Social Research Unit

People shop from the back of a converted truck container in a low income housing community in Ballymun, Dublin.

January 27 2010

The Social Research Unit is among child policy research centres in Dublin this week for the latest meeting of a network bringing international perspective to the problems of child poverty, child abuse and neglect.

The International Network of Child Policy Research Centres was set up after an exploratory gathering at the Chapin Hall Center for Children in Chicago in 2001.

The Unit has had connections with the Chicago centre since the 1990s. Other participants come from Brazil, India, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Korea, Northern Ireland, Norway, South Africa and the US. On the agenda are discussions about prevention and early intervention, youth policy, assessing the impact of research on policy and evaluating complex community-based initiatives.

Previous collaborations have produced two Oxford University Press books, giving cross-national perspectives on research utilisation and residential care. But they are not the goal: the founding objective was to create a space for peer learning unhindered by political borders.

Needs measures must change

January 04 2010

Despite the legal requirement that local authorities should identify and assist ‘children in need’, children’s services agencies are still struggling to do so meaningfully and efficiently, we argue in the latest edition of the British Journal...

Nick Axford's article analyses the strengths and weaknesses of prevalent approaches to determining the needs of child populations England and Wales before discussing new methods. It also argues how resources could and should be transferred to these more robust approaches. Failure to make wider use of them is endangering attempts to achieve better outcomes for children, Axford claims.

Click here to view article.

RESEARCH

Opening windows on operating systems

October 21 2009

Unit thinking about the role in children’s services of ‘operating systems’ as a framework for evidence-based programmes, cost-benefit analysis and reliable evaluation was discussed at the annual conference of the UK Association of Directors o...

Director Michael Little described our experience of applying the Social Research Unit’s Common Language on the island of Ireland and in Birmingham UK. Other contributors included Joyce Moseley and Fran Pollard from Catch 22, the license holders for another model, Communities that Care.

Michael’s talk is attached, as are the slides Fran Pollard used to describe the contribution of the Communities that Care approach. We will also be providing a link to the publication "Tools for improving outcomes and performance” from the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) which summarises operating systems so far available in the UK.

RESEARCH

Breaking the chains of too early marriage

October 06 2009

Concern about the place of early marriage in a chain of adverse effects that transplants children from rural Ethiopia into the sex industry is the basis of a potential collaboration between the Research Unit and the NGOs ChildHope and Chad-Et.

Unit researchers Michael Little and Dwan Kaoukji are in the capital Addis Ababa, this week, with ChildHope’s director Emma Crewe to discuss the scope for an experimental evaluation of a community intervention to reduce child prostitution.

The Unit is proposing translating a baseline survey into an experimental evaluation comparing outcomes in communities receiving the intervention with those in a randomly selected control group.

CHAD-Et, ChildHope’s partner organization in Ethiopia, works in three areas of Addis Ababa where around 5,000 children are at risk of sexual exploitation and others are living and working on the streets.

Evidence collected on their behalf suggests that early marriage too often displaces children and puts them at risk.

If early marriages fail, children feel too ashamed to go back to their families. Typically, they take low grade employment in nearby towns. Often they are subject to abuse. And when they run away from poor situations, they are easy prey for pimps.

Children send money home from Addis and, from the perspective of family members, the arrangement may seem beneficial.

The intervention seeks to raise awareness in rural communities. It includes a series of ‘community conversations’ about ways of reducing the incidence of early marriage and the associated risks.

• Michael Little will be running in next year’s Liverpool Hall Marathon on behalf of Chad-Et and ChildHope.

RESEARCH

Grasp more of the nettles others avoid

September 28 2009

Social Research Unit director Michael Little urges the Michael Sieff Foundation to new depths of reflection as an infomed interdisciplinary critic of UK children and families policy.

The early years were the focus of the last week's annual Sieff Conference in Windsor. A Foundation trustee for six years, Michael Little returned to summarize discussions that ranged widely across policy, practice and public health issues. His notes are attached here as a .pdf to download

RESEARCH

All our trials soon described

September 02 2009

How to get evidence-based programmes successfully embedded in children’s services systems is the theme of a Unit presentation later this month in York, UK.

The paper at the fourth annual conference on randomised controlled trials (RCTs) draws on our work in Birmingham, where the city council has funded the evaluation of three evidence-based programmes: the PATHS social-emotional learning curriculum and the Incredible Years and Triple-P parenting programmes.

We will be describing methods for adapting and evaluating the programmes, focusing on steps taken to ensure that they work in real-world settings and that the evaluations generate results of use to local policy makers.

The trial designs have been adapted to make them more manageable (and fundable), and the programmes have been adapted to make them ‘system ready’. A parallel programme of work is designed to make the system more ‘programme ready’.

RESEARCH

Hobbs to build CASEL connection

August 24 2009

Links between The Social Research Unit and the influential Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) at the University of Illinois, are being strengthened by the temporary departure of researcher Tim Hobbs.

Tim is shortly to leave the UK for Chicago on a six-month sabbatical. During his time away writing up his doctoral thesis, he will be a visiting scientist at CASEL, extending a connection established when its President, Roger Weissberg, made the opposite journey last June.

Tim's research study concerns the role of children's cognitive appraisal of risk as a factor determining their degree of physiological stress and engagement in school life.

RESEARCH

Going down to New Orleans

July 06 2009

Tim Hobbs will present the Unit’s work on measuring the well-being of children with special educational needs at this year's International Society for Quality of Life Research annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Work taking place in Birmingham, supported by the Nuffield Foundation, will culminate in a validated tool for measuring the subjective well-being of children unable to participate in typical attempts to measure the outcomes of children in school.

The process of development and key findings will be shared with researchers via a poster presentation at the Society’s 16th Annual Meeting between the 28th and 31st of October 2009. Qualitative insights alongside the psychometric properties of the measure will be shared, followed by a discussion about how data from such an instrument may be used to monitor trends in well-being (at the individual and aggregate level) and help design services to improve outcome.

Further information about the conference may be found at http://www.isoqol.org/

RESEARCH

Experimental evaluations of development projects

March 24 2009

Discussions have begun in Birmingham about how to integrate cost-benefit analysis into the Unit’s evaluation of three proven models. The Brighter Futures strategy ties a £42m investment in prevention to a predicted £102m saving on heavy-end s...

The evaluation must not only estimate the impact of The Incredible Years, Triple-P and PATHS on child outcomes, but also calculate financial costs and benefits.

The core of the discussions concerns the ‘monetisation’ of outcome measures, such as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

In the context of local government budgets, three forms of cost-benefit analysis are required. They relate to savings that accrue to the local authority, savings to the budgets of other children’s and adult services, and the benefits to broader society, such as the greater tax contribution made by healthy children in adulthood.

RESEARCH

Foundations grant opens window on better screening

April 17 2009

The Unit has been awarded a grant by the UK Nuffield Foundation to develop a more accurate way of measuring the well-being of children with special educational needs.

Part of continuing efforts to improve outcome measurement techniques for all children, the project adds a new aspect to our partnership with Birmingham City Council. Trials will be based on a modified version of the quality of life measurement tool, Kidscreen-52.

A revised questionnaire will be tested in Birmingham special schools among children experiencing barriers to learning including communication difficulties, autistic spectrum problems or visual and hearing impairments.

Preliminary testing has been ‘cognitive interviewing’ techniques – an analysis of questions and answers to iron out problems with language and and meaning.

Birmingham teaching assistants are being trained for a bigger pilot study during the 2009 summer term. At least 300 children will complete the questionnaire and its reliability and scientific properties will be assessed.

If all goes well, the new instrument will be used to assess the circumstances of children who are typically hard to reach, so informing strategic development and service design in Birmingham and elsewhere.

RESEARCH

Stopping family life sliding over the line

April 30 2009

The need for better understanding of the thin line between domestic violence, child maltreatment and the routine turbulence of ordinary family life, and for interventions that recognise the sliding scale of seriousness, is the theme of a Unit presentation at t...

Researchers Tim Hobbs, Vashti Berry and Michael Little will argue that although domestic violence is recognised globally to be the cause of social problems that have the potential to disrupt children’s development, interventions are confined to crude rescue attempts.

Such services only benefit a small proportion of children, many of whom will already have had damaging experiences. Hence the need for a better understanding of the wider, contextual dynamics of aggression and violence in the home.

For example, parents’ efforts to discipline children and to socialise them provide regular opportunities for conflict or dispute. Similarly, partners will disagree with one another on a range of issues, some trivial others significant.

Their findings will be reported at the annual British Association for the Study and Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (BASPCAN) conference at the University of Wales, Swansea.

RESEARCH

Above all else, we want to understand why some children develop better than others and why it is so difficult to make evidence-based practice part and parcel of mainstream services.

Studies are in progress or soon to begin into how the dynamics in societies, neighbourhoods, schools or families affect the risks to children’s health and development. It is well known that many children exposed to significant threats to their well-being progress without obvious problem. We want find out why this happens, and what are the consequences for the children who succumb.

We are also investigating how evidence is translated into policy and practice. We want to discover why programmes that have been shown to improve child outcomes are so seldom taken up and so poorly implemented. These studies are intended to inform the Unit’s efforts to transform services and national policies.

Scientific development is usually spoken of as a consequence of productive research. But we are also trying to exploit the scientific potential of our own development activity. For example, most of our efforts to improve how communities or local government engage with children start with an epidemiological study.

We use the data we assemble about well-being, what influences it and how to validate our research measures and shape hypotheses about helping children with different patterns of impairment. Since the Unit requires that all its attempts to enhance children’s services are fully evaluated, ideally by experiment, more high quality data emerge at that point in the process about how far children flourish with or without extra support.

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Center for Social Policy Spring Seminar 2010

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Promoting the well-being agenda