Textbooks

 

Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.

Our content is fully searchable and can be accessed on and off-campus through Shibboleth, OpenAthens or an institutional authenticated IP. For any questions on digital textbook pricing and subscription information, please contact simon.bell@bristol.ac.uk.

We are happy to provide digital samples of any of our coursebooks by completing this form. To see the full collection of all our core textbooks, browse our main website.
 

Books: Textbooks

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A Simple Introduction
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Covering a range of important social theorists – from W.E.B. Du Bois to Judith Butler – this accessibly written textbook encourages critical thinking and critical approaches to social work, providing an entry point for anyone interested in thinking theoretically about practice.

Key features include:

  • essential terms explained throughout;

  • end-of-chapter prompts to promote further thinking from students;

  • suggestions for further reading complete with commentary; and

  • companion website with links to videos, a lesson plan and additional resources.

Written for introductory audiences and experts alike, this book will appeal to students studying social work or other related social and allied professions at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as practitioners engaged in professional development.

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Second Edition

The second edition of this best-selling book provides an essential guide to best practice in adult safeguarding. It has been updated to include recent legislative, guidance and research-based developments and relates them to useful practice examples.

Featuring new support materials and key case studies, it includes:

  • a focus on working with marginalised groups under the safeguarding and prevention duties, including ‘transitional’ safeguarding;

  • an exploration of best practice in light of changes to national guidance and research;

  • findings from a range of Safeguarding Adult Reviews with reflections on the outcomes of two national (England) Safeguarding Review Audits; and

  • an expansion of the concepts of professional curiosity and trauma informed/aware approaches.

Students and practitioners are guided to reflect on practice and to extend their skills, knowledge and values to become confident and competent in the complex area of adult safeguarding.

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The Best Interests Assessor (BIA) Practice Handbook is firmly grounded in real-life practice and remains the only textbook focusing directly on the BIA role. Offering clear and practical advice on the legal elements of the role, and the values and practice elements of working within the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) framework, this is essential reading for BIA students and practitioners.

This fully-updated edition takes account of recent legislative changes, including the planned changes from the Liberty Protection Safeguards (LPS), recent case law and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on BIA practice.

Packed with advice on delivering effective, person-centred, rights-driven practice, it includes:

  • case studies;

  • legal summaries;

  • decision-making activities;

  • CPD support;

  • examples of new case law in practice.

Looking forward, the book considers the new context for practice in the Approved Mental Capacity Professional (AMCP) role within the LPS and the potential roles that BIAs might fulfil in this new framework in the future.

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Community-based Action for Transformative Change

In this second edition of a bestselling book, the authors’ unique, holistic and radical perspective on participatory practice has been updated to reflect advances in thought made in the past decade, the impact of neoliberalism and austerity and the challenge of climate change. Their innovative approach bridges the divide between community development ideas and practice to offer a critical praxis.

The authors argue that transformative practice begins with everyday stories about people’s lives and that practical theory generated from these narratives is the best way to inform both policy and practice.

The book will be of interest to academics and community-based practitioners working in a range of settings, including health and education.

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A Step-By-Step Guide to Take You from Start to Finish
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Students and researchers have an abundance of materials and sources available to them via the internet for use in their projects. However, there is little practical guidance available on the fundamentals of performing qualitative research with documents.

This valuable book enables readers to undertake high-quality, robust research using documents as data. Encouraging critical consideration of research design, the book guides readers step-by-step through the process of planning and undertaking a research project based on documentary analysis. It covers selecting a research topic and sample through to analysing and writing up the data.

The book includes:

• a wealth of case studies demonstrating how lessons can be applied in practice;

• summary boxes and suggestions for further reading in each chapter to guide learning;

• helpful online resources to facilitate designing your own research.

Accessible and comprehensive, this book will be invaluable for both students and researchers alike who are new to documentary analysis.

All the resources included in this book are available to download on the book’s webpage at https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/doing-your-research-project-with-documents/online-resources. Look for the Online Resources logo throughout the book.

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The only up-to-date, accessibly written short guide to community development, this third edition offers an invaluable and authoritative introduction. Fully updated to reflect changes in policy, practice, economics and culture, it will equip readers with an understanding of the history and theory of community development, as well as practical guidance on how to do it.

This is a key text for all students and practitioners working with communities. It includes:

• a broad overview of core themes, concepts, basic practices and key issues in community development;

• an analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on community life and well-being, along with the implications for longer-term community support;

• additional brand new content on the pressing issues of democratic decline, social fragmentation and isolation, social care pressures, technological developments and climate change.

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A Practical Approach for Social Workers

Crossing the traditional divide between social work with children and families and adults, this text applies a lifecourse perspective, within an ecological frame. Based on the principle that practice drives theory, a practical approach for social work is put forward using five interconnected themes:

• duality of support and protection

• life transitions and life events

• intergenerational relations

• civic partnership and engagement

• health and wellbeing

Designed for students and practitioners, this text takes an enquiry-based approach using Critical ART (analysis, reflection and thinking). The book features:

• case studies

• research examples

• tips for Critical ART in practice

• further reading and resources

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A Practical Guide

Nearly 20% of the population has a disability. Despite this, mainstream research often does not explicitly address the methodological and practical issues that can act as barriers to disabled people’s participation in social research. In this book, Aidley and Fearon provide a concise, practical introduction to making it easier for everyone to take part in research.

Requiring no prior knowledge about accessible research methods, the book:

• explains how removing barriers to participation will improve the quality of the research;

• covers the research process from design, to collecting data, to dissemination and publication;

• includes checklists and further reading, as well as useful examples and vignettes to illustrate how issues play out in practice.

This book will be invaluable to researchers from a variety of backgrounds looking to increase participation in their research, whether postgraduate students, experienced academic researchers, practitioners or professionals.

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A Practical Guide

This groundbreaking book brings creative writing to social research. Its innovative format includes creatively written contributions by researchers from a range of disciplines, modelling the techniques outlined by the authors. The book is user-friendly and shows readers:

• how to write creatively as a social researcher;

• how creative writing can help researchers to work with participants and generate data;

• how researchers can use creative writing to analyse data and communicate findings.

Inviting beginners and more experienced researchers to explore new ways of writing, this book introduces readers to creatively written research in a variety of formats including plays and poems, videos and comics. It not only gives social researchers permission to write creatively but also shows them how to do so.

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A Practical Guide
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Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice.

This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods:

• arts-based research

• embodied research

• research using technology

• multi-modal research

• transformative research frameworks.

Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research.

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