required to produce these indicators in a way that draws on the views of low-income Australians who are forced to rely on the support and assistance provided by community sector (welfare) agencies. It describes key features of the project and some of the background data produced from the Community Understanding of Poverty and Social Exclusion (CUPSE) Survey (originally conducted in 2006).
This chapter presents new results on the incidence of three dimensions of exclusion in Australia: disengagement; exclusion from basic services (public and private); and economic exclusion. It examines the profile of exclusion more systematically, focusing on the role of socioeconomic factors such as gender, age, family type, and economic status. It focuses its attention on the incidence of multiple exclusion (within and across domains) and the characteristics of those in deep (multi-dimensional) exclusion. It explores the incidence of exclusion among groups known to be susceptible to poverty as a way of demonstrating that poverty and exclusion are different, and confirms this using overlap analysis. It examines the links between exclusion and perception of well-being as a way of confirming that exclusion is an enforced condition that has negative consequences for well-being.
This chapter summarises the key features of the deprivation approach, including the role of community input, and explains how the Community Understanding of Poverty and Social Exclusion (CUPSE) Survey data are used to identify those items regarded as essential (‘the essentials of life’) in contemporary Australia. It explains that these items are identified and analysed to determine the underlying needs that they are intended to fulfil and how they relate to each other. It examines the findings to identify differences in the responses held by different groups in the community and establishes whether or not a consensus exists about the identification of essential items. It notes that the results provide a fascinating insight into the modern Australian psyche, not least as it reflects what the majority regard as essential — things that no one in Australia should have to go without.
