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Parental advocacy is an emerging area of research and policy interest in Wales and across the UK. Although there is little research in the UK context to date, international research has indicated that parental advocacy can improve the relationship between parent and professional in the field of child protection social work. This paper aims to ascertain how the implementation of a parental advocacy programme supports parents to play a meaningful role in decision-making when children’s services are working with them and their families.

This study used interviews, surveys and focus groups to obtain qualitative data from 18 parents, seven parent advocates, two advocacy managers and four social workers, to explore the potential impact of parental advocacy on decision-making. The study identified challenges in implementing parental advocacy, particularly relating to awareness of the service. Participants also discussed experiences of the child protection system and how parents are supported by advocates.

Despite challenges surrounding implementation, initial findings were encouraging, and generated examples of how parental advocacy services have helped parents to understand children’s services and develop relationships of trust with social care professionals. In doing so, this study identified potential mechanisms that may be useful to support future service delivery.

This paper and research is novel as it explores parental advocacy within the Welsh context. Although there has been research conducted into parental advocacy, this has largely come from the USA. This research comes from the evaluation of an innovative and promising parental advocacy scheme in Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of hate crime relating to people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

This is a discussion outlining some of the key evidence relating to ASD and hate crime.

For too long the issue of hate crime and autism has been neglected in spite of significant numbers of people with ASDs experiencing hate crime and/or harassment on a regular basis.

Although people with ASD are thought to be subject to high rates of hate crimes the literature is sparse when compared to other strands of hate crime such as race or religion.

The purpose of this paper is to describe what it is like to be a midwife in the professionally isolated and marginalised arena of home birth in Ireland and to explore whether the organisation of home birth services and professional discourse might be undermining the autonomy of home birth midwives.

This paper is drawn from auto-ethnographic field work, with 18 of the 21 self-employed community midwives (SECMs) offering home birth support to women in Ireland from 2006 to 2009. The data presented are derived from field notes of participant observations and from interviews digitally recorded in the field.

Home birth midwives must navigate isolated professional practice and negotiate when and how to interface with mainstream hospital services. The midwives talk of the dilemma of competing discourses about birth. Decisions to transfer to hospital in labour is fraught with concerns about the woman's and the midwife's autonomy. Hospital transfers crystallise midwives’ sense of professional vulnerability.

Maternity services organisation in Ireland commits virtually no resources to community midwifery. Home birth is almost entirely dependent upon a small number of SECMs. Although there is a “national home birth service”, it is not universally and equitably available, even to those deemed eligible. Furthermore, restrictions to the professional indemnification of home birth midwives, effectively criminalises midwives who would attend certain women. Home birth, already a marginal practice, is at real risk of becoming regulated out of existence.

This paper brings new insight into the experiences of midwives practicing at the contested boundaries of contemporary maternity services. It reveals the inappropriateness of a narrowly professional paradigm for midwifery. Disciplinary control of individuals by professions may countermand claimed “service” ideologies.

This article features four disabled artists who are parents and center on their balance of artistic practice and family. As a disabled artist considering starting a family and becoming a parent, the question of balancing artistry with a child has been a consistent thought and inquiry. Especially as a disabled artist wrestling with the realities of managing one's bodily needs with a career and personal life, I realize it will be a challenging yet rewarding adjustment. Furthermore, artists often lead atypical work lives with atypical working hours, which can sometimes lend itself to parenting and take away from it in other ways. With the resultant interviews and article, I aim to provide critical insights into practicing disabled artists' viewpoints on parenting, ranging from the challenges to the dividends. I hope these insights will support a singular view of disability parenting and artistry, as well as the Journal's goal of a new paradigm in disability scholarship overall.

This study aims at a better understanding of parents’ identity work when their parenting skills are questioned, in an organizational setting. The parents in this study were assessed as at risk of unsatisfactory parental functioning because of problems related to drugs, mental health and/or psychosocial functioning, and they were observed and offered guidance at an extended health centre in Norway. The study explores how individual self-presentations are interwoven with and dependent on organizational narratives of identity.

Based on an analysis of 16 qualitative interviews, three exemplary cases are analyzed in detail. Narrative identity and professional gaze constitute the theoretical framework.

Parents and service providers negotiate which organizational narratives of identity are available, and the narratives are integrated in parents’ self-presentations in different ways. The most common strategy is to accept the organizational narratives offered, but they are also transformed and rejected. The experience of being seen by an empathic professional gaze contributes to the creation of an acceptable self-narrative.

Tending to parents’ identity needs should be an integral part of services provided. If parents are to cooperate with state services and engage in interventions, their needs for preserving an acceptable and coherent self-narrative must be considered.

This paper adds to the understanding of how identity work is a central feature of service provision. It also adds to the literature on relationships between identity narratives at different levels of society.

American Horror Story, with its strong narrative arcs, interesting characters and high production values, is one of the most important horror TV series in the post-millennial years. This chapter will focus on the four roles played by Oscar-winning actress, Jessica Lange in the first four series.

As an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth understanding of adolescent experiences of maternal cancer to identify the individual and contextual factors that shape adolescent experiences and evaluates the potential applicability of the Family Ecology Model to the illness context.

This analysis is focussed on three female adolescents who completed semi-structured interviews, which were subjected to IPA. Maternal illness is a challenge for adolescents, which can be improved or undermined by their contexts. The analysis yielded three sub-themes: family structure, social supports, experiencing maternal cancer at a time of transition and the lasting impact of cancer.

This study found that adolescent experiences of maternal cancer depend on their contexts from an ecological perspective the type and quality of adolescent interactions determine coping and adjustment. Maternal cancer can be difficult as adolescents are already facing specific developmental challenges. Future research can benefit from adopting an ecological perspective to further understand adolescent experiences to support adolescent that may be more vulnerable and benefit from additional supports. This is not a generalisable piece of research but it provides a very deep and detailed understanding of the impact of maternal cancer on adolescents’ developmental course and determines how the complexity of their contexts can serve as a risk or a protective factor at this challenging time.

This paper contributes to the body of research by providing a comprehensive understanding of adolescents facing maternal cancer. The Ecological Model supports the findings of this research and proves to be a good model to understand the complex interplay between adolescents and their environments when facing a difficult challenge like maternal cancer is.

Often, researchers view silence as antagonistic to equity-aimed projects. Because verbal, written, and textually agentive communications are presumed to be the most valid qualitative-research data, moments of silence are under-analyzed. Yet, we argue that silence holds meaning as data and that it is a valid, rich form of communication.

Through this reflective analysis of silence, we invite readers to reconceptualize silence in research from a critical disability-research perspective with emphasis on crip willfulness. We introduce silence as an interpretive, agentive and relational gesture.

We attend to silence as necessary in all research because it helps researchers excavate able-bodied expectations about communication in qualitative-data-collection practices.

We demonstrate that silences in research can be an interpretive, relational, and agentive gesture that can teach us about taken-for-granted assumptions about research practices. Revisiting our research encounters with this framing of silence informed by critical disability studies allows us to question how traditional social science research methods value some modalities of expression over others. Rather than viewing silence in research as moments when nothing happens, we show that silence indicates something happening and is valid data.

Testicular cancer affects approximately 550 men in Australia each year. Early intervention, with the potential to reduce the burden of this serious disease, requires a strong understanding of the factors that influence help‐seeking. In the current qualitative retrospective study, the symptom‐recognition and help‐seeking experiences of 11 men aged between 28‐44 years who had undergone treatment for testicular cancer were examined. Analysis of the semistructured telephone interview data indicated that most men sought help early, and were treated promptly. A few men, however, described prolonged help‐seeking delays. The factors implicated in help‐seeking delays included lack of knowledge about testicular cancer; initial misattribution of symptoms; slowly progressing or low‐severity symptoms; a busy lifestyle; embarrassment about having a genital examination; and a fear of orchidectomy and its potential threat to masculinity. Further research using quantitative methodology is required to determine the relative importance of these various factors on help‐seeking delays.