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In this exciting book, leading fatherhood scholars from Europe and Scandinavia offer unique insights into how to research fathers and fatherhood in contemporary society.
Outlining research methods in detail, including examples of large scale studies, online research, surveys and visual and aural methods, they explore how each approach worked in practice, what the benefits and pitfalls were, and what the wider and future application of the chosen research methods might be.
Covering a wide range of subjects from non-resident fathers to father engagement in child protection, this major contribution to the field also critiques and addresses the notion that fathers, especially young fathers, can be ‘hard to reach’. Essential reading for both students and policy makers in a fast-growing area of interest.
From the vantage point of forty years in social research and the study of families, Julia Brannen offers an invaluable account of how research is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. This fascinating work covers key developments in the field that remain of vital concern to society and demonstrates how social research is an art as well as a science – a process that involves craft and creativity.
Family policy paradoxes examines the political regulation of the family in Sweden between 1930 and today. It draws attention to the political attempts to create a ‘modern family’ and the aspiration to regulate the family and establish gender equality, thereby shedding light on ongoing policy processes within Europe and how these can be understood in the light of a particular political experience.
The book is valuable for researchers, lecturers, undergraduate and graduate students who study gender, gender equality and welfare state development in gender studies, sociology, social and public policy, social work, politics and social/contemporary history
This radical and critical account of family justice explores children’s wellbeing and ethical issues in children’s upbringing through the lens of political philosophy. Fowler reconceptualises what constitutes children’s wellbeing, the duties of parents to promote children’s wellbeing and the collective obligations of state and society to ensure that children’s best interests are advanced and protected.
Arguing that the wellbeing of children should not be measured in terms of subjective happiness but rather by them coming to hold an appropriate set of values and aspirations, Fowler challenges the dominant liberal model of parenting and calls instead for all citizens to take greater responsibility for guaranteeing that children lead flourishing lives.
The launch of the Troubled Families Programme in the wake of the 2011 riots conflated poor and disadvantaged families with anti-social and criminal families. The programme aimed to ‘turn around’ the lives of the country’s most ‘troubled families’, at a time of austerity and wide-ranging welfare reforms which hit the poorest families hardest.
This detailed, authoritative and critical account reveals the inconsistencies and contradictions within the programme, and issues of deceit and malpractice in its operation. It shows how this core government policy has stigmatised the families it claimed to support.
Paving the way for a government to fulfil its responsibility to families, rather than condemning them, this book will empower local authority workers, policy-makers and researchers, and anyone interested in social justice, to challenge damaging, aggressive neoliberal statecraft.
This volume brings together contributors from 18 countries to provide international perspectives on the politics of parental leave policies in different parts of the world. Initially looking at the politics of care leave policies in eight countries across Europe, the US, Latin America and Asia, the book moves on to consider a variety of key issues in depth, including gender equality, flexibility and challenges for fathers in using leave. In the final section of the book, contributors look beyond the early parenthood period to consider possible future directions for care leave policy in order to address the wider changes and challenges that our societies face.
This exciting collection presents an in-depth, up-to-date analysis of the unprecedented phenomenon of increasing numbers of grandparents worldwide, co-existing and interacting for longer periods of time with their grandchildren.
The book contains analyses of topics that have so far received relatively little attention, such as transnational grandparenting and gender differences in grandparenting practices. It is the only collection that brings together theory-driven research on grandparenting from a wide variety of cultural and welfare state contexts - including chapters on Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Australia - drawing broad lines of debate rather than focusing at a country level.
Building on the success of ‘Contemporary grandparenting’, edited by Virpi Timonen and Sarah Arber, this book further deepens our understanding of how social structures continue to shape grandparenting across a wide range of cultural and economic contexts. The book is essential reading and reference for researchers, students and policy-makers who want to understand the growing influence of grandparents in ageing families and societies across the world.
‘The family’ is a subject of enormous academic, political and popular interest. It is a central feature of most people’s lives, the framework within which other relationships, activities and events take place. This unique study provides important new insights into the dynamics of Britain’s social and economic life - in family structures and relationships; in employment and household incomes; in housing, health and political affiliations.
Most previous research has been limited to measuring an individual or family’s position only at the time of the interview. This book presents a clearer picture by following the important events in people’s lives, such as starting work, getting married, or falling into poverty. It reviews existing findings and presents new analyses of data from the British Household Panel Survey. The same 10,000 adults (in 5,000 households) have been interviewed every year between 1991 and 1997.
Seven years in the lives of British families is a collaboration between members of the University of Essex’s Institute for Social and Economic Research. Each of the authors is an expert in the field, but the work has been presented in an easy-to-read style to make these important research findings widely accessible. The book will be read by policy makers and all with an interest in the dynamics of modern society, as well as by academic sociologists, economists and demographers.
This book offers a radical rethink of family policy in the UK. Clem Henricson, the family policy expert, analyses in detail the major shift in the role of the state viz a viz personal relationships in recent years, with its aspirations to reduce child poverty, increase social mobility and deliver social cohesion. Brought in by New Labour and carried forward, albeit in diluted form, by the Coalition, Henricson asks whether this philosophy of social betterment through manipulating the parent-child relationship is appropriate for family policy. She challenges the thinking behind the expectation that you can change a highly unequal society through the family route. Instead the argument is made for a family policy with its own raison d’etre, free of other government agendas. A premium is set on the need to manage the multiple core tensions in families of affection, empathy and supportiveness on the one hand and aggression, deception and self interest on the other. A set of coherent support and control polices for family relations are developed which endorse this awareness and embrace a fundamental shift in perspective for future progressive governments.
This book takes a life course perspective, analysing and comparing the biographies of mothers and fathers in seven European countries in context. Based on an innovative, cross-national EU study, it examines the ways in which working parents negotiate the transition to parenthood and attempt to find a ‘work-life balance’.
Using in-depth qualitative biographical data, the book offers a deep understanding of working parents’ real lives by locating them within diverse national, workplace and family contexts. It provides rich insights into how policies and practices at the institutional level play out in individual and family lives, how they shape the decisions during both transition phases and in parents’ daily experiences of juggling work and family life. It highlights some difficult and complex issues about the sustainability of contemporary working practices for bringing up children that are highly relevant in times of economic retrenchment.
‘Transitions to parenthood in Europe’ will be of interest to an academic readership at all levels of the social sciences, as well as employers, managers, trade unions and policy makers.
