This article contributes to the literature on engaging employers in activation policies. It focuses on a specific policy aimed at promoting the labour-market participation of people with disabilities. Unlike many activation policies, this policy recognises that the engagement of employers and the human resource management practices in their organisations are crucial factors for the policy’s success. The article reports on a study among employers participating in this policy. It focuses on the challenges employers experience in placing people with disabilities in their organisations, and on the public support they expect in dealing with these challenges. The article concludes that as promoting the labour-market participation of groups remote from the labour market requires social policy interventions as well as interventions in organisational human resource management, it poses challenges for policy makers, agencies providing employment services, and employers and their organisations.

Using Work Training in Norway as a case, this article provides insight into motivation and structural factors that impact employer engagement with active labour market policies (ALMP) targeting young people. Drawing on mixed-methods data, we find a substantial proportion of Norwegian employers engage in Work Training. Both social responsibility and the economic interests of the company influence employers’ motivation for committing to Work Training. The findings reveal that the structural factors of business size and sector are crucial determinants of employer behaviour when it comes to hiring Work Training candidates. Although improved outreach activities by local job centres may be important, the article argues that efforts towards opening up sectors closed by sector-specific regulations on hiring, and increased awareness of structural constraints, are similarly important.

Studies have indicated government transfers greatly alleviate poverty among older Americans. Yet recent social policy changes were suggested to increase older Americans’ fiscal insecurity. New evidence is needed to expand the evaluation of government transfers. Longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data from 2002 to 2014 were used. We computed individuals’ poverty status both when household income included and did not include government transfers. Results indicated the poverty rate dropped dramatically when household income included government transfers. The poverty alleviation effect was significantly greater among people who were female, older, members of a minority group, having fewer years of education, residing in the South, and living in a bigger household. Evidence from this study solidified the overall poverty alleviation effect of government transfers in old age. Differential effects among various demographic groups could be attributed to their initial status and divergent political beliefs about who should receive government transfers.

Retirement scholars (and policy makers) have traditionally assumed spouses share their retirement savings, even when they are financially heterogamous and their individual saving capacities diverge. Recent research, however, has challenged this assumption, emphasising that wealth is unequally distributed within couples. In this study, we contribute to this debate by exploring how often financially heterogamous spouses describe their management of retirement savings as joint and redistributive. Data collected in Québec (Canada) in 2015 show that 28 per cent of couples with an income differential report to balance retirement savings across partners. Building on exchange and institutional theories of conjugal behaviour, we also stress that the prevalence of this practice varies with several factors, including union duration and matrimonial status. These findings suggest policy makers underestimate the size of the population at risk of old age financial vulnerability when assuming lower-income individuals are well prepared for retirement if partnered with a better-off spouse who saves.

This article aims to identify how the economies that do not necessarily prioritise social rights in their social policy arrangements fare in achieving various healthcare objectives. The big five of East Asian countries – China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore plus Hong Kong – are considered as such cases. It first highlights a wide range of variations in their healthcare offerings. It then shows that, contrary to the common belief, they constitute a surprisingly high level of redistributive elements in them. Deviating from their overall welfare regime characteristics, each healthcare system presents a unique combination of policy objectives in social, medical, economic and political terms, raising a question of the utility of social rights as a central conceptual lens to understand the world of welfare capitalism.

Qualitative longitudinal research can make a distinctive contribution to policy discussions and to the assessment of outcomes. This article draws on research with lone-parent families over fifteen years to illustrate how change and continuity can look different over shorter and longer time periods, to discuss presenting longitudinal qualitative evidence through the selection of case studies, and to explore some of the challenges of engaging in policy debates with qualitative data.

Qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) has grown in prominence and popularity since the 2007 themed section on the subject in this journal. This new themed section reflects on how QLR has been mobilised and made sense of in recent times. This article showcases QLR’s distinctive way of knowing and understanding the social world and how it can illuminate the processes through which policy can enhance, or indeed inhibit, the well-being of individuals and groups within society. This state of the art article focuses on QLR as a valuable but tricky approach. It argues that QLR can enhance qualitative research in social policy by fostering sustained policy engagement and development, and that this is especially useful for policy-making in relation to socioeconomic disadvantage. It also explores cross-cutting methodological dimensions pertinent to QLR’s distinct approach, such as its enhanced ethical considerations, which are also integral to research with people at high risk of socioeconomic disadvantage. The article concludes with possible future directions and developments for QLR as a methodology.

In this article, qualitative longitudinal (QL) research is presented as a powerful form of fluid enquiry. The combination of its real-world and real-time features enables this methodology to ‘follow reality in all its windings’, and, thereby, to produce useful knowledge for policy and professional practice. The main focus is on the power of QL methodology to illuminate complex causal processes by teasing out their multiple, fluid and relational elements. The article goes on to consider new ways to broker the interface between research endeavours and policy processes, based on collaborative modes of knowledge co-production that unfold in real-time. QL enquiry emerges here as more than an added option, a ‘niche’ approach. It has potential as a valuable ‘impact’ tool for discerning causality in new ways and reformulating insights into ‘what works?’, with scope to play a pivotal role in shaping and facilitating change in policy and practice settings.

There has been an increasing focus in the UK on the support provided to the Armed Forces community, with the publication of the Armed Forces Covenant (2011), the Strategy for our Veterans (2018) and the first ever Office for Veterans’ Affairs (2019). There is also an important body of research – including longitudinal research – focusing on transitions from military to civilian life, much of which is quantitative. At the same time, the UK has witnessed a period of unprecedented welfare reform. However, research focused on veterans’ interactions with the social security system has been largely absent. This article draws on the authors’ experiences of undertaking qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) to address this knowledge gap. We reflect on how QLR was essential in engaging policy makers enabling the research to bridge the two parallel policy worlds of veterans’ support and welfare reform, leading to significant policy and practice impact.

This article reflects on the contribution of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) to understandings of homeless peoples’ experiences of support service interventions in an era of austerity in the UK. It brings into ‘analytic conversation’ data from qualitative longitudinal evaluations of homeless support projects operated by voluntary sector organisations in Scotland. With fieldwork spanning 2014-2019, the analysis expands the analytical potential of pooling small-scale studies through an interrogation of individuals’ ‘journeys’ through homelessness services and their rough path to ‘home’. By reflecting on our substantive findings, the article explores the added value and challenges of a longitudinal approach. It concludes that while QLR can deliver deep insight into lives lived by vulnerable populations and potentially reduce the distance between policy makers and those affected, its benefits must be balanced against pragmatism and the ethical responsibilities associated with the method.