Marian Barnes

University of Brighton · School of Applied Social Science

Traditional approaches to research emphasise methodological questions about data collection and analysis rather than approaching research as a relational practice. This chapter starts to explore what researching with care means in practice through focusing on the different relationships it is necessary to develop and sustain when carrying out resea...

Researching with Care applies feminist care ethics to reimagine research as a caring practice. If we care about what we research, do we recognise that others care in different ways and for different reasons? What does this mean for the way we research, who we research with and what we seek to achieve as a result? Drawing on their own and others’ di...

The ethical dilemmas of research are not always predictable. The ethics of care offers a guide to recognising and responding to the relational ethical challenges of research, and to how caring relations can optimise positive outcomes. Understanding research as a dynamic relational practice helps develop competences and generate substantive insights...

Tronto’s analysis of the phases of care and the principles associated with them offer a way of analysing different practices that can be understood as caring. Here the authors consider what attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and solidarity mean in the context of doing research. The importance of the different perspectives fro...

The book concludes by offering personal reflections on how the ethics of care has become significant for the authors. They recognise the intersection of personal and political in the way they seek to expand and improve their understanding of the world. Caring about the issues we research includes taking responsibility for contributing to repairing...

This chapter discusses the origins of the authors’ commitment to caring research in experiences of conducting participatory research with users/survivors of health and social care services, and in discovering feminist care ethics. It offers a brief introduction to the ethics of care and the way in which this has been taken up by researchers working...

The authors draw on Sayer’s arguments about the necessity of recognising ‘what matters’ to people in social science research. They develop this as a basis for thinking of different ways of caring about research, and also the necessity for thinking in different ways about emotions, knowledge and their interactions in the way in which we research. Th...

The ethics of care can be both a perspective from within which to analyse research data, and a guide to the process of conducting analysis together with others. In this chapter authors recount different approaches used by researchers to actively engage research participants in the process of data analysis. They outline Sevenhuijsen’s ‘Trace’ analys...

This and the following chapters draw on conversations with ethics of care researchers as well as the authors’ own experiences. An introduction to this part of the book introduces these researchers. Discussions are structured by the stages of research, starting with the initial phase of how we identify and frame the research we plan to do. ‘What do...

The international contributors to this unique collection demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking across diverse geographical, policy and interpersonal contexts.

This article explores the relationship between ‘care’ and ‘community’ in the context of a residential community established to offer hospitality and support to people with addictions, mental health problems and other troubles. The community is located in a rural part of England and was established as a Christian community offering hospitality to pe...

Margaret Urban Walker’s essay ‘Getting out of line’ questions gendered assumptions about moral agency in old age and its assumed links to the concept of a ‘career self.’ In this article I develop and apply her critique to consider what forms ageing activism might take. This focuses on recognising and remembering the value of connections with people...

Contemporary interest in citizen engagement in public policy stems from a concern with the governance and quality of public service delivery, with improving the legitimacy of decision making and with articulating the claims of those previously marginalised (Barnes and Bowl 2001; Newman 2001; Sullivan and Skelcher 2002). This article discusses recen...

Jo Aldridge (2015), Participatory Research: Working with Vulnerable Groups in Research and Practice. Bristol: Policy Press. £70.00, 200 pp., hbk. - Volume 45 Issue 3 - MARIAN BARNES

Background: Since 1990, health policy in England has stressed the importance of user involvement in shaping and delivering services. Aims: To explore mental health service user-led organisations (ULOs) in England, as they interact with decision-makers to bring about change desired by them with a focus on institutional norms behaviour and special...

Over the last 20 years there has been a flourishing of work on feminist care ethics. This collection makes a unique contribution to this body of work. The international contributors demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking across diverse geographical, policy and interpersonal contexts. From Tronto’s analysis o...

The ethics of care offers a broad understanding of care as a ‘species activity’ that encompasses diverse contexts and relationships. This means needing to look beyond one to one relationships that clearly distinguish care givers from care receivers to understand the diversity of what care means in practice, and what the ethical implications are. Th...

The ethics of care has developed substantially since its early articulation by Gilligan as distinct from justice ethics. Much of its power derives from its capacity to offer insights into care as both personal and political, and to work with both philosophical as well as empirical social science understandings of the meaning of care. Thus recent fo...

The international contributors to this unique collection demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking across diverse geographical, policy and interpersonal contexts.

The international contributors to this unique collection demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking across diverse geographical, policy and interpersonal contexts.

Introduction Alcohol use among older people is a neglected area in research, policy and practice. A large amount of government and media attention on alcohol has been focused on younger people's drinking and in particular on binge drinking and antisocial behaviour in public spaces. When we think about the problematic use of alcohol, we do not tend...

Over recent years much attention on alcohol has focused on younger people’s drinking and in particular on binge drinking and anti-social behaviour in public spaces. When we think about the problematic use of alcohol we do not tend to think about older people, and alcohol use amongst older people is a neglected area in research, policy and practice....

Issues of gender and alcohol are approached in ways which demonstrate the need to look differently at our understandings of women’s alcohol use. The use of a social model enables contributing authors to challenge medical models and position them within a political context. Prejudice and injustice are addressed, including the marginalization of wome...

The book is introduced by Prefessor Elizabeth Ettorre and edited by Dr. Patsy Staddon, who recovered from alcohol issues in 1988. It includes chapters by Laura Serrant, looking at Black Caribbean women and alcohol (mis)use, Lydia Lewis, on adult community learning responses to women’s alcohol problems, and other chapters on the history of moral reg...

This article explores the relevance of deliberative practices framed by feminist care ethics to social work practice with older people. It draws on two connected projects which brought together older people: practitioners and academics. The first was a participatory research project in which the significance of care to well-being in old age emerged...

Good care is often positioned as a natural by-product of the widespread availability of good information (‘inform to care’). This paper contests this association through empirical investigation of the information-care relationship in the context of dementia care. It combines critiques of the ‘informatisation’ of care with insights from the epistemo...

This article responds to the claim that there is a critical neglect of age and ageing across media and television studies. It does so by arguing an exploration of the insights from the fields of critical gerontology/Age Studies and Media Studies allows critical scrutiny of the intersection between populist stereotyping of age, the pedagogic functio...

Background Over the last 20 years governments around the world have promoted user involvement in an effort to improve the quality of health services. Despite the growing emphasis placed on user involvement in England, there is a paucity of recent studies looking at how service users and professionals perceive the outcomes of user involvement polici...

Omeni, Edward, Barnes, Marian, MacDonald, Dee, Crawford, Mike and Rose, Diana (2014)

ContextNational Health Foundation Trusts present opportunities for individual mental health service users to be active in the governance of trusts. This is one of a range of mechanisms for patient and public involvement and one which promotes an individual rather than collective approach to involvement.Objective Within the context of a broader stud...

This study set out to measure the extent and perceived impact of service user involvement (SUI) in mental health services and to explore different forms of SUI, both collective and individual. The focus was on service users’ (SUs’) interactions with managers and other key decision-makers in the UK NHS and social care. The theoretical frameworks use...

This article explores how the provision of information about dementia impacts on carers and the caring relationships in which they are involved. Narrative interviews were undertaken with 25 carers who had undertaken the Alzheimer's Society - run Carer Information and Support Programme in one of seven sites across London and the South East. Thematic...

This article offers a critique of the dominant ways in which well-being has been conceptualized and researched within social policy, focusing in particular on the significance of this for policy relating to older people. It conceptualizes well-being as relational and generative rather than an individual outcome. We critically explore normative noti...

The Partnerships for Older People Projects programme provided government funding for local and health authorities to pilot prevention and intervention services in partnership with the voluntary sector and older people between 2006 and 2009. This local evaluation of a pilot in southern England undertaken between 2007 and 2009 used a Theory of Change...

Many of our day to day interactions are with ‘strangers’. Indeed for some isolated older people, interactions with strangers comprise the majority of their human contact. The conversations they have on buses, in shops, in the park may be the only conversation they have in a day. The way they are treated at the doctors surgery or when they pay a bil...

In this chapter, Tronto and Fisher's inclusion of ‘the environment’ within the web of care is considered. It has potentially very broad implications, encompassing our relationships with the micro environments in which we live, and the global level and the relationship of humanity to the planet on which we live. In addressing the relevance of care e...

The interpersonal significance of care goes beyond those circumstances in which illness, disability or age generate a need for support. Friendship has received little attention in comparison with work on family or community, but its significance as a political value has been explored and its importance in terms of quality of life has been demonstra...

This chapter highlights three key elements of feminist care ethics: an emphasis on human individuals as relational and hence the universality of the need for care; the moral principles of care ethics, and the relationship between care and justice. It identifies care ethics as one of a number of normative positions that seeks to emphasise the import...

The archetypal image of care is that of a mother and child. Care giving is probably most immediately understood in the context of personal relationships where one person has greater needs for support than the other. These circumstances most usually apply at the start and end of life, but intimate caring relationship are experienced throughout the l...

Many people are employed in jobs that are linked to care. But it is in this context that care as a value has come under particular attack. The work of those paid to care for disabled people and others has been criticised for denying the right of individuals to make their own decisions about the support they need in order to live their lives as they...

In the final chapter the concept of care is revisited to reflect on what applying care ethics to different everyday contexts contributes to our understanding of care. The author suggests the principle of ‘responsiveness’ can be developed though a contextualised understanding of the significance of reciprocity, and also emphasises the epistemologica...

In this chapter Tronto's moral principles of care are applied: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, to deliberative processes through which those subject to public policies might play a part in shaping them. The author argues the need to go ‘beyond argument’ and to encompass the embodied and emotional dimensions of e...

Care has been struggled for, resisted and celebrated. The failure to care in 'care services' has been seen as a human rights problem and evidence of malaise in contemporary society. But care has also been implicated in the oppression of disabled people and demoted in favour of choice in health and social care services. In this bold wide ranging boo...

Feminist care ethics emphasises the relational nature of care. This suggests the importance of understanding the different dynamics of care in different relational contexts. This article applies such a perspective to exploratory interviews with carers looking after siblings in older age. While some attention has been given to sibling care following...

Based on research with members of two Senior Citizens Forums in the South East of England, this article examines the biographies and motivations of those who get involved in such activities, with particular emphasis on (a) how they see themselves in relation to ‘other older people’ and (b) their relationships with the places in which they live. We...

Purpose – There has been increasing recognition that alcohol may be a source of problems for older people. This has been reflected in the increase in alcohol‐related hospital admissions for people over 65. Although a neglected area in policy and research within the UK, studies from health and social care practice have drawn attention to the complex...

The Nottingham Advocacy Group (NAG) was one of the earliest advocacy groups to be established in the mid-1980s. It developed good relationships with local service providers, was influential in supporting the development of other local groups and national organisations, such as the UK Advocacy Network, and played an important role in the lives of se...

The conclusion of the book moves from consideration of specific examples of involvement to reflect on the extent to which such developments as a whole can be considered to have led to a transformation in policy and services, and to have contributed to the achievement of social justice for those who use health and social care services. It suggests w...

This collection draws together experiences and perspectives on user involvement from user activists, academics and practitioners. It includes chapters that focus on autonomous collective action by disabled people, mental health service users and others; action within the health and social care service delivery system to influence services; and user...

The adoption of personalisation as the principle on which policy and practices for social care in England should be developed has been hailed as marking a fundamental transformation in the nature of social care and the experiences of service users. This article examines both the discourse of personalisation and the practices that are being adopted...

An understanding of policy implementation issues in many of the core fields of social policy requires attention to the mode of service delivery that is characteristic of those fields: face-to-face interaction between frontline service staff and service users. A focus on implementation as interaction between these groups reveals the significance of...

Responsibility, participation and choice are key policy framings of active citizenship, summoning the citizen to take on new roles in welfare state reform. This volume traces the emergence of new discourses and the ways in which they take up and rework struggles of social movements for greater independence, power and control. It explores the changi...

‘Whole family’ approaches to intervention and prevention have raised the profile of ‘family’ within social policy, where the family is constructed as a site of child care and protection, neglect and disadvantage. However, ‘family’ is a taken-for-granted and narrowly defined concept within policy documentation, and often used interchangeably with ‘p...

This chapter offers some conceptual frameworks that could contribute to facilitating the increased reflexivity on the part of service users and their movements advocated by Beresford. It considers the principles that (should) inform participatory approaches to governance and service delivery, and specifically, the principles underpinning the issue...

Aim This article offers a brief description and analysis of public participation in health in Brazil and England in order to highlight different motivators and tensions within an acceptance of participation as official policy. Sources/methods The article draws on a range of research in both countries and an analysis of official documents relating t...

The central question addressed by this book is how front-line staff in public services and the citizens who use those services act in ways that modify, disrupt, or negate the intended processes and outcomes of public policy. This chapter maps the broad landscape within which different detailed case studies are presented. It starts by considering th...

This chapter reflects more precisely on what the different studies of this book have to say about ‘what’ is being subverted, ‘where’ subversive practices take place, and ‘how’ subversion happens. It offers some conclusions about what the different perspectives adopted by the contributors to this collection can offer to an understanding of this aspe...

This chapter deals with the potential of participative spaces in which alliances may be built and the ‘citizen-official’ binary may be undermined. It addresses the way in which participatory forums can enable the construction and reconstruction of individual and collective identities of both citizens and officials, and thus hold the potential for u...

Many of the recent reforms in public services in the UK have been driven by the image of the ‘responsible citizen’ - the service user who does not only have rights to receive services but also has responsibilities for the delivery of policy outcomes. In this way, citizens’ everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidenc...

Background: User involvement in mental health has developed substantially since the mid 1980s. However, experiences of involvement are not always positive. This article discusses an attempt to enable women service users to make a positive contribution to the development of an “expert paper” on women only mental health services. It draws on theories...

This paper uses the concept of citizenship to understand the objectives of self-organisation among users of mental health services. It is based on research conducted for the ESRC Local Governance Programme and addresses issues relating to the governance of services, as well as the individual and collective empowerment of users. Studies of three ver...

This chapter examines a number of reasons for disputing the adequacy of a consumerist frame of reference for understanding the challenge presented to health and social care services by user and carer movements. Not only is the consumer as chooser an inadequate conceptualisation of the relationship between users and producers of welfare services, it...

In the United Kingdom, parenting had historically been seen to be the focus of state interventions to ensure the well being of children. New Labour introduced a range of initiatives designed to support, educate, or police parents. An example was Sure Start, which provided services rooted in understandings about the impact of early intervention on p...

This chapter examines how National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF) partnerships sought to identify, define, and target specific groups of children and young people that they considered most at risk of social exclusion and thus priorities for action. It also considers ways in which selected partnerships approached the four groups chosen for...

This chapter focuses on the activities that were funded, supported, and developed by the partnerships which focused on four target groups chosen for detailed study by the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF): disabled children, black and minority ethnic children, gypsies/travellers, and refugees and asylum-seeking children. It highligh...

The adoption of a social-exclusion perspective by New Labour in its early years of government reflected the aspirations for social change of a new government following long years of Conservative rule. This chapter considers the contested nature of the concept of social exclusion. Using the framework of social exclusion adopted in the National Evalu...

This chapter looks at different ways of understanding prevention, based on the previous analysis of the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF) in practice, and relates these to the dynamics of social exclusion. It describes a new categorisation of preventative activity and analyses the underlying assumptions about the relationship betwee...

This chapter discusses the specific preventative policies and policy initiatives through which New Labour governments have sought to address the needs of young children and their families in the United Kingdom. Historically, policy understandings of prevention have drawn on service-led and needs-led models of prevention. However, these tiered model...