Titles on our Children, Young People and Families list range from bestselling textbooks, including the Open University Childhood series, critical monographs such as those in the international Sociology of Children and Families series and the Families, Relationships and Societies journal.
Long-established, this interdisciplinary list brings together work across Childhood Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. It supports students in their successful study, challenges current policy and practice and offers practical guidance to those working with children and young people in often difficult circumstances.
Children, Young People and Families
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This chapter will support the reader to develop a research aim and research questions for their participatory research project. The chapter explains what research aims and research questions are and the difference between them as well as offering tips and checklists to develop them with the project with groups, organisations or communities. The importance of people creating their own research questions is linked to social justice. This chapter also introduces the idea of ‘locating’ the research study in a wider field of literature in order to show how it relates to other people’s thinking. A practical approach to this is suggested so that it does not become too time consuming or distracting.
This chapter explains some of the core beliefs that are associated with different types of research so the reader can understand the fundamental differences between them. The underpinning beliefs or philosophy of participatory research is explained as having three foundations. The chapter then progresses to explain how different approaches to research are tied to the core beliefs of each type of research. The chapter also introduces the concept of research alignment – ensuring that all elements of design are complementary – as a key aspect of research quality.
This chapter explores the range of people and roles for people in participatory research. This includes thinking through who does the research with you as co-researchers and who the co-researchers might invite to be participants in the research. The chapter includes a discussion of power as participatory research aims to transform power relations between actors in these collaborative research endeavours. The chapter describes some of the difficulties inherent in identifying and describing groups and suggests practical solutions to these issues. The chapter also discusses people’s involvement in terms of identifying target populations, sampling and recruitment strategies and ways to deal with the inevitable ‘drop out’ from research.
In China, Confucian authoritative familism has long established the tradition of paternal grandparents caring for grandchildren. With urbanisation in progress, many older people choose to settle in cities with their children, mainly to look after their grandchildren, and are known as ‘migrant grandparents’. Through a study of this group in Shanghai, the article reveals four other roles of migrant grandparents in addition to the role of caregivers: namely, workers, leisure seekers, in-laws (qingjia) and spouses. The prioritisation of grandparents’ roles demonstrates their increasing subjectivity in self-determination, transformative social values and personal life expectations. This article argues that Chinese older adults have begun to individualise and that these practices have contributed both to the destruction of the collective single-core family model in traditional and neo-familism and the emergence of independent, dual-core familism between two generations.
This chapter explains how community activists in Complexo da Maré, Brazil, worked to enhance the sense of identity of local residents by recording and celebrating their stories, lives and the social relations that exist, in addition to physically mapping the area for the first time. This participative mapping exercise, undertaken with the support of sympathetic academic and civil society actors, provided an evidence base to make effective demands on service providers. The chapter also refers to the range of strategies adopted by Redes da Maré, from creative approaches to the training of local volunteers, and from the provision of direct services to advocacy and legal tactics.
The chapter considers community development practice in Northern Ireland/the North of Ireland – where even the appellation is contested. The political context and landscape are described to offer a context for the community development and conflict transformation approaches adopted over some five decades. The author examines the politics of peacebuilding as well as outlining community development practice at various phases of the conflict and emergence from overt violence. She also focuses specifically on learning drawn from work undertaken by, and with, victims/survivors of the violence and political ex-prisoners.
The chapter also offers an insight into how development work was undertaken with those communities that were in danger of being ‘left behind’ in terms of community organising. The sensitive and difficult work of addressing inter-community divisions is also described, with an examination of the application of Putnam’s theory of social capital (bonding, bridging and linking) to frame the important task of building relationships among divided communities. The chapter concludes with some pointers for funding organisations that are interested in resourcing community development approaches to peacebuilding.
In this chapter we draw together some of the themes from earlier chapters and outline what we think are the foundations for practice in peacebuilding through community development. We consider some of the theoretical foundations; we try to address some of the questions which practitioners on the ground might have about how you know what needs to be done, how to do it, how long it might take and how you know whether it is working. We also draw particularly on the editors’ experience of working in Northern Ireland as well as an appreciation of the importance of grounded community-based peacebuilding approaches supported by the members of the Foundations for Peace Network – a Network that was co-founded by Avila Kilmurray in 2004.
This chapter examines how local intelligentsia drove community development in the conflict-affected regions, reaching out across the conflict divides and beyond to find allies in their mission. One particularly bright illustration of this is the formation of the Caucasus Forum of NGOs, which between 1998 and 2005 brought together active civil society from across the north and south of the region in a shared mission and mutual exchange. The format was an adaptation for the new and emerging ‘civil society’ of a traditional Caucasian method of dispute resolution, wherein neighbours are invited to play the role of mediator and facilitator.
The chapter provides examples of how through various initiatives the network operated as mediator, dialogue facilitator, civil society capacity builder, early warning and conflict prevention mechanism and an engine for community development. It reflects that the distinctions between national elite and local community development are false distinctions in this context – or where there are ‘local leaders’ who are not part of the ‘elite’, their work is almost completely dependent on them.
In this chapter, the authors explore and build on this theory to discuss their attempts to operationalise it into community development practice in Rakhine State, Myanmar – a region that has seen significant intercommunal and armed conflict in recent years, resulting in two-thirds of the Rohingya population being driven into Bangladesh in an act of ethnic cleansing. This chapter explores ways in which the principles and typologies of ‘everyday peace’ are being translated into community development practice by Vicki-Ann and Anthony Ware and evaluated by Leanne Kelly, in a programme working to strengthen peace formation between villages of Rohingya Muslim remaining in Myanmar and their Rakhine Buddhist neighbours. The authors draw from both their academic perspective and their grounded experience of the practice put in place during this programme of work. The case study demonstrates the conclusion that community development approaches can offer a strong foundation on which to scaffold an everyday peace framework that, in turn, supports the building of inclusive relationships and more peaceful coexistence.
Community development approaches to peacebuilding usually focus on strengthening social cohesion, finding common ground, bringing groups together and negotiation. However, this is not always immediately safe or possible after serious intercommunal violence. The idea of ‘everyday peace’ has recently emerged in the literature, to describe the ways in which ordinary individuals and groups navigate everyday life in deeply divided societies, to avoid or minimise both awkward situations and conflict triggers. At one end of the spectrum, everyday peace may create a safe space in which things appear normal, despite the conflict, allowing people to get on with life. At this level, everyday peace could be seen as the first peace, with inter-group contact after violence, or the last peace in the sense of being the last remaining bridging social capital before total rupture. In this chapter, the authors explore the concepts of the everyday and of everyday peace in detail, highlighting its relevance to community development practice, particularly that which adopts appreciative inquiry and awareness-raising approaches (Elliott, 1999; Bushe, 2011).
