Promoting Research

Dr Siobhan Laird

In her jointly authored book entitled Cultural Diversity in Child Protection: Cultural Competence in Practice Dr Laird draws attention to racial, ethnic and religious diversity requiring social workers to safeguard children and support families from many different minority backgrounds.

This innovative book is based on an analysis of Serious Case Reviews (Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews) involving issues of race, ethnicity and faith. The authors examine face-to-face social work practice with children, parents, their partners and other family members from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Throughout, they identify common mistakes in practice, and detail culturally competent responses to often challenging child protection situations. Students and practitioners are supported in the development of their own knowledge and skills through a series of reflective exercises and worked case examples.

Professor Alison Pilnick

This jointly authored paper entitled ‘The power of suggestion: examining the impact of presence or absence of shared first language in the antenatal clinic’ published in Sociology of Health and Illness is relevant to multicultural settings.

Healthcare encounters involving participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds are becoming more common due to increasing globalisation and migration levels. However there has been little research examining how this impacts on communication in consultations.

This paper arises from a long standing research collaboration with colleagues at the University of Hong Kong, focused on the delivery of antenatal services to a highly diverse community. We compare consultations where first language is shared to those where it is not, and highlight how the commonly used practice of clinicians making recommendations for future actions can have a differential impact on patient choice in this context.

Dr Pru Hobson-West

The jointly authored paper entitled ‘Animals, veterinarians and the sociology of diagnosis’, published in Sociology of Health and Illness has relevance for human medical practitioners. While sociologists of medicine have focused their efforts on understanding human health, illness, and medicine, veterinary medical practice has not yet caught their attention in any sustained way.

Rock and Babinec (2010, p.18) argued that ‘researchers may find that asking people about pet health problems represents a useful way of gaining an insight into experiences, expectations, attitudes, knowledge, and values pertaining to human health’. Her exploration of interspecies health relations confirms that this claim is also likely to hold true for diagnosis. This could therefore be harnessed by public health promoters, with the caveat that, not all patients regularly interact with animals, and not all diseases cross species boundaries. Second, delving into veterinary medicine may serve as a useful reminder to human medics to prioritise the patient rather than the diagnosis.

Professor Rachel Fyson

Published in the Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities the research report ‘Staff understandings of abuse and poor practice in residential settings for adults with learning disabilities’ is concerned with perceptions of abusive behaviour.

A common factor in the abuse of people with intellectual disabilities in residential settings has been the failure of care staff and frontline managers to recognise poor practice at an early stage and prevent its development into a culture of abuse. In this context, staff understandings of abuse and poor practice in residential services for people with intellectual disabilities were explored.

Care staff and frontline managers working across England were interviewed which included the use of vignettes, based on real‐life experiences of people with intellectual disabilities, to prompt discussion. Staff struggled to define either “abuse” or “poor practice”, focussing more on individual acts or omissions than on institutional practices. When faced with vignettes, staff demonstrated a lack of agreement regarding what constitutes either abuse or poor practice. The paper explores the implications of this for policy and practice.

Dr Nicola Carr

Dr Carr led the first Irish study examining the over-representation of young people in care in the criminal justice system entitled ‘Care and Justice: Research on the Over-representation of young people from care in the criminal justice system’.

The research was commissioned by the Irish Penal Reform Trust and it was launched in February 2019 by Dr. Niall Muldoon, the Ombudsman for Children. View details of the report and launch.

The findings from the study were reported in national media in Ireland, and the report authors, Dr Nicola Carr and Dr Paula Mayock (Trinity College Dublin) wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times and a blog for the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Dr Philippa Tomczak

Her book entitled Prison Suicide: What Happens Next? recognises that while prison suicide is a global problem, there is little knowledge about the investigations occurring after prison suicides.

Addressing this gap, this book provides the first detailed case study of the investigations that follow prison suicides using data from England and Wales. Despite the large range of institutions that monitor English and Welsh prisons, suicides reached a record high in 2016, with the rate having doubled since 2012. This book details and critiques the lengthy and expensive police, ombudsman and coroner investigations that follow prison suicides.

Drawing on extensive document analysis, including analysis of over 100 Prison and Probation Ombudsman fatal incident investigations, and original semi-structured interviews with stakeholders undertaken between 2016-2017, this book provides a novel analysis of prison oversight. Dr Tomczak also ran an author meets critics session on the book at the recent American Society of Criminology annual conference in San Francisco, November 2019.