The Impact of Short Breaks on Families with a Disabled Child: Report One of the Quantitative Phase

This document reports on a cross-sectional sample of families with a disabled child using short breaks in England; it describes the characteristics of children and families using short breaks, the nature and quantity of the short breaks they are using, their experiences of and satisfaction with short breaks and which factors are associated with a range of outcomes for family carers, disabled children and their siblings. This report uses both quantitative data derived from standardised questions and qualitative data from family members’ written responses to open-ended questions in the survey instruments

The impacts of short break provision on disabled children and families: an international literature review

For over 30 years, short breaks have been part of the landscape of support provision for families with a disabled child. Historically, the term ‘respite care’ has been used in much of the research literature concerning short breaks for families with a disabled child. However, ‘short breaks’ has become the preferred term, partly due to the negative connotations of family carers requiring ‘respite’ from their children, and partly because short breaks now encompass a much wider range of supports than out-of-home placement in specialist residential facilities (Cramer and Carlin, 2008). As such, the term ‘short breaks’ will be used throughout this review, with the exception of direct quotes from research studies where the term ‘respite’ is used by study participants or study authors

Towards a Psychosocial Pedagogy: The 'student journey', intersubjectivity, and the development of agency

We report preliminary results from a CELT Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research grant. Informed by psychosocial psychology and Lacanian discourse analysis, the project studied students’ transformations into autonomous and effective agents. Repeat interviews (n=15) with final year students were informed by the psychosocial themes of power, affect, intersubjectivity and agency. The analysis was guided by Lacan’s theory of the 'four discourses' (Lacan, 2007; Neil, 2013) and T. R. Johnson’s (2014) application of Lacan in a higher education context. We found that students can move backwards and forwards between discourses depending on their desires and ambitions: the Lacanian objet a. We conclude that the pervasive metaphor of the 'student journey' is an inadequate representation of the student experience. Our critique addresses the implications for learning and teaching and for the university’s mission to develop its students

The emotional and analytic impact of working with disturbing secondary data

The paper discusses the effects on the researcher of reading disturbing secondary data (defined here as evidence gathered by someone other than the researcher). The case study is a qualitative sociological autopsy of suicide and the secondary data – written documents and photographs - are all from case files in a British coroner’s office. After some ethnographic detail about the research setting and research process, there is some discussion in the paper of the diverse secondary data sources in these files, particularly in relation to the impact on the researcher. Some general observations are made about emotion in the research process and potential strategies for responding to emotion. The authors locate their responses to reading about suicides within the broader context of the social processing of death and distress and also consider whether or not emotional reactions to data have any analytical purchase

Public opinion as questions not answers: How citizens evaluate the therapeutic potential of stem cell research in the context of T1 diabetes

It is now commonplace for policy-makers, think -tanks and social scientists to call for increased public participation in science and technology policy (e.g. House of Lords, 2000; Wilsden and Willis, 2004; CST, 2005). Nowhere is this more apparent than in stem cell science. The recent Pattison report1 on the UK Stem Cell Initiative called on the government to invest at least £350m in stem cell research by 2016 and also stressed the importance of maintaining a ‘close liaison of parties involved in developing regulation and public dialogue on stem cell research’ (recommendations 8 & 11). Whilst laudable, the idea of increased participation is not without its problems. For example, one frequently expressed concern is that public dialogue comes too late in the process to effect any significant change. From this perspective, consultation exercises are seen as ways of re-building trust so that what is presented as an exercise in democratic participation can often be interpreted as an investigation into how to gain support of the public (cf Irwin, 2001, 2006; Rayner, 2003; Rowe and Frewer, 2004)

Student Subjectivity in the Marketised University

We present data from an exploratory qualitative interview-based pedagogical research project on the development of student agency in higher education. Our aim was to respond to Nick Zepke’s claim that what is often missing from the current neoliberal discourse of higher education ‘is students having a voice in what and how they learn and how they can action their voice in the wider community as agentic citizens.’ Informed by Lacanian discourse analysis, our project investigated the opportunities and threats facing some of our undergraduate students as they struggled to exercise agency and develop autonomy in the marketised university. Repeat interviews (n = 15) with final year students focussed on the psychosocial categories of power, affect, intersubjectivity and desire. The analysis was guided by Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, an account of the vicissitudes of agency. We found that students can move between discourses depending on the extent to which their agency (operationalised here as Lacan’s ‘object cause of desire,’ the objet petit a) was enabled or thwarted. Our critique of the metaphor of the ‘student journey’ addresses the implications for learning and teaching and the university’s mission to develop its students in light of perceived commercial pressures