Jonathan Scourfield
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 214319 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jonathan Scourfield |
| NOMBRES | Jonathan |
| APELLIDO | Scourfield |
| FIRMA | SCOURFIELD J |
| AFILIACIONES | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6218-8158 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 121 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 719 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 120 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1998 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Self-Organized Men’s Mental Health and Well-Being Groups—An Emerging Social Development
Men’s mental health is a national and global concern amid consistently higher suicide rates and rising demand and long waiting times for state-funded services. Simultaneously, groups supporting men’s health and well-being, such as Men’s Sheds and community-led self-help and peer-support initiatives, have expanded. Despite their growth, research on the role of men’s peer-support groups in tackling mental health is still in the early stages, with l…
Numbers and demographic characteristics of UK social work students over time
Although the numbers and demographic characteristics of social work students are published annually by workforce regulators in each of the four UK nations, these have not before been brought together to form a UK-wide picture, over time, and allow some comparison between the four nations. This article does that, using individual-level data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, from 2007/8 to 2021–2. The analysis found the well-known pictur…
What affects the likelihood of children entering public care? The interaction of household low income, area-level deprivation and parental risk factors
Adult risk factors partly explain the relationship between both area-level deprivation and low income and the likelihood of children entering public care. • While children from areas of high deprivation are more likely to enter public care, parental risk factors have the same effects on the odds of care in areas of high deprivation and areas of low deprivation. • Specific adult risk factors − depression, anxiety and self-harm − have a bigger impa…
Just because we can does not mean we should
Administrative data are increasingly used in impact evaluations of complex interventions in children’s social care (CSC), offering advantages such as longitudinal, population-level coverage, and reduced burden on families and practitioners. However, administrative data alone are insufficient to support meaningful and responsible evaluation. Drawing on insights from two webinars hosted by the Children’s Social Care Data User Group, which focused o…
Factors associated with childhood out-of-home care entry and re-entry in high income countries
Use of Linked Administrative Adult Social Care Data for Research
Administrative data provide unique coverage of populations using care and the use of new datasets and advancing digital technologies only contribute to this growing area. There are ongoing limitations in the linkage of administrative datasets, which for adult social care have been exacerbated by inconsistent coding and varied IT systems. The aim of this review was to provide an overview of all studies to date that have used linked adult social ca…
Family Voice
Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare brings wider family members together to engage in the best way to meet a child’s needs. Shared decision-making is hypothesised to result in more even power-sharing between families and professionals, and greater trust. Previous research suggested FCGs may reduce more intrusive state intervention
What Linked Data Can Tell Us About the Increasing Numbers of Children Entering Public Care
The number of children in public care in Wales, UK, rose from the mid‐1990s to 2021. It is unclear if this change was related to increases in risk factors in parents, changes in the impact of risk factors, or changing policies and practices. Administrative data from children's social care were linked to administrative health care data to create three cohorts of households with children, covering 4‐year periods between 2008 and 2020. Households th…
The inter-relationship between parental problems and ethnic background
Both parental problems and being from certain ethnic minoritized populations are associated with an increased likelihood of children entering local authority care. This study explored the intersection of these factors in the UK. Population-level administrative datasets were linked to create a dataset of school-aged children living in households in Wales, between 2016 and 2020 (n = 431,584). Multilevel logistic regression models were used to look …
The Impact of Political Stance on UK Newspaper Coverage of Child and Family Social Work
Previous research has shown that news coverage of the social work profession plays an important role in influencing public opinion, and can damage staff morale if negative, affecting recruitment and retention of staff. Relatively little research has been done to ascertain how factors such as political stance of news outlet influence the way social workers are portrayed. The focus of this research is how child and family social workers are portray…
Suicide and Its Nexus
In Indonesia, suicide research has largely overlooked structural factors at the meso and macro levels, whether as primary causes, contributing factors, or considerations for prevention strategies. The dominance of psychological and psychiatric approaches has marginalized sociological perspectives, limiting a more holistic understanding of suicide. Existing heuristic models primarily frame suicide as a consequence of mental health disorders or eco…
Receipt of social services intervention in childhood, educational attainment and emergency hospital admissions
All groups receiving social service intervention experience poorer educational and health outcomes than peers in the general population. Children who remain with their home parents or caregivers but are identified as 'in need' or 'at risk' by social care practitioners require further research. Integrated support is needed from multiple sectors, including health, educational and social care
Parental risk factors and children entering out-of-home care
Parental difficulties, including mental ill health, substance misuse, domestic violence and learning disability have been associated with children entering out-of-home care. There is also evidence that these issues may co-occur within families. Understanding how the co-occurrence of these difficulties is associated with care entry is complex because they may co-occur in the same or different household members and have different impacts on the lik…
Ethnic Disproportionality in the Child Welfare System
Children’s chances of contact with the child welfare system at different stages vary significantly by their ethnicity. This study goes beyond recent UK studies on the scale of ethnic differences in children in care or on protection plans by improving data completeness through data linkage, considering the ethnic patterns in the wider population of children in need or receiving care and support, and reporting trends over time. We contribute to the…
The Visibility of a Socio-Economic Dimension in Day-to-Day Child and Family Social Work Practice in Wales
This study explored how day-to-day social work practice with children and families in Wales responds to poverty, building on case studies already published in the other three UK nations. A case study design was used. The sites were locality teams in two local authorities, differing in their children looked after rates and trajectories of these over time. Qualitative research methods included practice observations; interviews with staff; focus gro…
Family Group Conference Provision in UK Local Authorities and Associations with Children Looked after Rates
Family group conferences (FGCs) in child welfare share decision-making with family members by bringing the immediate and wider family together to make a plan to meet a child’s needs. This paper reports survey findings on FGC provision in the UK in 2022 and explores whether in England the presence of an FGC service and the rate of FGC provision is associated with the rate of children in care, entering care, in kinship foster care and leaving care.…
Why social work needs to embrace data linkage research
Purpose Linked data can provide unique insights into both the need for social care services and the outcomes of intervention. Crucially, these insights will be based on much more representative coverage of the population of people receiving social care than is achieved by surveys and they are not subject to the reporting bias that can arise in relation to stigmatised services. Design/methodology/approach The opportunities are expanding for linkin…
Retention in statutory social work from fast-track child and family programs
Two fast-track child and family social work training programs have been established in England — Step Up to Social Work and Frontline. Trainees’ financial support is far higher than for mainstream social work degrees. One of the reasons claimed for setting up these programs is addressing retention, although critics (of Frontline) predicted graduates would not stay in social work. A 4-year study assessed retention and reasons for leaving social wo…
Why are there higher rates of children looked after in Wales
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider some possible reasons for the relatively high rate in Wales of children looked after by local authorities. Design/methodology/approach Selected potential explanations for Wales having higher rates were tested against aggregate data from published 2021 Government statistics. Wales was compared with England and English regions for area deprivation, local authority spending, placements at home and kin…
Establishing research priorities for investigating male suicide risk and recovery
This study uses the Delphi expert consensus method to work with lived-experience experts and establish research priorities to advance our understanding of male suicide risk and recovery. Items for the Delphi were generated via findings from two recent quantitative and qualitative systematic reviews on male suicide, a comprehensive gray literature search, responses to a global survey on male suicide, and feedback from a panel of 10 international a…
Use of Linked Administrative Children’s Social Care Data for Research
Increasing access to children’s social care data presents enormous potential for research and policy evaluation, with opportunities increased where data can be anonymously linked to other sources of information, such as health and education data. The purpose of this scoping review was to provide an overview of all UK data linkage studies that have used routinely collected individual-level children’s social care administrative data. Six research d…
A scoping review of system-level mechanisms to prevent children being in out-of-home care
Identifying which approaches can effectively reduce the need for out-of-home care for children is critically important. Despite the proliferation of different interventions and approaches globally, evidence summaries on this topic are limited. This study is a scoping review using a realist framework to explore what research evidence exists about reducing the number of children and young people in care. Searches of databases and websites were used…
Knowing where the shoe pinches
Three Labour politicians with experience in government and backgrounds in social work spoke on a conference panel about politics and social work. All had moved into electoral politics with the view that there were limits to the radical change that social work could achieve. They discussed how social work has influenced their political work and how constituency casework illuminates the impact of policies on individuals. This article examines the t…
How might changes to family income affect the likelihood of children being in out-of-home care? Evidence from a realist and qualitative rapid evidence assessment of interventions
Interventions that change family income include any policy or practice that directly or indirectly changes the amount of money a family have. Although theory regarding the relationship between poverty and child maltreatment is well established, theories of how family income change affects the likelihood of children being in out-of-home are not well developed. This realist rapid evidence assessment provides an overview of the process of how interv…
Contesting constructs and interrogating research methods
Discourses of self-harm, and also suicide, are often underpinned by a central tenet: prevention is the priority. This belief is seemingly so inscribed in research that it is rarely interrogated. The present paper re-analyses qualitative data from a hospital-based study of self-harm management and prevention practice. It aims to reflect upon, and disrupt, the authors' latent assumptions about the construct of 'prevention', while reflecting on the …
Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity
The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home car…
Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions
The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor famil…
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people's experiences of distress
The research presented in this paper set out to explore the cultural context of youth suicide and more specifically any connections between sexual identity and self-destructive behaviour, in the light of international evidence about the disproportionate risk of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people. The empirical basis for the paper is qualitative research that was carried out in the …
Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services
Sociological autopsy
This paper's main aim is to argue the methodological case for a particular approach to researching the sociology of suicide. By way of illustrating the use of this approach it also offers some brief examples of substantive findings about the gendered character of men's suicides. The first half of the article explains and justifies the research approach. This is a qualitatively-driven mixed method and dual paradigm study of individual suicides. It…
Understanding Suicide
Sociologists have debated suicide since the early days of the discipline. This book assesses that body of work and breaks new ground through a qualitatively-driven, mixed method 'sociological autopsy
When things fall apart
Comparison of suicidal ideation, suicide attempt and suicide in children and young people in care and non-care populations
Suicide in children and young people is a major public health concern. However, it is unknown whether individuals who have been in the care of the child welfare system are at an elevated risk. Care is presently defined as statutory provision of in-home care (e.g. child living with birth family but in receipt of legal order involving supervision by social workers) or out-of-home care (e.g. foster care, residential care and kinship care). This pape…
The non-display of authentic distress
This article draws from focus groups and interviews investigating how young people talk about self-harm. Some of the research participants had personal experience of self-harm but this was not a prerequisite for their inclusion in the study. Thematic coding was used initially to organise and give an overview of the data, but the data were subsequently analysed using a discourse analytic approach. The article focuses on the young people's construc…
Making sense of suicide
Constructing women in child protection work
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of the occupational culture of a social work team in the UK. It is a discussion of some key aspects of social workers’ construction of women as clients. Data were collected from observation of routine case talk, reading of case files and in‐depth interviews with social workers. The conclusion of the research is that three defining discourses can be identified in the culture of the social work office: w…
The Intergenerational Transmission of Islam in England and Wales
If secularization is increasing over time, this should be observable in patterns of religiosity across the generations. The Home Office Citizenship Survey (of adults in England and Wales) and its accompanying Young People's Survey provide a relatively rare example of individual-level and intergenerational British data on religious transmission, with indications of religious affiliation or practice across three generations. Secondary analysis was …
Risk, Reflexivity and Social Control in Child Protection
The article addresses some recent attempts to reassess the contemporary child protection system as potentially liberating. These are, first, discussions of child protection in the context of theories of reflexive modernization and the risk society, and, second, postmodernist feminist writings. After initial theoretical debate about some of these perspectives, the authors go on to present ethnographic research evidence showing that social control …
New Labour and the `problem of men
The New Labour government has arguably broken new ground by making `masculinity policy'. Whereas the policy process is always inevitably gendered, with implications for men as well as women, it is only in the last few years that a government has made quite such explicit references to men in some areas of policy. The most high-profile initiatives have been in relation to fathering and the education of boys. In this article, we make out a case that…
Untangling child welfare inequalities and the ‘Inverse Intervention Law’ in England
Paradoxical evidence on ethnic inequities in child welfare
The challenge of engaging fathers in the child protection process
This is an overview of the well-known difficulties of engaging fathers in the child protection process and makes some suggestions about constructive responses from services. There is brief discussion of the historical context of the problem, current child welfare policy, the culture of front-line practice amongst child protection staff and the behaviour of fathers who come to the attention of child protection staff. Ideas for changes in policy an…
Suicidal Masculinities
Across the West, suicide rates in young men have been rising for some time. This trend has attracted considerable media attention and is often cited within media discourse as evidence of a 'crisis of masculinity'. The field of suicide research (or suicidology) is dominated by quantitative methodology, and although there has been research attention to the gendered character of suicidal behaviour, studies tend to compare 'men' as a group with 'wome…
Social Work Doctoral Students in the UK
Despite traditionally having low numbers of doctoral students, social work research is currently undergoing expansion at doctoral level. Professional doctorates are starting up, which are highly applied to practice and include modules as well as a thesis, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) has now recognized social work as a separate discipline for doctoral training. The aims of this research project were to identify who these so…
Children’s accounts of Wales as racialized and inclusive
The article is a discussion of the aspects of children’s accounts of Welshness that are either racialized or inclusive. The empirical basis is a qualitative research project on children’s national and local identities in Wales, conducted with 8-11 year olds in six primary schools across the country, with schools selected to provide diversity of region, language, social class and ethnicity. This article focuses on the aspects of the children’s tal…
Cuts both ways
Recency of Divorce, Depression, and Suicide Risk
Previous individual-level research on the association between the status of divorce and suicide risk has been marked by two recurrent limitations: (a) it is not clear if the timing of divorce (recent vs. distal) affects risk of completed suicides and (b) it is not clear if the association between divorce and suicide completions will withstand controls for a series of risk and protective factors including psychiatric morbidity. The present study a…
Democratising the Family and the State? The Case of Family Group Conferences in Child Welfare
This article discusses the potential of family group conferences to act as a liberating intervention for families traditionally controlled by the state welfare system. Family group conferences are interventions designed to remove control of decision making from professionals and allow family groups to make decisions about the welfare of one or more of their members. Using data from a qualitative evaluation of family group conferences in Wales, th…
Constructing Men in Child Protection Work
The child protection process has been characterized by some commentators as being primarily concerned with the scrutiny of mothering. For a variety of reasons, social workers tend to spend relatively little time working with men in families where children are considered to be at risk. Even where a man is considered to be the primary abuser in a family, the usual approach is to concentrate on the mother's 'failure to protect' the children. This ar…
Staff Wellbeing and Retention in Children’s Social Work
Objective: To systematically review international evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions targeting the mental health, wellbeing, and retention of child and family social workers and their impact on child and family outcomes.Method:Systematic review and narrative synthesis of quantitative comparative studies. Published or unpublished research was sought via 12 bibliographic databases, websites, contact with experts, …
Probation Officers Working with Men
Recent debates on making masculinities explicit in work with offenders are reviewed as the context for a qualitative research study. Interviews were conducted with probation officers and files and pre-sentence reports read with the aim of exploring the construction of masculinities within the probation service. Tensions about gender were found within and between the three areas of professional rhetoric, practice and internal relations. The most s…
Programmes for Violent Men
The results are presented of a telephone survey of British therapeutic and educational programmes specifically for men who are violent towards women partners. The following issues are considered: the organisational status of projects, funding, systems of referral, resistance to the creation of programmes, relationship with women's refuge organisations and theoretical and ideological orientations. The findings suggest some resistance has been expe…
The Rediscovery of Child Neglect
The article is a discussion of the construction of child neglect in a child and family social work team in the UK, based on ethnographic research in the social work office. Two influential and contrasting professional discourses on neglect are identified, and it is suggested that the dominant construction of neglect in the team studied is maternal failure to adequately service children's bodies. This construction is discussed in relation to some …
Managing Marginalised Masculinities
This paper aims to offer some insights into the gendered nature of the work of probation officers. Much of the work of the British Probation Service is with marginalised men. In recent years there has been some discussion in academic and practitioner circles about the significance of the social construction of masculinity to probation practice. This paper reports a qualitative study of probation officers' constructions of masculinity. The study f…
Constructing women in child protection work
This paper is based on an ethnographic study of the occupational culture of a social work team in the UK. It is a discussion of some key aspects of social workers’ construction of women as clients. Data were collected from observation of routine case talk, reading of case files and in‐depth interviews with social workers. The conclusion of the research is that three defining discourses can be identified in the culture of the social work office: w…
Men's Work and Male Lives. Men and Work in Britain, John Goodwin, Aldershot
Constructing Men in Child Protection Work
The child protection process has been characterized by some commentators as being primarily concerned with the scrutiny of mothering. For a variety of reasons, social workers tend to spend relatively little time working with men in families where children are considered to be at risk. Even where a man is considered to be the primary abuser in a family, the usual approach is to concentrate on the mother's 'failure to protect' the children. This ar…
Responding to the experiences of minority ethnic children in virtually all‐white communities
This paper aims to contribute to the relatively small body of literature on the minority ethnic experience in almost entirely white communities, by reporting the findings of qualitative research into the experiences of minority ethnic children living in the South Wales valleys. Twenty‐eight interviews were conducted with children and their parents/carers. Interviews with children also included sentence completion and card‐sorting tasks. The paper…
New Labour and the `problem of men
The New Labour government has arguably broken new ground by making `masculinity policy'. Whereas the policy process is always inevitably gendered, with implications for men as well as women, it is only in the last few years that a government has made quite such explicit references to men in some areas of policy. The most high-profile initiatives have been in relation to fathering and the education of boys. In this article, we make out a case that…
Reflections on Gender, Knowledge and Values in Social Work
This paper is a discussion of the application of social work knowledge and values in practice. It draws on ethnographic research in a child‐care team in the UK which set out to explore the construction of clients as gendered. It is argued that social workers' accounts of practice reveal tensions between an emphasis on clients as individuals and an emphasis on social collectivity. These tensions could be seen as inherent in social work knowledge a…
Gender and Child Protection
It has been widely noted in the social work literature that the practice of child protection is highly gendered. When it comes to child abuse, women come under more scrutiny and men, who are more likely to present a risk of harm to children, are not engaged with. This important text takes stock of this controversial topic, examining the state of policy and theory on the subject and exploring the organisational culture and the professional knowled…
Risk, Reflexivity and Social Control in Child Protection
The article addresses some recent attempts to reassess the contemporary child protection system as potentially liberating. These are, first, discussions of child protection in the context of theories of reflexive modernization and the risk society, and, second, postmodernist feminist writings. After initial theoretical debate about some of these perspectives, the authors go on to present ethnographic research evidence showing that social control …
The negotiation of minority ethnic identities in virtually all-white communities
This paper draws on qualitative interviews with 19 children and nine of their parents or carers in the South Wales valleys to discuss the effect on the social identities of minority ethnic children of living in virtually all-white communities. There is discussion of minority ethnic identities, local identities and Welshness, and the paper concludes with consideration of the theoretical and policy implications of the research. Interviews with the …
The Experiences of Frontline Staff Working with Children Seeking Asylum
The focus of this paper is welfare professionals’ accounts of their work with children who are seeking asylum. The empirical basis is a commissioned study of children seeking asylum in Wales. As well as qualitative research with children (which is not discussed in this paper), 62 professionals took part in interviews and focus groups. This sample included staff from social services, health, housing, education, police and the voluntary sector. Res…
Democratising the Family and the State? The Case of Family Group Conferences in Child Welfare
This article discusses the potential of family group conferences to act as a liberating intervention for families traditionally controlled by the state welfare system. Family group conferences are interventions designed to remove control of decision making from professionals and allow family groups to make decisions about the welfare of one or more of their members. Using data from a qualitative evaluation of family group conferences in Wales, th…
Children’s accounts of Wales as racialized and inclusive
The article is a discussion of the aspects of children’s accounts of Welshness that are either racialized or inclusive. The empirical basis is a qualitative research project on children’s national and local identities in Wales, conducted with 8-11 year olds in six primary schools across the country, with schools selected to provide diversity of region, language, social class and ethnicity. This article focuses on the aspects of the children’s tal…
Suicidal Masculinities
Across the West, suicide rates in young men have been rising for some time. This trend has attracted considerable media attention and is often cited within media discourse as evidence of a 'crisis of masculinity'. The field of suicide research (or suicidology) is dominated by quantitative methodology, and although there has been research attention to the gendered character of suicidal behaviour, studies tend to compare 'men' as a group with 'wome…
Children, Place and Identity
In this, the first sociology book to consider the important issue of how children identify with place and nation, the authors use original research and international case studies to explore this topic in depth. The book is rooted in original qualitative research the authors conducted with a diverse sample of children (aged eight to eleven) across Wales, but this data is also located in the context of existing international research on place ident…
Lay and professional knowledge in social work
This paper is concerned with the discursive interaction of lay and professional knowledge in the practice of social workers. The contention is that identifying discrete sources of knowledge—such as evidence-informed materials—may be less important for explaining how social workers guide their practice than recognising the effect of the discursive interaction of lay and professional knowledge within organisational culture. The example used for thi…
Access, Ethics and the (Re)construction of Gender
This paper presents an account of an access encounter, and uses this case to reinforce the potential for access meetings to provide a rich source of ethnographic data. The paper originates from one of the authors' experience of negotiating research access in a UK local authority social services department. In response to a summary research proposal sent in advance that expressed interest in social work with men, a gatekeeper expressed his concern…
Children Seeking Asylum in Wales
While there is an emerging body of research on children seeking asylum, the UK-based studies have to date been largely conducted in England. This paper presents the findings of qualitative research on the experiences of children seeking asylum in Wales, a nation within the UK whose National Assembly has devolved responsibility for social welfare and educational services. The research involved interviews and focus groups with children, relevant pr…
The challenge of engaging fathers in the child protection process
This is an overview of the well-known difficulties of engaging fathers in the child protection process and makes some suggestions about constructive responses from services. There is brief discussion of the historical context of the problem, current child welfare policy, the culture of front-line practice amongst child protection staff and the behaviour of fathers who come to the attention of child protection staff. Ideas for changes in policy an…
Gendered Organizational Culture in Child Protection Social Work
Journal Article Gendered Organizational Culture in Child Protection Social Work Get access Jonathan Scourfield, PhD, DipSW Jonathan Scourfield, PhD, DipSW senior lecturer Cardiff School of Social Sciences, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF11 9QB UK; e-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 51, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 80–82, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw…
The significance of place in middle childhood
The paper presents some key findings of qualitative research with older primary school children in Wales on their attachments to places and cultures. There is discussion of children's perspectives on the global, national and local arenas. We argue both that there are continuities with adult perspectives and that the children's views on place and identity need to be understood in the context of the social location of middle childhood. The study sh…
Working with Men in Health and Social Care
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Sociology (85 obras) · Psychology (81 obras) · Political science (73 obras) · Medicine (58 obras) · Law (44 obras) · Social Psychology (39 obras) · Homelessness and Social Issues (34 obras) · Social Work (33 obras) · Social Work Education and Practice (32 obras) · Child Abuse and Trauma (28 obras)