Work,parenting and gender: the care–work negotiations of three couple relationships in the UK

Changes globally mean that there are now record numbers of mothers in paid employment and a reported prevalence of involved fathering. This poses challenges to mothers and fathers as they negotiate care–work practices within their relationships. Focusing on interviews with three heterosexual couples (taken from a wider UK qualitative project on working parents), the paper considers care–work negotiations of three couples, against a backdrop of debates about intensive mothering and involved fathering. It aims to consider different configurations of work and care within three different couple relationships. We found that power within the relationships was negotiated along differential axis of gender and working status (full- or part-time paid work). We present qualitatively rich insights into these negotiations. Framed by a critical discursive psychological approach, we call on other researchers to think critically about dominant discourses and practices of working, caring and parenting, pointedly how couples situated around the world operationalise these discourses in talking about themselves as worker and carers.     

Fertility patterns in the Roma population of Spain

The Spanish Roma population have co-existed with the broader population of Spain, under the same laws and regulations for more than 500 years, but they exhibit very different fertility patterns. The aim of this paper is to determine whether there are factors other than income or education that can explain the larger number of children in Spanish Roma families. Our analysis reveals that the existence of a family business, which is highly labor-demanding, appears to be associated with parental decisions concerning the number of children. Since parental authority, in Roma families, holds sway over children even after their own marriage, the future labor contributions of children are particularly beneficial to the family business.     

Implementing the Power to Kids programme in home-based (foster) care: Identifying the SAFETY approach

Sexual abuse and dating violence are chronic problems for children and young people in out-of-home care. This study explored the impact of a prevention and response programme Power to Kids, which targets harmful sexual behaviour (HSB), child sexual exploitation (CSE) and dating violence (DV) for children and young people in home-based (foster) care. Twenty-eight case managers, 25 foster carers and 13 children and young people participated in a mixed methods study in Victoria, Australia informed by the research question: How does the Power to Kids programme impact the sexual health and safety of children and young people in home-based (foster) care? The data analysis revealed a SAFETY approach whereby the sexual health and safety knowledge of carers and case managers was enhanced, and carers were given permission to have Brave Conversations with children and young people, who could then apply the new knowledge to their lives. Case managers were upskilled in identifying indicators of sexual abuse and empowered to escalate stalled therapeutic and disruption practice when children and young people were identified as experiencing HSB, CSE or DV.     

The photo‐survey research method: capturing life in the city

Recent promotion of city centre living within UK policy has led to a commensurate interest in city centre conditions and the opinions and experiences of the people who live there. An apposite, straightforward method to capture city centre residents' experiences and views is described in this article. We successfully combined a novel, under‐utilized visual technique (self‐directed photography) with qualitative methods (log‐sheets and interviews) in the form of a ‘photo‐survey’. A background to visual methodologies is presented in this article, alongside a critique of using the photo‐survey with 84 city centre residents to investigate environmental conditions and perceptions within three of the UK's major cities. The method provided a rich, detailed set of data, but also brought a number of noticeable benefits to the data collection process. The photo‐survey not only effectively captured and documented life in the city but also acted as an ‘agent for change’, evoking thoughts and feelings which ultimately encouraged participants to reflect on their existing perceptions and urban experiences. The study also raises some important considerations for future work undertaken with this method and with using photographs as a set of data, and proposes techniques for minimising potential problems.     

Social work through collaborative autoethnography

This paper discusses a research project involving five MA Social Work Students and one member of Social Work Academic Staff. Using narrative and taking a collaborative autoethnographical approach, this project highlights some of the feelings that students articulated following a 70-day placement experience. Findings include anxiety, powerlessness and frustration, together with growing confidence, recognition of their skills and a deeper understanding of the role of ‘self’ in social work. Raising issues of preparedness for practice placement, this paper has implications for both social work practice and social work education. Autoethnography (AE) is both a method of carrying out research and a methodology, specifically a qualitative methodology linked to ethnography and narrative inquiry. AE results in highly personalized narrative accounts of the researcher’s engagement with specific sociocultural contexts in the pursuit of knowing more about a phenomenon. Applying such a methodology to explore collaboratively issues of student lived experience of placement is a new and innovative use of this method.     

Conditional Gaussian mixture modelling for dietary pattern analysis

Summary.  Free-living individuals have multifaceted diets and consume foods in numerous combinations. In epidemiological studies it is desirable to characterize individual diets not only in terms of the quantity of individual dietary components but also in terms of dietary patterns. We describe the conditional Gaussian mixture model for dietary pattern analysis and show how it can be adapted to take account of important characteristics of self-reported dietary data. We illustrate this approach with an analysis of the 2000–2001 National Diet and Nutrition Survey of adults. The results strongly favoured a mixture model solution allowing clusters to vary in shape and size, over the standard approach that has been used previously to find dietary patterns.     

Multifamily therapy in the community mental health network: A pragmatic randomized and controlled study

Multifamily therapy (MFT) is a psychotherapeutic group intervention for patients with severe mental disorders (SMDs) and their families. The present study is a multicenter, randomized, and controlled trial that analyzes the benefit of MFT during outpatient treatment. The recruited patients were randomly assigned to the experimental group (n = 26), which received 24 MFT sessions in addition to their treatment as usual (TAU), or to the control group (n = 29), which received only TAU (individual and family sessions). Six months after the inclusion in the MFT, the experimental group showed a significant decrease in number of visits to the psychiatric emergency services, number of psychiatric admissions, and the days of admission. The need for hospital care 6 months after recruitment was also lower in the experimental group compared to the control group. These results suggest that the implementation of MFT during outpatient treatment facilitates community management of people diagnosed with mental health problems.