‘Get yourself some nice, neat, matching box files’: research administrators and occupational identity work

To date, qualitative research into occupational groups and cultures within academia has been relatively scarce, with an almost exclusive concentration upon teaching staff within universities and colleges. This article seeks to address this lacuna and applies the interactionist concept of ‘identity work’ in order to examine one specific group to date under-researched: graduate research administrators. This occupational group is of sociological interest as many of its members appear to span the putative divide between ‘academic’ and ‘administrative’ occupational worlds within higher education. An exploratory, qualitative research project was undertaken, based upon interviews with 27 research administrators. The study analyses how research administrators utilise various forms of identity work to sustain credible occupational identities, often in the face of considerable challenge from their academic colleagues

Dirty secrets and being ‘strange’:using ethnomethodology to fight familiarity

The paper is a discussion of my attempt to move beyond familiarity by using ethnomethodology – and the emotional impact of doing so; namely, the feeling of having a ‘dirty secret’. As a social work group member interviewing social workers, the process of fieldwork was all too familiar. However, during transcription and analysis, what I had considered to be ‘business as usual’ was revealed as something more complex. The paper describes how the ethnomethodological notions of being a member, the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and breaching worked to make the familiar strange and became key to my understanding

Vulnerable Children, Young People, and Families: Policy, Practice, and Social Justice in England and Scotland

This chapter begins by highlighting the rise of vulnerability as a term in social policy, and the three-level approach that is used to examine it. The first level is definitional, examining the possibility of defining vulnerability and vulnerabilities through a consideration of relevant literature and a number of recent policy documents. The second looks at how policy developments in Scotland and England have diverged, particularly since 2010, and how vulnerability has become more central to education policy in England. The third level focuses on practice, presenting research undertaken by the authors into a programme developed to support vulnerable children, young people, and families in Northern England as a case study exemplifying some of the factors affecting the effectiveness of programmes in which schools played an important but not central part. This practice perspective is still too often overlooked in discussions of policy and definition, and it is suggested that its inclusion will contribute to the ongoing debate about both how best to support vulnerable families and the implications for education and social justice

Conceptualising and Effecting Good Outcomes in Foster Care:an exploration of the research literature

On any one day over 75,000 children are looked after by local authorities in the UK. Numerically the most important form of provision for these looked after children is foster care. This caters for about 60% of those looked after at any one point in time. This review is about its outcomes. The Oxford English Dictionary gives one meaning of outcome as 'a visible or practical product, effect or result'. This definition emphasises causality and efficacy. So we are primarily concerned with outcomes which foster care can bring about: changes that are desired (or not) and that would not have occurred without it. That said, it is often difficult to know whether these changes should be seen as the effects of foster care or would have occurred in any case. In what follows we first describe what happens to foster children. We then turn to the more complicated question of how far what happens can be seen as an effect of foster care itself. Against this background we consider five broad issues. • Methodology – how do we decide whether an apparent outcome is in fact produced by foster care and not simply a state that follows it? • The background to outcome research in foster care. What are the basic characteristics of fostered children? Why are they fostered? How do they do? What is foster care meant to do for them? Against what criteria should its outcomes be assessed? • The overall impact of foster care. Judged against these criteria do children on average do ‘better’ if they are fostered than would have been the case if they were not? • Differences within foster care. Given that a child is fostered what makes a difference to whether he or she has a good or less good outcome? • Implications. In the light of this evidence what might be done by way of organisation, training and so on to ensure that the outcomes of foster care are as good as possible

Local authority family centre intervention: a statistical exploration of services as family support or family control

This paper sets out findings from a statistical exploration into services arising from child protection referrals which became open cases allocated to local authority child care social workers employed by a large local authority social services department in South Wales. The workers operate from six local authority family centres located in areas of high social need. They offer a range of family support services as well as carrying out child protection investigations and related activities. In analysing the data a probability ratio was created to identify which offered services were more likely to be taken up. An activity index for services offered and taken up was then constructed followed by an attempt to delineate families' likely orientation to a family support or 'protection and control' mode of intervention. This is achieved by creating a simple range of lower and upper bounds of perception by imputing service orientation from the position of three 'representative individuals': a 'very suspicious client', a 'neutral third party', and a 'very optimistic social worker'. These three positions allow manipulation of the questionnaire data to estimate the probable interpretation of services from provider and recipient standpoints. From these sources parameter estimates to explore key variables associated with worker views about the sufficiency of their service in relation to family support and/or more controlling forms of intervention are deployed. The study suggests that child protection cases receive a family centre service strongly orientated to support rather than a narrow policing activity. However, there remain some notable differences of perception between worker and 'representative individuals' that imply potential difficulties over the role of local authority family centres

Advocacy services for children and young people in Wales A Welsh Office commissioned study

English/Welsh text on inverted pagesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m00/22006 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo