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
The concluding chapter brings the book to a close reiterating the main messages of the book. It starts with looking at the contextual nature of system change, through a reflection on the regional differences of the sites we worked with and how this changed the approach we took. We share what we learnt about needing to have a flexible approach and learn through the unexpected contextual differences. The chapter then moves to focusing on the process of ending system change, sharing how we approached this in a staged way, inventing ‘ritual’ and having multiple conversations that honoured the relationships and celebrated the changes made. We explore the issues of ‘fidelity’ and explain how we managed the process of letting go, for example, by allowing the learning from the Scale-Up project to inform our future work. The chapter and book ends with a reflection on the three elements that characterise the three parts of the book – feeling, thinking and doing. We encourage readers that if they value all three processes, alongside one another they can bring about real-life system change.
In this chapter, we look at how we analysed findings from the data collected in collaboration with sites, developed site-specific plans, piloted new ideas and gained the perspectives of young people and parents. We outline the ‘system review’ methodology that allowed us to review the whole system at different points in the project and the meetings we used to report these back to the organisation. The chapter outlines how we used our analytical framework during reflective research meetings and helps readers to think through how to develop their own. We outline how we created system change plans and give specific examples of the process we used to form plans in collaboration with sites. We end by outlining how we engaged with parents and young people in this process.
All too often, human systems are criticised for failing those they are meant to serve. One example is the growing awareness of the overlooked needs of adolescents facing harm in their communities. This has highlighted a need for new systems that enable practice that is ethical, effective and grounded in supportive relationships. But how can this be achieved?
Appealing to those interested in Contextual Safeguarding and beyond, this book shares ‘real-life’ lessons from research, covering:
• Practical guidance and tools for changing systems using embedded methods;
• Navigating complex relationships and emotions in organisational change; and
• Using theory and concepts to support change.
The book’s lively and creative style makes it accessible for researchers, students, professionals and anyone committed to system change in children’s social care.
This chapter introduces some of the methods that you can use to understand how systems work. It describes some of the ethnographic-style methods that allow you to more passively observe and understand how the current system in your organisation operates, such as meeting observations and workplace observations. The chapter includes three exercises to get you thinking about the types of methods you want to use to map your system, what the aim of your research is and how you would create templates to capture data. We include examples from our own research to show different approaches to ethnographic observation that can be used whatever your level of experience is with the system in hand.
In this chapter, we explore the relationship between ourselves, the researchers and the system change leader in sites. We begin by discussing the importance of relationships in system change work and consider how to value relationships as both ‘data’ and a fundamental tool for making change happen. We provide tools and exercises to help you form initial relationships and how to tune into relationships within organisations. In this chapter, we focus on the psychosocial theory of emotional containment and how relationships and research tools can offer emotional containment when doing organisational change that is always complex, messy and multi-faceted. We finish with a discussion about building relationships online.
In this chapter, we reflect on the challenges that arise from witnessing ‘bad practice’ within organisations. We consider what happens when researchers encounter practice that stands out as particularly problematic, ethically troubling and upsetting and how to contextualise this. We begin by exploring ways to create the conditions for organisations to receive feedback by minimising defensiveness and defensive practice. In this chapter, we provide examples of problematic practice we have observed in our work and how we addressed this through individual feedback and system review meetings. We argue for the importance of allowing emotional responses to harmful practice and how to draw on these in constructive and supportive ways. The social discipline window is presented as a theoretical approach for ensuring a restorative approach for working with people in organisations.
We explore in this chapter the theoretical concepts that have underpinned the approach we have developed throughout the book. The chapter begins with an explanation of how and why we have integrated ideas from the sociological social science tradition with ideas from systemic, psychoanalytic and relationships-based traditions. We then focus on our use of psychosocial framings, whereby psychoanalytic ideas have been applied to group processes. We give an explanation of the origins of these ideas, for example, the idea of emotional containment with organisational systems, and show how an understanding of what is going on ‘beneath the surface’ helped us to provide a ‘formulation’ to sites that helped us to work out what is going on, so as to inform our process of change. We then situate these ideas within the broader ecological theoretical framing and present a new model for embedded research for systems change, which demonstrates the complexity of the processes nested within one another.
This chapter contextualises the focus and methodology explored in the book. It starts by describing what a ‘real-life’ approach to embedded research is – one that brings sociological approaches to understanding social systems together with psychosocial theories that engage with ‘under the surface’ emotions and cultures. It describes embedded research as a methodology where people with an explicit research role learn about an organisation by getting involved in the day-to-day life of the place. The chapter outlines who the book is aimed towards – those interested in Contextual Safeguarding specifically, those who want to change children’s social care broadly and those interested in embedded research methods in human services. The chapter also outlines what the book does and does not focus on. We provide a brief overview of our own system change approach: Contextual Safeguarding, why this is a challenge in children’s social care and the research projects the book is based upon.
This chapter is about relational methods for understanding systems. These methods require you to engage more actively with the system to learn how it works. The chapter describes some discursive methods that focus on how language constructs systems. It outlines the authors’ case file review method. The chapter also explores reciprocal methods whereby the researcher is expected to give back to the participants, in our case research sites. Consultatory activities are described, and the chapter discusses giving feedback. Two exercises are included: one to support you to develop your own case file review methodology and one to help you consider how case file reviews can unearth evidence about the type of culture that exists in a system.
