When it comes to adopting evidence-based approaches, does the size of an organization really matter?
This practical guide brings leading police and sociology experts together to demonstrate how police forces of all sizes can successfully embed evidence-based methods by using their strengths and limitations to their advantage. Drawing on experiences of policing in North America, it proposes new ways of strategizing and harnessing the talents of ‘change champions’.
Building on the authors’ widely adopted first book on evidence-based policing, this is essential reading for practitioners, aspiring leaders, students and policy-makers.
-specific values, skills, motivations, and timeliness. keywords: civil society • evidence-based research • intermediaries • knowledge exchange To cite this article: Allen, WL (2017) Factors that impact how civil society intermediaries perceive evidence, Evidence & Policy, vol 13 no 2, 183–200, DOI: 10.1332/1744264 6X14538259555968 Introduction In recent years, the civil society sector has produced, consumed, and commissioned a great deal of ‘evidence’, and continues to do so. As datasets and tools for accessing them become more widely available, increasingly under the
expected to relate to and provide a support service for the entire delivery framework. WEDHS planned activities included providing a gateway to all research in Wales specifically involving BME patients, service users and community groups; to establish a research support service that proactively promotes an equality agenda; to design and support high quality evidence based research that addresses the priorities of BME patients, service users and groups; and to identify, review and utilise research findings that will improve the health and wellbeing of BME
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 LGBT+ 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 editors examine best practices to positively affect the lives of survivors.
Social policy is often constructed and implemented by people who have little experience of its impact as a service user, but there has been a growing interest in greater public, patient and service user involvement in social policy as both political activity and academic discipline.
Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.
A companion volume to Peter Beresford’s bestselling All our welfare, it introduces the voices of different groups of service users, starting from their lived experience. With an impressive list of contributors, this important volume fills a gap in looking at social policy using participatory and inclusive approaches and the use of experiential knowledge in its construction. It will challenge traditional state and market-led approaches to welfare.
As someone with long-term health conditions, health policy is important to me, because it can affect which services I access and how. On paper, at least, that is reflected in UK policy, with phrases such as ‘nothing about us without us’1 and the NHS Constitution2 placing great important on people like me getting involved as patient leaders.
My lived experience began when I was 19 and still studying at university. After the initial shock and disruption of getting diagnosed with long-term health conditions, it quickly became clear to me that this was a far more informative experience than information I was trying to learn in my studies. It is hard to describe the lived experience I am accumulating as each day goes by, since it varies from good to bad, acute to chronic, specialist care and the ‘get on and cope with it yourself ’ approaches as well as the almost inevitable mental health challenges caused by the physical health.
Combining that with a hunger for a new identity since my old identity had been robbed by the health conditions motivated me to want to make this experience of some value for somebody somewhere – although at first, I really wasn’t sure who or where that would be. I think the sentiment of ‘wanting to improve things for others’, or ‘make sure others don’t have to go through the same experience’ is a common motivator for people, and I am certainly no exception. The challenge for me came in finding something that fitted that bill, and enabled me to use my lived experience.
The statement in the title by a Housing Officer in my local borough said so much. The focus on the provision of at best a house rather than a home ignores the impact lack of suitable housing can have on the human beings who are so often the recipients of the results of decisions made about them without them. Having made the transition from homelessness to now having a social housing tenancy and a further transition from long-term dependency on benefits, I have come to redefine my understanding of Squalor – one of the ‘giant evils’ Beveridge defined in his then groundbreaking report.
I believe he meant it in a ‘bricks and mortar’ sense. Having people living in squalid conditions was clearly the key challenge in those times. I have come to see it these days as having deeper connotations.
An archaic definition of ‘stigma’ is a brand on the skin. I see squalor as also being about mud that sticks. People forced to rely on benefits, and if lucky housed in social housing, are increasingly viewed as being of lesser worth – the ‘undeserving poor’, the ‘feckless’, and so on. I noted with horror the building of so-called ‘affordable housing’ in private developments with separate entrances for those lesser mortals. The creation of ‘poor doors’ with markedly less attractive fixtures and fittings and even segregated bins to make sure even the rubbish of the lesser is kept away from the throwaways of the privileged.
The UK Care Act 2014 defines housing as one of nine areas of ‘wellbeing’ which local authorities must promote and give proper attention to ‘the suitability of living accommodation’ (HM Government, 2014)
In 2015 the Building Research Establishment more than doubled its 2010 estimate of cost to the UK National Health Service (NHS) of poor housing from £600 million to £1.5 billion.
So far the approach of UK social policy to addressing inclusive education has been a pick-and-mix affair. It has primarily been related to notions of locational, social or functional integration (DES, 1978) rather than inclusion; that is, the wholesale restructuring of education in its totality, relating to human rights, social justice and principally about the politics of recognition (Barton, 2003). Indeed this can be seen as the global situation with few exceptions. As regards a participatory approach, educational state policy rarely includes the ‘voice’ of disabled people, a point raised by Oliver (1996), although in relation to welfare policy. Oliver’s comment is worth repeating (with amendment) in this context of inclusive education, that:
I have watched in dismay as [segregated educational services] continue to be reorganised on the basis of advice from people who have little or no experience of them and how the advice of [disabled people who have attended such provision] continues to be ignored. (Oliver, 1996: 43 –44; emphasis added)
The concept of inclusive education, rather than ‘integration’, emerged during the early 1990s, primarily through a series of conferences initiated and facilitated by a group of individuals but principally by Joe Whittaker (who was then situated at the University of Bolton, previously Bolton Institute of Higher Education, and currently a trustee of the Alliance for Inclusive Education). Among other initiatives, these conferences set the tone for change, and centrally involved disabled people at the forefront of sharing knowledge, drawing upon their own lived experiences.
Even the movement for education inclusion, led by disabled people, began life in 1990 as the Integration Alliance (emphasis added) with a name change to the Alliance for Inclusive Education (ALLFIE) in the mid-1990s.
‘I came here for job. It was not easy. It was hard before because I didn’t speak English … it was difficult to go to job centre and apply for job. Now is easier because I speak English and I have job. Now is all right.’ Marek (M, 28, Slovakia)
‘To give people work. It’s very hard if people do not speak language
… this is very big question.’ Kornelie (F, 47, Romania)
This chapter explores the Beveridge ‘giant’ of ‘idleness’ – and its presumed slayer, a political commitment to achieving full employment – via the lens of ‘first hand’ experiences of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrant Roma (‘Gypsy’) communities who have moved to the UK in the past decade or so from countries such as Slovakia and Romania. To do this, a few words will first be said about how we both understand and interpret ‘idleness’ and employment in the historical and contemporary age. This section will necessarily investigate the specific Beveridge approach to combatting ‘idleness’ and look at some of the fundamental diversity and equality issues that it raises, including racism, classism, xenophobia and sexism. Likewise, from an international or at least trans-European perspective, the chapter will locate and analyse what might be termed the ‘labour of language’. What is meant by this? In a later section it is argued that for many CEE Roma workers in the UK – such as Marek from Slovakia and Kornelie from Romania, who are quoted above – one of the first issues to be confronted is a ‘working language’ barrier, in addition to many other challenges in seeking even basic service provision in key social policy areas such as housing, social security, health and education.
This chapter is about what it’s like to live in Bunbury, Western Australia (WA) and the things that the government does for people with disabilities. The City of Bunbury is 180 kilometres south of Perth, in the south west corner of WA. About 32,000 people live in the City of Bunbury. There are also other shires near Bunbury – for example, the Shire of Harvey, where some of us live. A shire is a local government area. The Greater Bunbury Region includes the Shires of Harvey, Dardanup and Capel. Altogether, about 80,000 people live in Greater Bunbury. There are a lot of kangaroos in Bunbury too; you see them all the time on the golf course in Australind, at the Bird Park, and at the University. Edith Cowan University has a regional campus in Bunbury, which is where Adam and Kathy work.
Adam and Kathy organised meetings and helped us write this chapter. We met five times – each time we met, we had lunch first and then we had a group discussion for two hours. We made recordings of our discussions and Kathy typed up what we said in the recordings and used our words to write the chapter. We talked about whether we would use our real names in the chapter, or just our first name, or choose another name – we all did what we wanted to do. We have used real names for most of the organisations we talk about in the chapter – but in a few places, we have used a false name and put it in inverted commas.
