Julia Brannen

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• B.A(Econ), MSc, PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University College London

The article is based on original, contemporaneous data in the form of personal diaries from the perspective of a middle-class secondary schoolgirl living in North London in the 1920s. It first considers the use of personal diaries in social science. The article’s particular contribution is to demonstrate the value of diaries to understanding everyd...

How to do research in an international interdisciplinary project

For nearly 50 years, the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) has been integral to the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). This article is written from the perspectives of four researchers who have served in the TCRU’s formative years and over its lifetime. It chronicles the TCRU’s hist...

This book provides fascinating insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations, understandings and experiences of their work and intersection of it with their family lives.

This book takes a life course perspective, analysing and comparing the biographies of mothers and fathers in seven European countries in context.

Becoming a parent, especially for the first time, marks a major turning point in most people's lives. In this book we explore and examine conditions related to young working parents’ decisions and experiences in the transition to the life course phase where they become mothers and fathers, and also the contexts and conditions under which they manag...

The chapters in this book have each contributed to a wider understanding of the transitions to and the experiences of parenthood across different European countries. The analysis of biographical cases was carried out taking account of a multilayered set of conditions: the nation state both over time and in the present; national institutions such as...

Introduction Having looked at how and why people entered childcare work and the identities they forged, in this chapter we turn to how care workers currently understand their work and what it means to care for vulnerable children and young people. Drawing largely upon the case studies, we consider the goals they aim to achieve with their work and t...

Introduction In this chapter, we consider questions concerning who stays and who leaves childcare work and why. We also examine movement between different types of work with vulnerable children, since this has particular relevance for government policies to encourage greater flexibility and transferability across the childcare workforce (see Chapte...

Main conclusions from the study The study sought to examine four particular groups of childcare workers. The four groups have in common that they care for some of the most disadvantaged children in society. The children's situations are on a continuum of disadvantage and include children of different ages (young children to young adults) with diffe...

Introduction Making sense of people's lives and the stories they tell is a complex task. As described in Chapter Two, in the case studies we teased out the ‘biographical facts’ of care workers’ lives and the contexts in which their lives were lived from the interpretations they provided as interview informants. Both the accounts of interviewees and...

Introduction In this chapter we take up the story of care workers’ careers from the point at which they first entered childcare, the focus of Chapter Four. We take the term ‘career’ to mean an individual's progression in paid work over the lifecourse and how it interacts with their other careers, for example the career of parenthood (Elder, 1978)....

Introduction Negotiating an ethic of care cannot be witnessed directly but may be glimpsed in people's life histories and life stories and the ways in which informants present themselves and their lives. This chapter starts at the beginning of our story of care workers’ lives and addresses the question: to which periods or moments in their lives do...

Box A1: Contextual information about the organisations from which postal survey sample was drawn Authority A London local authority. Foster care: around a 100 foster carers with an older age profile. High proportion of single parents. Fees lower than independent sector. Residential care: no units. Family support: 23 based in nursery/centres, foster...

“They should be a lot more honest [about the nature of the work]…. Because I think people tend to be put off because of the bad press that they get. And that tends to highlight like the bad things rather than the positive things.” (Debra Henry, a foster carer) This chapter sets out to document the everyday reality of working with vulnerable childre...

This book provides fascinating insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations, understandings and experiences of their work and intersection of it with their family lives.

Introduction This chapter describes the study's research questions, how its research design addressed these questions, the different phases of the study, the variety of different methods used and the characteristics of the childcare workers who participated. The study's research questions The main research questions addressed by the study are: • •...

Introduction An important part of the jigsaw in understanding childcare workers’ lives remains, namely how as parents and family members childcare workers managed to combine their work and other care responsibilities – how they connected their public and private worlds, not only over time but also on a daily basis. For these workers, caring was an...

The people who work with children are central to keeping them safe and helping them to get the most out of life. (HM Government, 2003, p 10) Introduction This book is about the work and family lives of people who provide care for ‘vulnerable’ children and young people. This includes children who are looked after by the state in either foster famili...

The combination of global financial, health and climate crises in the 21st century brought both threats and opportunities for the international research community. Today, scientists are being actively encouraged to collaborate on an unprecedented scale across cultural and disciplinary boundaries to find and deliver solutions to these societal chall...

Based upon cross-national case studies of public and private sector workplaces, Work, Families and Organisations in Transition illustrates how workplace practices and policies impact on employees' experiences of work-life balance in contemporary shifting contexts.

This paper examines the orientations to the future of young people living in low-income families in the U.K. and Portugal following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the contexts in which they are socially reproduced. It is based on data from comparative research on families and food poverty, funded by the European Research Council. The study fo...

In the context of successive global crises and rising household food insecurity in wealthy European countries there is renewed attention to the role of school meals as a welfare intervention. However, little is known about the extent to which school meals are a resource for low-income families living in different contexts. Drawing on a mixed method...

A growing literature addresses undocumented migrants in different countries, with governmental exclusion from welfare and health services a common theme. However, little is known comparatively about the difference social context makes to the resources available to these migrants in different circumstances or how they manage and experience material...

Food is fundamental to health and social participation, yet food poverty has increased in the global North. Adopting a realist ontology and taking a comparative case approach, Families and Food in Hard Times addresses the global problem of economic retrenchment and how those most affected are those with the least resources. Based on research carrie...

The chapter examines life story and narrative approaches and their application in the study of family lives. It begins with a brief history of some key figures in biographical research followed by an examination of some of the distinctions between the two approaches. The second part of the chapter presents and discusses a case of a grandfather and...

This paper focuses on two cohorts of Norwegian young men whose behaviour in childhood and adolescence caused serious concern to their parents, teachers, social workers and, in some cases, the police, Despite having been identified as ‘at risk’, they made transitions to positive adult masculine identities in two different historical contexts; the 19...

This chapter studies children and young people in families. Throughout most of the twentieth century, psychology and its associated field of child development were lead disciplines in the study of children and childhood, just as psychology led the way in youth studies. In the 1980s and early 1990s, interest in childhood as a field of study was alre...

This chapter discusses the growing interest in the use of auto/biographical approaches in the social sciences. Narrative research and narrative analysis are umbrella terms that refer to data available in a variety of forms and produced for a variety of purposes. Such data can be spoken, written or visual. Narrative approaches are not allied to any...

This chapter assesses the concept of generation, which brings into view the historical period in which a person grows up. The popularity of the concept waxes and wanes, often coming to the fore in lay, policy, and sociological discourse in periods of rapid social change. A generational unit is formed not only when peers are exposed to the same phen...

From the vantage point of forty years in social research and the study of families, the author of this book offers an invaluable account of how research is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. The book has two main themes that are interwoven throughout the text. A central theme is how social research matters in relation to historical contex...

This introductory chapter provides a brief biography of the author, offering a glimpse of the author's beginnings in the field of social research. This story is not intended to be a tale of individual endeavour but an examination of the times, concerns, and conditions in which the work of one sociologist develops and how a career reliant on researc...

This chapter reflects on the shifting public discourses in Britain concerning mothers and the labour market from the end of the Second World War and shows how the framing of research questions reflects these changing public discourses. At the end of the Second World War, women were ejected from many of the jobs in which they had worked in wartime t...

Food poverty in the Global North is an urgent moral and social concern. In the UK, food banks have proliferated and the number of food parcels handed out to families has risen dramatically. In addition, welfare support has been increasingly withheld by successive UK governments as a tool for controlling immigration. Drawing on qualitative research...

Introduction When people make significant compromises about food this is a central aspect of relative and absolute poverty, however those conditions are defined. Food is a basic human need. At one level, food provides the nutrients needed for growth and development. Inequitable access to healthy food plays a role in health inequalities. But the way...

This book examines absolute poverty in Europe, which is at the moment fairly neglected in academic and policy discourse. It opens with conceptual and methodological considerations that prepare the ground for an application of the concept of absolute poverty in the context of affluent societies and analyses shortcomings of social statistics as well...

Since the 1990s, international social science research has made a major contribution to the evidence base on changing family forms and household structures by collecting and processing data about family composition, dissolution and reconstitution, as well as household living, working and caring arrangements. Social scientists have exploited the ava...

This paper contributes to scholarship concerned with media representations of poverty by exploring newspaper coverage of food poverty as experienced by UK children and families. Our content analysis of six contrasting print newspapers from 2006-15 finds that reporting of children's and families' food poverty begins in 2011, peaks in 2014 and is dom...

The paper draws on findings from a study called ‘Families and Food in Hard Times’, which is examining food poverty among children and families in three European countries. In the UK, qualitative interviews were carried out with 45 11–15 year olds and their parents or carers. Young people's narratives reveal food poverty as a multi‐dimensional exper...

This chapter provides a cross-national comparison of the school to work transition of working class men in the two countries. Based on biographical interviews with members of three generations in each family, it discusses working class men’s transitions set in the contexts of historical change and intergenerational relations. The theoretical framew...

This chapter addresses research on the transition to adulthood in relation to wider family relationships and examines how this transition is shaped historically both by the family support available and the wider economic and political contexts of the period when young people make their transition. First, it sets the transition to adulthood in a con...

Not enough is known in the UK about how economic phenomena and policy changes have impacted families’ ability to feed themselves. This article employs a novel way of identifying the types of UK families at risk of food poverty over time. Applying a relative deprivation approach, it asks what counts in the UK as a socially acceptable diet that meets...