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 of over 1400 titles.
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
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Gender-based violence (GBV) can take many forms and have detrimental effects across generations and cultures. The triangulation of GBV, rurality and rural culture is a challenging and essential topic and this edited collection provides an innovative analysis of GBV in rural communities. Focusing on under-studied and/or oppressed groups such as immigrants and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the book explores new theories on patterns of violence. Giving insights into GBV education and prevention, the text introduces community justice and victim advocacy approaches to tackling issues of GBV in rural areas. From policy review into actionable change, the authors examine best practices to positively affect the lives of survivors.
This textbook offers students and practitioners an accessible introduction to strengths-based approaches in Social Work and Social Care practice. Covering the theory and research in support of these approaches, and packed full of case studies, the book will allow readers to develop a critical understanding of how strengths-based approaches work, and how they can be successfully applied in order to improve outcomes for people with lived experience.
Covering the five main models of strengths-based practice, the text presents international research and evidence on the efficacy of each approach, enabling students and practitioners to apply the benefits in their own social work practice. The guide features the perspectives of people with lived experience throughout and includes the following key learning features:
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case studies of best practice;
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points for practice: succinct tips for practitioners and students on practice placement;
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further reading list and resources;
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glossary.
We begin this chapter with a critical account of attachment theory and then consider how neuroscientific knowledge is furthering, or in some cases limiting, our understanding of these theories. We briefly explore the relationship between attachment and childhood adversity and consider the question: does one lead to the other? We then explore what we know about the effect of poor and potentially damaging childhood experiences and consider the brain research in this area. We look at the areas of the brain that have been most fully researched: predominantly the amygdala, the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Lastly, we look at the work that has taken place to investigate the plight of Romanian orphans, victims of the ill-fated Ceauşescu regime of the period 1965–1989.
Attachment theory
The concept of attachment was developed in the 1950s by several researchers, although it is usually credited primarily to the psychologist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. The work of Bowlby, alongside his colleague Mary Ainsworth in the United Kingdom and Harry Harlow in the United States, fundamentally and irrevocably changed our understanding of the relationship between infants and parents. Bowlby presented evidence from studies of both humans and animals to demonstrate his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s work on imprinting and Harry Harlow’s work with Rhesus monkeys. This latter work showed, for example, that young monkeys separated from their mother will prefer to cling to a cloth-covered wire doll rather than a bare wire doll, even if it is the bare wire doll that provides them with milk.
Gender-based violence (GBV) can take many forms and have detrimental effects across generations and cultures. The triangulation of GBV, rurality and rural culture is a challenging and essential topic and this edited collection provides an innovative analysis of GBV in rural communities. Focusing on under-studied and/or oppressed groups such as immigrants and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the book explores new theories on patterns of violence. Giving insights into GBV education and prevention, the text introduces community justice and victim advocacy approaches to tackling issues of GBV in rural areas. From policy review into actionable change, the authors examine best practices to positively affect the lives of survivors.
This bestselling textbook provides social science students with an accessible introduction to neuroscience and the implications for our understandings of child development, considering the links between brain development and social and cultural issues.
Now covering the 0-18+ age range, the new edition critically analyses the relationship between children and young people’s thoughts, behaviours and feelings and the ways in which their developing brains are structured. It includes a new section on emotional development in adolescence, considering the impact of drugs and alcohol on the brain and the role of brain changes in driving risky behaviours.
Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, the text connects the latest scientific knowledge to the practice of understanding and working with children. Incorporating the latest research and debate throughout, the book offers students and practitioners working with children:
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case studies showing how brain science is changing practice;
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a companion website including self-test questions;
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end-of-chapter summaries, further reading and questions to test knowledge;
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a glossary of neuroscientific terms.
Title IX of the Education Amendments Act requires institutions of higher education to respond to issues of sexual violence. However, research indicates that students often do not recognise behaviours characteristic of interpersonal violence unless blatantly physical in nature, even though emotional and sexual violence are equally common. Because students may not recognise these behaviours as interpersonal violence, these issues often go unreported, leading to long-term consequences, including anxiety, continued victimisation, depression, difficulty maintaining relationships and/or school failure. Additionally, those residing in rural communities are less likely to acknowledge and/or report such victimisation due to protecting the deeply entrenched ‘close-knit’ relationships. This chapter presents findings from a survey designed to measure undergraduate perceptions of interpersonal violence. Members of the research team attended 12 randomly selected junior and senior-level classes at a rural, liberal arts, teaching university. Students (n=247) viewed a series of vignettes depicting both violent and non-violent forms of interpersonal violence. Participants then provided basic demographic information and indicated whether each vignette demonstrated instances of interpersonal violence. Analysis accounted for differences in gender; race; whether the student, or someone they know, previously experienced interpersonal violence; and whether the student previously attended a programme educating students on the signs and symptoms of interpersonal violence. Findings confirm that education is effective for helping students recognise interpersonal violence. Expanding educational resources will aid campus college administrators in proactively reducing Title IX issues and effectively responding to Title IX issues after the fact.
Intimate partner violence (IPV) poses a significant public safety and public health problem in the United States. This is especially salient in rural communities. Rural jurisdictions have a number of unique problems that may exacerbate the frequency of IPV compared to urban communities, including, for example, the increase in availability of firearms, geographical isolation from victim services, increased stigma associated with IPV, and a lack of financial resources. The purpose of this chapter was to utilise incident-based crime data and measures of rurality from the US Census Bureau to develop an understanding of how crime incident characteristics of IPV vary across mostly rural compared to mostly urban counties in the United States. Findings indicate differences in the seriousness of IPV offences, the presence of firearms, frequency of arrest, and whether victims cooperate with authorities between rural and urban counties. Policy implications are discussed.
This chapter reminds the reader of the different models of strengths-based practice discussed in the text. It emphasises that there may be some gaps in practice, but this is in areas where strength-based practice is under-utilised and -researched. It reminds readers of Saleebey’s (1992) 3-CPR model, which argues that strengths-based approaches should focus on the following:
C – competence, capacities, courage
P – promise, positive expectations
R – resilience, reserves, resources
The importance of Chapter 10, which focuses on the voices of those with lived experience of strengths-based approaches, is emphasised, as these are the people that practitioners are accountable to and should build positive relationships with. The importance of relationship-based practice is also emphasised here.
The chapter goes on to remind readers of some of the barriers to implementing strengths-based approaches in practice and the danger of the approaches becoming a core mechanism of a neo-liberal, individualised framework to social work. The chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of having a well-trained social work workforce and well-resourced social work services, both of which are key to the effective implementation of strengths-based approaches.
Developing an awareness that the physical world exists beyond our own senses is a major development in infant cognition. Early theories of child cognition based a large part of their research on trying to understand how infants begin to learn about their physical world. It is a large task to begin to comprehend a three-dimensional world through sensory processing. Infants have sensory systems and motor skills to enable them to explore the physical world. Through singular and combined sensory input and motor exploration, they gradually learn about various physical properties around them such as the solidity of objects and that the three-dimensional physical world exists outside of themselves. A key topic in infant cognition is how children learn object permanence, namely that a psychical world exists in space and time independently from themselves.
To understand this, infants need to develop the ability to perceive objects and realise that an object is the same even when it is moving in space. Shape constancy is this tendency to perceive the shape of an object as constant despite differences in the viewing angle (and consequent differences in the shape of the pattern projected on the retina of the eye).
Modern research has recast our thinking on how children perceive objects, and new techniques have allowed us to better understand the basic mechanisms of object perception in infancy. Object perception is thought to be mediated by two separable cortical regions and visual pathways, the ventral and dorsal pathways.
The urgent bawl of a newborn baby would suggest that there is a capacity for emotional expression from the get-go, even if the range is somewhat limited. Yet we cannot be sure that what we are seeing is the expression of a discrete emotion such as anger or sadness or rather something more basic and undifferentiated that cannot be understood as a specific emotional expression.
Are emotions developed or constructed? There are two distinct paradigms. There are those who see emotions are ‘natural’, arising from distinct neural pathways in the brain that are present at birth. This paradigm seeks to understand which emotions are present at birth and which develop during the early years of life. This is sometimes referred to as a locationist model as it seeks to locate emotions in discrete areas of the brain.
The second paradigm is proposed by the constructionist school. In this approach emotions are seen as being constructed of basic psychological processes. Emotional experiences are created in the mind, are not located in specific brain areas and are dependent on language for their construction.
