Sally Holland

This paper reports qualitative findings from a mixed-methods evaluation of an intervention for families affected by substance misuse and child protection concerns. The study involved twenty-seven families, including eighty-four children. The data illustrate the various impacts of substance misuse on family life, including neglect, instability and physical and sexual abuse. During semi-structured interviews, many of the parents went some way to counter highly stigmatised identities through confessing previous parental failings and demonstrating the distance they have travelled since then. A small minority maintained that they have been wrongly labelled as inadequate parents. Additionally, parents vividly recalled hardships and abuse, underlining the challenging material realities of their lives. For most, domestic abuse was a particularly dominant factor. Implications for practice are outlined in the conclusion of the paper.

This article explores the relationship between ethical procedures and ethics in practice in a research project with parents and children from 27 families who had received a social intervention based on their substance misuse and concerns about the protection of their children. We draw on the ‘ethics of care’ to argue that ethical practices are relational, interactive, responsive and, at times, reciprocal. While ethical regulation provides an important opportunity to anticipate ethical issues and build safeguards for participants and researcher, the regulatory process tends to focus on the ethical actions of the researcher rather than the researched. In this article, we demonstrate how ethical decisions were made through, by or alongside participants, drawing on examples of access, consent, protection from harm and negotiating the presence of others in interviews.

This paper draws on a series of life‐history interviews with 16 young adults who were all formerly looked‐after children. Eight young men and eight young women aged 17 to 25 took part in the study in Wales, UK. They had experienced a wide range of circumstances at home, in care and after care. They were contacted through a self‐advocacy organization and other care leavers' groups. The paper explores how insights from the sociology of the family can serve to enhance understandings of these young people's life stories and, additionally, how their lived experiences can contribute to this sociological field. Key themes explored in the paper include the emotional co‐presence of the birth family for children living in substitute care, the dynamic nature of experiences and perceptions of family relationships through the life course, the importance of siblings and the insightful reflections of participants on the challenges of learning to ‘do’ family across childhoods marked by nomadism. The paper concludes that a holistic theoretical approach that embraces ‘psy’ and sociological understandings of families and relationships will be most productive for researchers, practitioners and families.

This paper reports on a study of 40 child protection case files that were open in an English local authority in 2007. The study aimed to explore continuities and change in the engagement of men in the child protection system in England. The files recorded that 63 men were involved in the lives of the 71 children who were the focus of the child protection concerns. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the minutes of the initial child protection meeting, strategy meetings, professional reports and the first review meeting. The study found high levels of violence in the cases and domestic violence was the most common reason for convening an initial child protection meeting. In common with earlier studies, men were found to be much less engaged in the child protection process than women, domestic violence was underplayed and little attention was paid to men's practical caring skills. Possibly as a result of changes to definitions of child abuse in recent years, this study also found that domestic violence may be used as a lever to initiate child protection processes where there are other concerns and that much more attention was paid to the likely emotional and physical impact of violence on children than on women. It was also found that violent men in this small sample were more likely to be engaged by professionals than men about whom there was no record of violence. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article discusses some new ways in which social work research can explore the interaction between neighbourhoods and child and adult well-being. The authors note that social work practices are often criticised for taking an individualistic approach and paying too little attention to the service user's environment. The article uses examples of research projects from Chile, the USA and Wales, to discuss the use of spatially oriented research methods for understanding neighbourhood factors. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods approaches that are particularly appropriate for investigating social work-relevant topics are discussed in turn, including quantitative and qualitative uses for geographical information systems (GIS), hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) for analysing spatially clustered data and qualitative mobile interviews. The article continues with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of using spatially orientated research designs in social work research settings and concludes optimistically with suggestions for future directions in this area.

This paper reports findings from a qualitative research study of twenty-six core assessments, concerning thirty-two children, completed over a six-month period in one Welsh local authority. The data reported in the paper come from the twenty-six written assessment reports and interviews with the thirteen social workers who completed the assessments. The study was concerned with how social workers assess and report on children's identities. Identity is one of the seven developmental needs of children categorised in the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families (National Assembly for Wales, 2001b). It is noted that practitioners display a broad understanding of identities when discussing their own identities in interview and report a practice commitment to learning about the details of children's lives in an attempt to ‘get to know’ the children. However, the assessment reports tend to convey only narrowly defined and negative aspects of the children's identities, with many descriptions standardised and replicated between reports. Similarities to findings from a study conducted by one of the authors prior to the introduction of the Assessment Framework are noted, and it is suggested that bureaucratic constraints, the need to argue a case and defensive practices may have impeded change.

This article reviews 44 refereed journal articles published between 2003 and 2008. All of the articles attempt to directly uncover the experiences or perspectives of young people cared for by the state in foster, residential or kinship care homes. The review reveals that this field is developing a rich body of evidence derived from a broad range of methodological and theoretical frameworks. In this sample, research designs appeared to be influenced by placement settings, as well as theoretical orientations, but comparative and longitudinal designs were used in both quantitative and qualitative studies. Participative research designs were only present in qualitative designs within a broadly interpretive theoretical orientation. It is suggested in this article that researchers should critically reflect on the use of constructs that may negatively label young people in care. It is also suggested that there could be fuller reporting of ethical issues. Despite some identified gaps, such as the participation of young people in quantitative research designs and research with younger age groups, the article concludes that there appears to be an encouraging emergence of theoretical and methodological diversity in this research area.

This article discusses the potential of family group conferences to act as a liberating intervention for families traditionally controlled by the state welfare system. Family group conferences are interventions designed to remove control of decision making from professionals and allow family groups to make decisions about the welfare of one or more of their members. Using data from a qualitative evaluation of family group conferences in Wales, this article examines ‘imposed empowerment’ and social control, and the feasibility of treating ‘the family’ as a unit for state intervention. The authors propose that the family group conference approach not only has the potential to shift the balance of power between the state and client families, but that it may have the potential to democratise decision making within families. However, it is also noted that such interventions can be seen to be maintaining social control through subtle and possibly unintentional means. The article engages with sociological research and theory on democracy in the family.