What’s The Point of Doing Research with Children and Young People?

Posted on by
Reply

Professor Janice McLaughlin

Professor Janice McLaughlin

Professor Janice McLaughlin is a sociologist in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology and until recently Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre. Her work explores how childhood disability or illness is framed from within the worlds of medicine, community and family. She has looked at themes such as the diagnosis of genetic syndromes in children, the role of medical intervention in the lives and identities of young people with cerebral palsy and the ways in which family lives can be changed, including positively, by the presence of a disabled child. More recently this work has increasingly become focused on questions about citizenship and young people – a shift that has come from working with young people and hearing their concerns about their position in society and their futures.

Working with young people from different backgrounds can be frustrating, challenging and a lot of work. Below I suggest why all of those difficulties are worth it if we are to create spaces where young people have a voice and how we can at least try to do it in ways that work for them. Most of the problems come from the institutional dynamics around children and young people and in themselves present insight into the ways in which society and the state carefully monitor children and their presence in the public realm. While many of these structures have emerged out of previous harms done to children, in themselves they risk producing the social fact that young people are vulnerable rather than being also seen as having the potential and capacity for agency and creativity. Young people can also be very busy, particularly with the demands of schooling (again highlighting the pressures on them from an early age). We have learned the need to be very adaptive to both their timetable and their interests. When a young person’s free time is limited (particularly for disabled young people who are often having to also fit in hospital appointments, surgery, physiotherapy, dealing with welfare agencies, alongside their school life) you need to ensure that if you ask them to give their time that it a) has a point and b) will be interesting to them.

Within a project examining embodiment and disability we explored the use of creative techniques – in particular making things, taking photographs and producing journals – as a way to make things more interesting and relevant to the young people.

Photograph taken by a research participant’s dad to show how he gets downstairs
Photograph taken by a research participant’s dad to show how he gets downstairs

Piece of jewellery made by a research participant to symbolise the importance of relationships to her
Piece of jewellery made by a research participant to symbolise the importance of relationships to her

For the young people who participated in that aspect of the project their feedback was that it was very enjoyable and did allow them to express issues around their lives and disability that was meaningful. Mark (none of the names given are people’s real names) represented his pride in his physical strength and ability to find ways to move through space through the picture he had taken of him moving down the stairs. Kim, used the bracelet to symbolise how the relationships around her of friends and family were of vital importance to her and a source of strength to her. So the creative techniques did add something to the project and worked well for those who participated, but here also is the snag, the number of participants who wanted to do these activities in comparison to the usual one to one interview was much less. So while methods papers may suggest that when working with children and young people that we should think about ways to make it more interesting and diverse than a research interview, it is worth checking if that is what young people actually want!

One benefit of the visual material the young people made is it did produce material that was very rich and also very appropriate for taking the findings out to non-academic communities. We worked with a graphic artist, web designer and a group of disabled young people to design a website and booklet that young people could use to explore themes about difference and how society treats children who have something different about them, in this case their bodies. The words and images the young people produced were central to that and the site could not have been developed without their input. The website is now being used by schools, third sector organisations and in teacher training (in New Zealand!).

Screenshot of the website
Screenshot of the website

So to sum up, yes it is worth working with children and young people, it’s obvious really, they have lots to say. But we need to keep thinking through and checking (with them as much as anyone) what the point of doing so is.

Other information:

Open access publications from the project:

McLaughlin, J. and Coleman-Fountain, E. (2014) The unfinished body: The medical and social reshaping of disabled young bodies. Social Science and Medicine. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.09.012

Coleman-Fountain, E. and McLaughlin, J. (2013) The Interactions of Disability and Impairment, Social Theory and Health, 11(2): 133–150, doi:10.1057/sth.2012.21

The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and ongoing work we are doing with young people on citizenship is supported by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal.

Other work and resources we have produced on disabled young people’s views on and participation in sport is also available.

The Shefton Collection: Preserving the Past, Securing the Future

Posted on by
Reply

Andrew Parkin    Sally Waite

Mr Andrew Parkin and Dr Sally Waite

Andrew Parkin is Keeper of Archaeology at the Great North Museum where he is responsible for the archaeology and ethnography collections.  He is particularly interested in the archaeology of the Greek and Etruscan world, his latest research has concentrated on Etruscan bronze mirrors in the Shefton Collection.  He is currently working on an exhibition about Gertrude Bell which is due to open in January 2016. 

Sally Waite is a Teaching Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.  She teaches Greek Art and Archaeology at undergraduate and postgraduate level.  Her research focuses on the history of collections. Most recently she curated an exhibition on the Kent Collection of Greek and Cypriot pottery at the Royal Pump Room Museum at Harrogate.  She has worked extensively on the Shefton Collection of Greek and Etruscan Archaeology.

The Shefton Collection takes its name from its founder Professor Brian B. Shefton (1919 – 2012), a Classical archaeologist based in Newcastle from the mid-1950’s until his death in January 2012. Brian Shefton first came to Newcastle in 1955 as a lecturer in Greek Archaeology and Ancient History; he remained for the rest of his career, becoming Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology in 1979. One of his most significant achievements was the creation of a collection of classical antiquities. This Collection moved from the University campus to the Great North Museum in 2009 and is now housed in the Shefton Gallery of Greek and Etruscan Archaeology. It continues to be used for University teaching and research but over the years its remit has expanded to encompass work with other audiences, in particular local schools.

The Collection is not widely known and a priority has been to raise its profile and make it more accessible. A project funded by Renaissance North East and the Catherine Cookson Foundation catalogued the Etruscan material in the Shefton Study Collection. This was originally conceived as a collaborative project to document and disseminate Professor Shefton’s knowledge of the collection. We worked together in the months before his brief illness and sudden death and the resulting catalogue will form an addendum to a larger project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to enhance and digitise the Shefton Collection records for all objects on display in the Shefton Gallery. The illustrated database has recently been completed and, once on-line, will provide a platform for students, researchers and others to access the Collection.

In April 2013 the University and Great North Museum hosted a series of public lectures and an international conference (PDF: 1.77MB) in memory of Professor Shefton. Leading academics and museum specialists presented on key pieces in the Shefton Collection. As a result of this conference we are currently co-editing, alongside Professor Sir John Boardman, some of the papers, together with others especially commissioned, to be published in a forthcoming book: On the Fascination of Objects: Greek and Etruscan Art in the Shefton Collection.

An additional element of the Shefton memorial events was an engagement project undertaken with West Jesmond Primary School in Newcastle. 572 children (aged 4 to 11) were given the opportunity to create their own artworks inspired by selected objects from the Shefton Collection. Children participated in archaeology workshops at school and were encouraged to produce an individual creative response to the Greek and Etruscan objects they encountered. The workshops were facilitated by both undergraduate and postgraduate student volunteers.

Reception children, for example, created their own fishplates. These were based on several examples of this distinctive type of Greek decorated pottery in the Shefton Collection. Many of the children focused very closely and were able to produce their own versions of the plates.

fishplates

A selection of the children’s art work was displayed alongside the artefacts in a special exhibition in the Great North Museum.

GNM exhibition

As part of this project 90 year 3 pupils also attended a Greek activity day in the Great North Museum. Here they took part in a range of activities, guided by student volunteers and museum staff, including pottery making, cartoon drawing and gallery based workshops. The project gained momentum growing beyond its original scope, for example the school set up their own exhibition in their visitors’ reception area, revealing the extent of their engagement with the project and pride in what they had achieved.

We recently had the opportunity to present a paper on current research and engagement initiatives involving the Shefton Collection at an international conference hosted by Aarhus University in Denmark. This conference explored some of the challenges facing classical collections in Universities and the ways in which different institutions have tried to make their collections relevant to wider audiences.

Getting ready for the 2015 General Election

Posted on by
Reply

James Law

Professor James Law & Mr Tom King

James Law is Professor of Speech & Language Sciences, and Tom King is Statistician, both based in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. This blog article highlights how Save the Children commissioned James and Tom to do some analyses of the Millennium Cohort Study. The paper they produced now features extensively in a new report published earlier this month, entitled: Read On. Get On: How Reading Can Help Children Escape Poverty (PDF: 1.46MB), which has been extensively reported in UK media stories.

In the run up to the General Election lobby groups press hard to have their interests represented in the party manifestoes. With the 2015 General Election looming now is the time to line up the arguments and write the documents that will inform this process.

Save the Children, together with a number of different charities, are writing a document entitled “Reading for a Fairer Future: A National Mission to Ensure All Children are Reading Well by 11 by 2025: delivering the Read On. Get On. campaign”. This draws together data from a variety of sources to make the case that parties need to be focusing on the attainment (and specifically oral language and literacy) of very young children in the early years if they are to get a grip on key policy issues flagged up by the UK’s performance in the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) and other international league tables. Reading attainment amongst 10 year olds is more unequal in England than in all other countries in Europe, with the single exception of Romania. In part this an issue about the achievement of all children but Save the Children were particularly interested in the differences between children who are relatively socially advantaged and those that are not. As part of this process Save the Children commissioned Professor James Law together with SLS statistician Tom King to carry out some analyses of the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study of 18,000 children born in 2000 and assessed at regular intervals since then.

What happens beyond the school gates and in homes is critical.  Our work for this report shows that reading to and with children matters for both mothers and fathers, but the impact of father’s reading – particularly to children after they have started school – appears even greater.  Children whose fathers read with them less than once a week at the age of five had, by the time they were seven, a reading level half a year behind those who had been read to daily.

There is also a wide ‘book gap’ in England: almost a quarter of 11 year olds in the poorest families had fewer than 10 books in the home, which contrasts with under 4 per cent of those in the richest families. This is likely to reflect a wider attitude and approach to reading in the home: children in homes with more than 500 books are on average more than two years ahead of those growing up in households with fewer than ten books.

The ‘Read On. Get On’ report concludes “Achieving this goal would mean that every single child born this year would be able to read well by the time they finish primary school in 11 years’ time.  In order to ensure we are making progress, we are also setting two interim goals.  Because the early years of a child’s life are so critical and because early language development is the building block on which later reading develops, we are setting the 2020 goal of: all children achieving good early language development by the age of five by 2020.  And because we need to ensure that we are on track for achieving the ultimate 2025 goal, our second interim goal will be: to be at least halfway to achieving the 2025 goal for 11-year olds by 2020” (page vii). Ambitious goals indeed, but we will only know whether they have been met if we have access to good quality national data. The next step will be the manifestoes and the response from the different political parties.

Please note:
The paper based on Newcastle University’s research is cited on pages vii,6,33-35,40, 42-43 and the whole of Chapter 2 of the Read On. Get On. Report (PDF: 1.46MB). See also Newcastle University’s press release.

The Read On. Get On. report  and/or the Newcastle University research is referred to in media stories in: The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Sun, The Times Online, ITV, to name just a few.

For more information about the Read On. Get On. campaign, see their website.

Pints, Pubs, Policing and Paedophilia: Reflections on a Good Night Out with the Skeptics

Posted on by
Reply

Elaine Campbell

Professor Elaine Campbell

Elaine Campbell is Professor of Criminology at Newcastle University in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Elaine’s current theoretical interests centre on the post-political landscapes of plural policing. Plural policing denotes the mixed economy of contemporary policing, where responsibilities for crime control and the management of risk is dispersed across the private sector, the voluntary sector, the cybersecurity industries, and local communities. In this blog post, Elaine reflects on her night out with the Newcastle Skeptics in the Pub, over the course of which she explored alternative ways of policing paedophilia, and argued for an approach which she describes as `policing without boundaries’. 

Skeptics in the Pub1

Ever fancied disseminating your research over a pint? I did just this at The Bridge, Castle Square, Newcastle Upon Tyne, in August 2014. Invited by the Newcastle Skeptics in the Pub to give a talk on my current research, Policing Without Boundaries, I was delighted to accept, and have been well-rewarded by an invigorating evening with an engaged, critical and attentive audience of Skeptics eager to learn more about my work. To create some context for the research focus, I started out by giving an overview of the shadowy world of paedophilia, and unpacked the secular demonology which has grown around this particular form of criminality. I went on to present a range of empirical data to illustrate how far paedophilia remains largely impervious to contemporary policing approaches which seek to map, control, manage and reduce (if not eliminate) its risks.


1/4 inch graph paper by David Swart: licensed under CC BY 2.0

I used a sheet of A3 graph paper as a prop to think about our reliance on a policing approach which centres on the surveillance, detection and investigation of paedophilia through, for example, the use of sex offender registers, CRB checks, chat room infiltrations, CEOP intelligence reports, computer forensics, and transnational, multi-sectoral policing partnerships. For me, this is a rather superficial way of going about things, and is a little like policing the two-dimensional space of graph paper. Put another way, it’s a policing strategy which imagines its operational topography as a flat surface upon which the incidence of paedophilia can be plotted, its impact measured, and its precise locations identified. Furthermore, it uses these co-ordinates to predict the movement and distances between different `paedophiliac events’, and mark out the boundaries for its containment. It’s a strategy which supposes that, with sufficient resources, time and technological know-how, paedophilia can be known, mapped, monitored, controlled and (eventually) expelled from the family home, the care setting, the community, the computer hard-drive, the chat room, and the network. Policing within boundaries is fine as far as it goes, and it should not be dismissed as unimportant, but perhaps there are alternative, more effective and complementary ways of tackling the issue.


Crumpled paper by Sherrie Thai: licensed under CC BY 4.0

This was the point at which I scrunched the A3 paper into a crumpled ball, and invited the Skeptics to look again at the policing terrain. In place of the Euclidian geometry of the A3 graph paper (and the policing within boundaries that it represents), we were now looking at the multiple landscapes of paedophilia. There are no fixed points here, or intersecting lines; marks on a graph which were separated are now brought together in close proximity; not everything is visible in this irregular and undulating terrain; there is no inside or outside, centre or margin. In short, where there is no objective form, it is impossible to map and measure content.  This pretty much describes the clandestine world of paedophiliac offending. In common with human trafficking, drugs and arms smuggling, terrorism, and the illegal trades in human organs and endangered animals, paedophilia dissolves our sense of what is close by and what is far away. The crumpled paper demonstrates quite vividly that real-time encounters (in the home, in the youth club, at school) are co-extensive with distant connections (paedophiliac tourism, international paedophile rings, the circulation of child sexual abuse imagery, child sex trafficking). So, rather than rely on arrest data, online subscriptions, credit card usage, and sex offender registers, as indicators of the locations and extensive reach of paedophilia, our attention should turn to its emergence in and through intensive social relationships – entanglements and interactions which not only blur the distinction between here and there, but also collapse the imagined binaries of safety and danger, adult and child, the virtual and the real, the local and the global. I describe such an approach as policing without boundaries.

Rubber band ball 4
Rubber band ball  by Chris Young:  licensed under CC BY 2.0

It was then time for some tricks with rubber bands. I stretched two rubber bands as far as they would go, twisted them through each other, knotted them together, and then pulled them apart with a bit of a guitar twang. The key question here is not about the different shapes and patterns which these contortions produced, but how the elements (the hydrocarbons) of the rubber bands hold together when recombined in novel and inventive ways. A real-world example might help to make the point. The role-playing, online game, Second Life, hit the headlines when adult players were found to be engaging in simulated sex with child avatars. The elements of paedophiliac practice remain in place here – intentionality, soliciting, grooming, performed abuse, sexual gratification and exploitation – but have been virtually reassembled without any `real’ victims and `actual’ consequences. Like the rubber bands, there’s a durability about `the doing’ of paedophilia which is continually in the process of transformation and realignment – in this instance reinventing itself as a `victimless non-crime’.

But what does all this mean in terms of policing strategy? These are abstract ideas which need to be developed further before anything resembling a policy framework is on the cards. This is the challenge and the task for my research over the next year or so. A first step is to strengthen the theoretical credentials of policing without boundaries. The Skeptics certainly recognised in my talk, the familiar vocabulary and insights of assemblage, actor-network and topological theories. These frameworks enable us to focus on the intensive social and cultural entanglements of paedophilia `in the making’. How does the `doing’ of paedophilia bring spaces, bodies and things (such as homes, children, screens) together in ways which dissolve, shift, bypass and ultimately render irrelevant the boundaries within which policing currently tracks and apprehends offenders? Where should we be looking for paedophiliac offending, and what and who should we be looking at? This calls for an openness to the dynamics and contingencies of paedophiliac opportunities, a healthy skepticism of what we think we know about its whereabouts and prevalence, and an incredulity of pronouncements that paedophilia is being effectively managed and controlled. A good starting point is to acknowledge at outset that paedophilia creates the spaces of its own being. It draws its own maps.

I am extremely grateful to the Skeptics for affording me the time and space to work through and explore these issues in such a constructive and friendly environment. Their insightful contributions will certainly help me to refine my thinking, and take account of the different concerns which are threaded through contemporary anxieties about paedophiliac criminality. I have had very good feedback from the Skeptics, who commented that `the response has been overwhelmingly positive; I’m glad you enjoyed your time at the group too! One of the strongest areas is the Q+A/feedback section, so it’s great to hear how this will impact your research’. If you want to give your research a good airing, perhaps to test the water and see if your research ideas `have legs’; or perhaps to present work which is already well-established, then just get in touch with the Newcastle Skeptics in the Pub.  Please visit their site for contact information, and to see full details of their activities, venues and programmes.

The theoretical strands of the research are being presented to an interdisciplinary audience in a sub-plenary at the ESRC-funded, CRESC Annual Conference, Power, Culture and Social Framing, University of Manchester, 3-5 September 2014; and at the Decentring Security: Policing at Home and Abroad workshop, organised and hosted by the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2014.

Poverty Research and Social Policy Practice

Posted on by
Reply

JVW image

Professor John Veit-Wilson FAcSS

John Veit-Wilson is a guest member of staff in the School of Geography. Politics and Sociology. He has been affiliated to Newcastle University since 1992, where he has previously held positions as Principal Research Associate and Visiting Professor in the former Department of Social Policy. Since working on the first British national survey of poverty in 1964 his research focus has been on what poverty and income adequacy mean, how they can be measured, and what governments in the UK and elsewhere could do to combat poverty.

In this blog, John outlines how his research has informed policy and practice, culminating in his being awarded a Social Policy Association Special Recognition Award in July 2014. As well as helping to found the Child Poverty Action Group in 1965 to put poverty research into policy practice, finally retiring as a trustee and vice-chair only in December 2013, John has been an adviser on income adequacy issues to many organisations including the European Anti-Poverty Network and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). He has also given both written and oral evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees and government consultations.

‘No one agrees on what poverty means’. That’s often said, but is it true? It’s been a government mantra for decades, and no UK government has ever implemented an adequate income level to meet population standards of minimum decency. The only official attempt to find out was suppressed and has never been repeated (see the chapter ‘The National Assistance Board and the ‘Rediscovery’ of Poverty’ for the story), probably because governments fear the political costs of using ordinary people’s standards of minimum decency for everyone.

Once you get behind the disagreements about what statistical measures to use, what relativity means, whether poverty is a personal or a structural fault, both quantitative and qualitative research shows that the UK population has long given clear answers about the minimum levels of living which everyone here ought to be able to afford from their disposable household incomes. That minimum decency level of living for social inclusion, often called ‘adequacy’, sets the baseline. Poverty means lacking the public and personal resources, chiefly cash, to get there. The chief focus of the research has long been to get the idea of ‘adequacy’ for minimum incomes accepted in place of the variety of artificial measures such as percentages of income inequalities or prescriptive budgets.

This isn’t just a matter of discovering the ‘contents of the shopping basket’ as it’s often misleadingly described, but of recognising whose minimum standards of decency, adequacy and inclusion are being used to judge it. Even the World Bank’s guide to poverty concepts and methods acknowledged that it was ‘the standards of society’ by which the minimum level of material well-being had to be judged (Ravallion 1992: 4). The pioneer of modern sociological poverty research, Peter Townsend (1993: 36), explained that relative deprivation was not being able to ‘follow the customary behaviour’ expected of members of society, and poverty was lacking or being denied resources to do so. But who judges what’s adequate for you and me, or what resources we need to get there? Only society can do that, so no wonder people are confused when politicians and media focus only on the personal characteristics of people in poverty (which are often shared right across society) rather than on the wider reasons why some people are deprived of adequate resources in our unequal society. The task of social policy research is to explore, analyse and explain these sociological and political issues (for more information, see the text of the ‘Poverty’ entry from the 2006 Routledge International Encyclopaedia of Social Policy).

The question of whose standards to use goes back more than a century. Nineteenth century investigators simply identified people in poverty by middle-class judgements of their appearance and lifestyles, as politicians still do, but that does not explain why they are poor. The chemist Seebohm Rowntree’s research in York instead used a basic nutritional standard for physical subsistence alone and showed that a third of people looking poor had incomes simply too low to exist on, chiefly because of low wages, unemployment, disability or old age (see the ‘Paradigms of Poverty’ article for more information). The basic causes of poverty have not substantially changed today.

In spite of government resistance, some politicians do care about the connections between ideas of poverty and how to count who suffers from it, and what the income maintenance system could do. In 1989 the House of Commons Social Services Select Committee invited me to give evidence (based on the article ‘Consensual Approaches to Poverty Lines and Social Security’), and in 1991 to advise on income adequacy in a joint meeting with the Social Security Advisory Committee. They wanted a UK feasibility study but as this was politically unacceptable JRF, the Nuffield Foundation and the British Council funded the study, Setting Adequacy Standards, of how governments around the world define their minimum incomes, 1992-94. At that time, ten governments based their minimum wages or other income maintenance provisions on their idea of a minimum acceptable level of living and the incomes needed to achieve it, and treated incomes below this level as forms of poverty. The findings may be dated but the theoretical foundations and discussion are still valid.

To describe these findings, the simple descriptive phrase ‘minimum income standard’ (MIS) was augmented with the prefix ‘governmental’ or with capitals to mean a third and politically-credible kind of measure (Veit-Wilson 1994) from those still conventionally used and much confused — the wide variety of arbitrary definitions and normative measures of poverty used in academia, some of which were called poverty lines, and the governmental use of statistical indicators of income distribution or of arbitrary social security benefit rates which aren’t based on any evidence of the resources people need to meet minimally adequate levels of living in the UK. The idea of MIS, whether or not with prefix or capitals, has become very widely used both in research (e.g. JRF’s largest ever funded research programme, the ongoing MIS project from 2006 which I advise) and in practical policy (e.g. as the basis of the Living Wage), not only in the UK but other countries (e.g. see the article on ‘Active Inclusion and Minimum Incomes’, and the response to the ‘European Minimum Income’s Network (EMIN) draft EU road map’).

Using a variety of research methods to find out what are the public’s minimum level of living standards and their costs does not, however, directly help a government to know at what levels to set the different parts of the income maintenance system, particularly if other kinds of evidence may also be relevant. If someone works a full week on the minimum wage shouldn’t that be adequate to keep a normal household out of poverty without supplementation? But if social security for unemployment is less than this for ‘incentive’ reasons, won’t it be inadequate for decency? What about the relationship with social security levels for long term conditions such as illness and disabilities, or old age? Questions like these demand considered judgement based on comparing evidence from research, not mere statistical formulas. When in 2000 the Social Security Select Committee reviewed the idea of integrated child benefit as a means of combating family poverty, it invited me to give written and oral evidence, and accepted that the government itself should fund such research and convene “an ongoing working party involving policy makers, academics and other interested parties to assist it to devise publicly acceptable measures of the levels of living needed to avoid poverty”. The Child Poverty Act 2010 provided for a Child Poverty Commission which might fill this role but has not yet done so.

The big question remains, does having enough money make a difference to reaching decency levels, or is poverty just down to personal characteristics? JRF is funding the Money Matters research programme I’d proposed and advise, and first reports show that having money is crucial for families and the pathways by which money influences health. The next stage of the research programme aims to focus on health inequalities to find out how much money makes the crucial difference.

References:
Ravallion, R. (1992) Poverty comparison: A guide to concepts and methods, Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Townsend, P. (1993) The International Analysis of Poverty, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Veit-Wilson, J. (1994) Dignity not Poverty. A Minimum Income Standard for the UK. IPPR for the Commission on Social Justice.

John’s publications mentioned above and other papers are available online.