In the context of risk and resilience, the paper attempts to integrate three strands of research: genetic and mental-health factors, the findings of cohort studies and those of other investigations of educational outcomes. A very wide range of factors, many of them related to disadvantage, bear on such outcomes, but none deterministically. Intelligence, conduct and emotional disorders are all found to influence academic achievement to varying degrees, as do a number of aspects of family, school and the wider social environment. Aspects that contribute to resilience are identified, and the paper concludes with a discussion of interventions to enhance resilience.

The relationship between research, policy and practice remains a contested area. This article explores pressures for researchers to make their work more useful and relevant to policy and practice, and for practitioners to undertake research. Whilst there are clearly areas of mutual interest and benefit, we argue that the research, policy and practice communities also have distinct traditions, skills and obligations which should be recognised and valued rather than artificially suppressed. Narrow conceptions of research utility constrain the debate about what each community has to offer and how best to communicate with each other across borders.

The article reviews the relevance and methodological utility of welfare regime typologies for the study of professional sense-making in social work with families. Focus groups were carried out with social workers in European and Latin American countries representing four different policy regimes. A case vignette was used to elicit social workers’ descriptions of how welfare policy may influence how they understand their work task and the notion of family. The research team identified methodological challenges of general relevance in similar policy-practice studies. There were paradoxes in terms of homogeneity on the regime level vs. heterogeneity within and between national services. Pitfalls appeared in the selection of regime-typical cases, language/cultural barriers, and in deciding organisational level. The article shows that welfare typologies have potentialities in that they may provide a helpful analytical basis for theoretical and practical reasoning in which syntheses between policy and practice can be explored, discussed and challenged.

This review surveys sociological literature on intercountry adoption from 1997 to 2010. The analysis finds a preponderance of literature from the United States, reflecting its place as a major receiving country, and a focus on adoption experience organised by reference to the adoption triad: adoptive parents, adoptees, birth families. Reflecting the power imbalances in intercountry adoption, the voices and views of adoptive parents dominate the literature. There is an emerging literature generated by researchers who are intercountry adoptees, while birth families remain almost invisible in this literature. A further gap identified by this review is work which examines intercountry adoption as a global social practice and work which critically examines policy.

This article describes an exploratory study of the Making Safe Scheme, which is a multi-agency initiative designed to provide a coordinated and integrated response to domestic violence by focusing on both victims and perpetrators. A key feature of the intervention is that it enables victims to remain in their own homes, provided it is considered safe to do so, and re-houses perpetrators. Consequently, the wrong-doer leaves the home and practitioners can work with families in their established communities to prevent further abuse. In 2008, the project was awarded the Butler Trust Public Protection Award for its innovative work with victims and offenders. The findings from this study focus on a number of themes: perpetrator accountability, the changing balance of power in abusive relationships and the increased opportunities for victims and their families to engage in recovery work whilst remaining in the family home.

The central emphasis of New Labour's anti-poverty strategy has been on tackling child poverty. While such an approach is both important and valuable youth poverty has been given limited attention. Low and unstable incomes are a major cause of poverty amongst young people and risks are greatly increased as they try to live independently and move out of the family home. In the discussion that follows, I argue that New Labour's continued commitment to the social exclusion agenda has marginalised both the problem of youth poverty and the necessary solutions. Social exclusion policy is more concerned with responsiblising families and young people and disciplining them to work regardless of its value. Little attention is given to addressing the problems of youth incomes or providing adequate housing support for those most vulnerable to poverty.

This article explores the dynamic field of children's participation and provides fresh insight into its construction within professional frameworks as well as within the social policy process. Protectionism, developmentalism, rights and managerialism are identified as significant discourses and this article explores their articulation and negotiation through policies. The argument is that the settlement reached represents a new configuration within policy frameworks relating to children where a version of children's rights is appropriated and mainstreamed. The interaction between children's rights, managerialism and professional discourses are illustrated with reference to policy and legislation.

This article examines the extent to which the growing attention being paid at EU and national level to issues related to work–life balance is reflected in families' lived experience. It identifies the demands facing families in balancing paid work with other activities, the strategies they adopt to meet them, and the role played by policy interventions. Attention is drawn to diversity in family structures and labour market participation throughout Europe, to differences in the issues encountered by families in achieving a satisfactory work–life balance, and to the contribution of policy to their strategies.

This article explores links made between teenage mothers and isolation: in particular, the notion of ‘relational exclusion’ (Kidger, 2004). Political conceptualisations of social exclusion often ignore this aspect and instead focus on the economic dynamics of exclusion. As a consequence, policies aimed at addressing the exclusion of teenage parents often focus on education and employment as solutions. This article argues that friendships are overlooked as a source of potential support. It therefore builds on work that has observed teenage mothers’ isolation and loneliness to examine how a teenage pregnancy affects a young woman's friendship networks. It then goes on to expand understanding of how new friendships are formed and the types of support they provide. The article concludes by proposing that social policy has a role in facilitating friendship support through investment, integrating group support with one-to-one methods and tackling stigma.

This article reports on parent abuse by 112 young people within a sample of 209 families with adolescent children who were receiving family support services, presenting both young people and parents’ accounts of this abuse. Drawing on an analysis of quantitative data, it also reports on the characteristics, histories and circumstances of the young people and families and examines the predictors of parent abuse. Lone mothers were more likely to be victims of this abuse. Many of the young people had experienced maltreatment and those who had witnessed domestic violence were more likely to be violent to parents.

Beneficiary advocacy organisations, which provide advice to individual claimants about how best to navigate the welfare system, exist in the context of complex and opaque benefit-claiming processes that have resulted from workfare policies. Drawing on a case study of Auckland Action Against Poverty, an organisation specialising in poverty activism and services for welfare beneficiaries, this article examines the provision of beneficiary advocacy services as a form of everyday resistance to workfare policies. Everyday resistance is less overtly political, less confrontational, and more ordinary than spectacular acts of resistance such as protests, but one that should not be seen as accommodating workfare policies and the market-based reform projects to which they are connected. By supporting individuals to defiantly persevere with their benefit claims, beneficiary advocates help to actively resist the operational logic of dissuasion that defines contemporary workfare.

This article analyses and problematises central assumptions in Sweden's National Strategy for Developing Parenting Support, a document that addresses children's deteriorating psychological health. The analysis was performed with Bacchi's (2009) approach to policy analysis. The results show how parental determinism is expressed; psychological ill health among school-aged children is described as an individualised problem caused by insecure parents, who are represented as the most important persons in a child's life and, therefore, are considered to be risk factors that require continuous support. Evidence-based parenting support programmes in particular are described as a central tool for improving parents’ sense of responsibility and parenting skills. While the strategy aims to offer all Swedish parents support, it underlines ideals that have been related to gendered, middle-class notions of parenting. The issue concerning children's psychological health is problematised and discussed in relation to parental determinism, the risk society, equality, equity and psychological health.

From 1988 the Chinese Government pursued a policy of ‘small government, big society’. The policy was determined at the highest level and, after a pilot study in Hainan Province, was implemented vigorously in a series of political reforms. It was the chief political dimension of the economic restructuring which led from state ownership of enterprises to the so-called socialist market. Like its economic counterpart, it reflected China's adoption of neo-liberal ideology. The aims were to encourage both civil society and the private market to provide social welfare and, thereby, to restrict demands on public expenditure. However, it failed to realise these goals and was recently replaced by a more state oriented approach. The article discusses the Chinese big society project and, specifically, examines why it was introduced, what it consisted of, its impact on social welfare, the criticisms it attracted and its recent changes in nature. The article concludes by considering some possible lessons for the UK Coalition Governments’ big society project and any similar initiatives attempted in other countries.

Financial education is viewed by both policy makers and the public as an increasingly important tool for developing financially capable citizens in an era of increasing individual financial responsibility. This paper considers the recent history of school involvement in teaching financial education. It then draws on research undertaken in summer 2010 at two Birmingham primary schools to explore children's understandings of key financial issues. The paper concludes that there appears to be a groundswell of momentum behind making financial education a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, but, even if this happens, there will be challenges in delivering such education in practice. For example, the role of values in financial education makes it a contested subject and teachers will need training and support to deal with this. They will also need to be supported to deliver financial education in a way which recognises diversity and sensitivity issues in the classroom.

There is growing interest in research that informs more effective practices in employment services across Europe, Australia and the USA. However, despite the ever-expanding amount of research on the implementation and efficacy of various policy programmes in practice, the knowledge on how to bring unemployed individuals closer to the labour market remains ambiguous and inconclusive. This is especially so in the context of the more vulnerable unemployed, who face physical, mental and social challenges in addition to unemployment. In this article, we examine the existing literature in terms of its potential to inform (the development of) effective employment policies. On this basis, we outline an alternative approach based on the concept of relational causality, and discuss the implications of such an approach for applied policy research.

Political and administrative processes are leading to collectively undesirable and intolerable societal outcomes in the advanced liberal democracies, as policymakers seek to address social issues in the design and implementation of new social policies that actively govern conduct. Behavioural regulation is the order of the day. For scholars interested in the development of social policy and the idea of a society as a whole, it is timely to begin the revaluation of the very notion of social policy and society beyond the ‘active’ neoliberal policy paradigm. Here we are particularly concerned with the ends and means of the coercive policy instruments and the active ethical issues arising from their use.

Government initiatives such as the Troubled Families Programme present a difficult problem for social scientists: how to discuss the policies without accepting and appearing to legitimise the problematic framing of social problems that they embody. The programme is characteristically neoliberal in its silence on structural inequality and in its targeting of certain families as deficient and wholly responsible for their situation. Like so many such programmes, its primary addressee is arguably not merely those targeted by the policies but the wider electorate. The paper discusses the dilemmas of challenging the policy's framing. First it makes some general points about the different characters of political and academic discourses, before examining some key features of the framing of TFP, its conceptualisation of social causes of problems and individual responsibility, and how social scientists might respond. It then draws upon the work of George Lakoff to comment on how the impact of policy and political discourse depends on the kinds of value systems it invokes, before concluding.

Against a historical and contemporary backdrop of queer sexualities in India, this paper discusses certain approaches towards agenda setting using the Multiple Streams policy framework (Kingdon, 1984; Zahariadis, 1999) to change Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises non-normative sexual activities. The paper attempts to map the path of legal challenge to Section 377 and focus on the process of agenda setting as a crucial step in the campaign towards social policy change. It then examines some of the current trends and developments that, if used efficaciously through agenda setting, may result in a unique policy window opportunity.

In the UK, there has been a re-awakening of interest in the ‘co-production’ approach to involve service users in modernised public services. Within this context, Sure Start Children's Centres are being created to address child poverty and social exclusion, with an emphasis on participatory approaches. This paper considers the engagement of users in service delivery, service planning and in monitoring and evaluation activities for Children's Centres in Greater Merseyside. Research findings indicate that a lack of time to implement (and develop trust within) the new arrangements, a lack of awareness by users to participate and a broader thematic (employment and education) and geographical remit for Children's Centres is impacting upon the greater involvement of users in all aspects of co-production. Without such participation it is concluded that there is a real risk that the current needs of those most disadvantaged will not be adequately addressed.

Exploring the five principles of the newly enacted Mental Capacity Act 2005, this article sets these in the context of day-to-day decisions over care and treatment. These areas figure strongly in the lives of people who have problems making decisions, but there is little consideration of them in contrast to major decisions about financial planning, deprivation of liberty, and healthcare and treatment. Social policy has often found it difficult to encroach upon areas covering intimate and family-based care relationships or the private domain of care at home. This legislation touches on this controversial area.