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 1500 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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 13 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Life Stages and Intergenerationality x
- Justice, Law and Human Rights x
Generativity or ‘giving back’ is regarded as a common life stage, occurring for many around middle age. For the first time, this book offers qualitative research on the lives and social relationships of older imprisoned women. In-depth interviews with 29 female prisoners in the south-eastern United States show that older women both engage in generative behaviours in prison and also wish to do so upon their release.
As prisoners continue to age, the US finds itself at a crossroads on prison reform, with potential decarceration beginning with older prisoners. The COVID-19 pandemic has led many to consider how to thrive under difficult circumstances and in stressing the resilience of older incarcerated women, this book envisions what this could look like.
Exploring the current and historical tensions between liberal capitalism and indigenous models of family life, Ian Kelvin Hyslop argues for a new model of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand and other parts of the Anglophone world.
He puts forward the case that child safety can only be sustainably advanced by policy initiatives which promote social and economic equality and from practice which takes meaningful account of the complex relationship between economic circumstances and the lived realities of service users.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND.
This book explores how children’s rights are practised and weighed against birth and adoptive parents’ rights and examines how governments and professionals balance rights when it is decided that children cannot return to parental care.
From different socio-political and legal contexts in Europe and the United States, it provides an in-depth analysis of concepts of family, contact, the child’s best-interest principle and human rights when children are adopted from care.
Taking an international comparative approach to these issues, this book provides detailed information on adoption processes and shares learning from best practice and research across country boundaries to help improve outcomes for all children in care for whom adoption may be the placement of choice.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Based on groundbreaking original research, this book provides a comprehensive account of the issues surrounding pregnancy and parenthood for young people in and leaving care.
Featuring the voices of care-experienced parents, together with reflections from practitioners, it offers valuable insights into the issues facing this group. Using qualitative data to explore why parenthood is such an important issue for young people in and leaving care, this book shows what can be learned from their experiences in order to improve outcomes for parents and children in the future.
The author highlights the practical and emotional needs of care-experienced parents and gives clear advice for practitioners on how these needs might be better addressed through summary points, practice guidance and recommendations for policy and practice.
This book examines a participatory approach in child protection practices in both Norway and the United States, despite key organizational differences.
Križ explores ways that children can be empowered to participate in child protection investigations and decisions after removal from home. The author shows how children can be encouraged to develop and express their own opinions and explores tools for child protection workers to negotiate complex boundaries around the inclusion of children in decision-making.
She presents valuable insights from front-line child protection professionals’ unique perspectives and experiences within two very different systems, and evaluates the impacts of different organizational practices in promoting children’s participation.
There is increasing pressure to involve children and young people in the decisions that affect them. Presenting new research on the extent to which parents and children participate in decision making when childcare social workers are involved, particularly in child protection conferences and Child in Care reviews, Diaz argues for a radical shift in existing practices.
Including a range of perspectives, this book highlights the systemic changes needed for social workers and other key professionals to ensure that children and parents participate more meaningfully in decision-making, which will improve the long term outcomes for children and their families.
This comprehensive international study provides a cross-national analysis of different understandings of errors and mistakes, as well as lessons to avoid and how to handle them in child protection practice, using research and knowledge from 11 countries in Europe and North America.
Divided into country-specific chapters, each examines the pathways that lead to mistakes happening, the scale of their impact, how responsibilities and responses are decided and how practice and policy subsequently change. Considering the complexities of evolving practice contexts, this authoritative, future-oriented study is an invaluable text for practitioners, researchers and policy makers wishing to understand why child protection fails – and offers a springboard for fresh thinking about strategies to reduce future risk.
This book offers an analysis and summary of the uses, abuses and limitations of attachment theory in contemporary child welfare practice.
Analysing the primary science and drawing on the authors’ original empirical work, the book shows how attachment theory can distort and influence decision-making. It argues that the dominant view of attachment theory may promote a problematic diagnostic mindset, whilst undervaluing the enduring relationships between children and adults.
The book concludes that attachment theory can still play an important role in child welfare practice, but the balance of the research agenda needs a radical shift towards a sophisticated understanding of the realities of human experience to inform ethical practice.
Child sexual exploitation (CSE) is now high on the social care agenda, but what is it? How is it different from other forms of child sexual abuse? This important book puts forward the rarely heard voices of children and young people who have experienced CSE and the professionals who have worked with them to answer these questions.
Taking a critical perspective, Hallett also addresses the possibility that further problems might arise from the framing of ‘child sexual exploitation’, which can have serious implications for the ways that society responds to CSE and to the children and young people caught up in it.
Central to the discussion are themes such as youth, childhood, care and power, making for an important sociological contribution to this under-researched field.
The book challenges the dominant way of thinking about CSE and, with new and valuable practice and policy relevant insights, is also essential reading for those working or training to work with children and young people.
In this outspoken and challenging book, Sarah Nelson argues that progress in addressing childhood sexual abuse has been in fearful or complacent retreat and that change is urgently needed in order to prevent abuse occurring, and to better support survivors.
From this starting point, she puts forward radical suggestions for new models of practice. These are designed to provide perpetrator-focussed child protection, to encourage community approaches to prevention, and to better support those who have survived abuse.
As revelations of widespread child abuse continue to emerge at an unprecedented rate, this book campaigns for change, offering policy makers and practitioners solutions for new ways in tackling sexual abuse, working alongside survivors to reduce its prevalence and impact.
