Dr Jay Wiggan on – Enhancing social policy teaching and learning. Reflections on theatre as a means to improve student understanding of complex social problems

The cast of Hostel: Julie Maxwell, Louise Matthews & Caroline Curran

The School is always seeking to develop its range of teaching methods, enhancing the student learning experience to foster improvement in academic knowledge and analytical skills. With this in mind the Social Policy team, with financial support from the Queen’s Annual Fund, took the opportunity to commission Kabosh, an award winning Belfast theatre company, to deliver a performance of  Fionnuala Kennedy’s play, Hostel , to undergraduate social policy, criminology, sociology and social work students in the School. Hostel had been performed to, and well received by,  general public , service user, practitioner and policymaker audiences in Northern Ireland and commended for offering insights into the trade-offs inherent when problem solving intractable social issues.

Dealing with issues of stress, despondency and hope that accompany reliance on a fragmented social welfare safety net, Hostel is a semi autobiographical account of a young lone parent, ‘Maria’, and her experience of becoming homeless and moving into sheltered accommodation in Belfast. The play consequently gives ‘voice’ to how aspects of housing policy actually work in practice, drawing attention to issues of low income; social exclusion and the unequal power relationships that exist  between service users and service providers in the welfare state. Given this, the Social Policy team reasoned that bringing a performance of the play into the School was an excellent opportunity to bring to life and engage student with core social policy themes, grounding them in this ‘real life’ example of how homelessness is represented and experienced in contemporary society.

Did this work? After the performance we invited students to give verbal and/or written feedback on Hostel and below are two reviews of the play, written by undergraduate students on the first year module; SPY1001 Finding out about Social Policy.

While intelligently written and at times comical; hostel provides an insightful look at how ordinary family life is postponed and devalued during periods of homelessness.  While it contain many touching moments perhaps the most powerful where the actors descriptions of how they had been disempowered by the housing department and those who manage the hostel.   On numerous occasions their opinions were not just ignored by the housing executive, but they were treated like petulant children within the hostel system.  The underlay reason for many of the occupants stay at the hostel could be directly linked to poverty and lack of opportunity in procuring affordable housing.   This short play actively portrays how  the end users of the social security systems are disenchanted with the services,  it  illustrates the lack of voice that they have  and brings not only the problems in relation to poverty to life but how social policy directly affects an individual’s life chances, and gives a moving account of how these issues shape the lives of all concerned (Bronagh Boyle).

Hostel gave an interesting insight into the stress and frustrations felt by the users of services provided by local authorities regarding housing or the lack of it. This play showed how powerless the service user feels and how their opinion is not always considered or taken into account when allocating housing. Maria showed that circumstances beyond a person’s control contribute to their situations but these personal situations do not get brought into decision making. For example when Maria requested to be housed near her mother so she would know someone, instead the decision makers would only offer Maria a house in a completely different area, knowing that the policy is that Maria could only turn down two offers or she would be taken off the housing list. The play showed the in balance between the hostel residents and the management of the hostel who on the whole did not seem to care about the residents requests and policed the rules and regulations to the letter. I think this play can definitely show how the individual is affected by administrative decisions. People are not homeless through choice but through unforeseen circumstance, whether it is family breakdown, loss of income or bereavement. Few of these factors seem to be considered when making decisions in social housing allocation (Bernadette Parks).

 

The performance was followed by a short question and answer session with the playwright and director Fionnuala Kennedy, who was able to discuss the inspiration for the play and explain how much of the content was based on actual events that had taken place in Belfast. The play received positive comments from students who indicated to staff they felt the play helped to contextualise some of the more theoretical and historical aspects of the social policy module, covered in the preceding weeks of lectures and tutorials. In subsequent tutorial discussions around housing policy and anti social behaviour it was my experience that students did reference and draw on the play when interpreting and debating official data and policy concerning contemporary welfare reform. Was it therefore an unqualified success? Well in hindsight the play had as much to say on issues of social control and social justice as it did on housing and homelessness.  An improved alignment of these topics in the tutorials in the weeks immediately following the play, together with improved integration of these issues in the linked assessment would have strengthened the potential learning benefits for students. The support of Queen’s Annual Fund meant, however, that the Social Policy team were able to hire an audio visual company to record the play which enables us incorporate a non-live performance of Hostel into the curriculum in future years, taking on board the lessons learned. Overall our experience of using theatre to bring to life complex social problems, policy responses and administrative structures was positive and we would not hesitate to utilise this teaching method again as a means to enhance the student learning environment and facilitate debate.  

Brendan Browne – Postgraduate Research Student on: Returning to the field: Covering the 64th Annual Nakba Commemorations in Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine

Every year on the 15^th May, Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and across the wider Diaspora gather to remember their Nakba, or ‘Immense catastrophe’. The commemorative act is both a moment to remember and reflect on a traumatic and turbulent past, but more importantly an opportunity to deliver a strong political message and to present an image of unity to a broader, global audience. Set against the backdrop of ongoing disputes between the two main political groups, Fatah and Hamas, and taking place at a time when over 1,600 Palestinian prisoners remain on hunger strike in Israeli Jails, the Nakba commemorations provided the ideal opportunity for Palestinians of all backgrounds to come together in a public act of solidarity. Following on from my fieldwork in Ramallah in the spring and summer months of 2011, I returned to Palestine to observe the 64^th Nakba.

According to representatives on the National High Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba, the representative body established to organise the event, the presentation of unity helps to generate a collective sense of solidarity between a group of people who remain divided geographically, politically, economically and ideologically. But in a region where rival factions compete for political supremacy and where the land itself is governed by two different administrations, separate commemorative events are organised by those who interpret the current political situation differently. The day also provides an opportunity for those who believe a more appropriate way to send a strong political message is through skirmishes with their traditional enemy.

During the 63rd Nakba commemoration in 2011,the year of the Arab Spring, members of Hamas and Fatah stood side-by-side on stage in what appeared to be a deliberate show of political unity in front of one of the largest gatherings of Palestinians from cities across the West Bank. In comparison the event this year appeared a fragmented and divided affair and the total number gathered at Arafat Square fell well short of last year’s assembled crowd.   

Rituals of this nature are rarely static, even in spatial terms. The space designated as the central gathering point was different to last year and the parade route taken by some of those involved changed considerably. Such changes further highlight the value and importance of observing events of this nature on more than one occasion. The reasons for the change in venue, for the relatively modest turnout, and for the absence of members of rival factions on stage during the central rally can be speculated upon and may become clearer upon follow-up discussions with those involved in organising the day. However, one thing that can be noted at this stage is the impact of the political climate of the day upon the organisation and structuring of the commemoration –  a theme that has become increasingly important as my research has developed.

Unfortunately, one thing that had not changed from last year was the levels of violence surrounding the event. The issues associated with conducting research in a region famed for its volatility and instability make the data collection process increasingly challenging. However, in returning to the field I was better prepared for what was about to take place on the day. Even small acts of preparation help, such as the fact I had invested in better camera equipment, which allowed me to take clearer images from a safer distance.

My primary concern in returning to Ramallah to observe the Nakba commemorations for a second year was to ensure the validity and accuracy of my own data collection before it is critiqued during the examination process. In returning, I also have been able to reflect on my own development as a researcher. Whereas last year I entered the ‘great unknown’, so to speak, , this year I returned to friends, to an area which I can now navigate my way through with relative ease, and to a place that I have formed a deep attachment to. Such changes have their own effects on my analysis as a researcher.

Some of the mistakes I made and risks I took last year, in my unavoidable naiveté, are important experiences that have assisted me greatly in my own professional development as a researcher. They also give me a greater appreciation of the particular challenges of research in potentially volatile regions on potentially sensitive topics. This ‘reflective’ aspect of the PhD learning curve has in many ways been as important and as steep as that of the empirical work itself. 

 

New book on Mental Health and Social Work Practice by Jim Campbell and Gavin Davidson

Jim Campbell, Professor of Social Work at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Gavin Davidson, Lecturer in Social Work, in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast have written a new book called Post-Qualifying Mental Health Social Work Practice.  The preface provides the rationale and context for exploring this complex area of practice:

“This is a specialist text for post-qualified social workers, and other mental health professionals who are interested in exploring the complexities of practice using a broad range of explanatory theories and evidence-based approaches. In writing this book we were mindful of the debates about the current mental health social work role (Ramon, 2009; Campbell, 2010) and how it might be changing because of the advent of the generic Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) in England and Wales, as well as the potential dilution of professional identity caused by the integration of social work practitioners in multidisciplinary teams.

The book presents a forceful argument for a strong, recognizable identity for mental social workers built upon a solid knowledge base and broad-based application of skills that complement the work of other professionals in this field. We argue that, in the midst of the inevitable changes to role and function created by shifts in law policy and organization, a discernible position can be identified and maintained for social workers in mental services. For these reasons we believe the text will be of particular interest to mental health social workers practicing and studying mental health social work at various levels with systems of post-qualifying education and training across the UK.

The text begins with summaries of four ‘core knowledge’ areas which inform the rest of the book – an Introduction to the various forms of educational and post-qualifying training in the UK followed by three chapters on Policy and Agency Contexts, Legal Contexts and Models of Mental Health and Illness. These provide essential, background contextual knowledge that then underpins the other chapters in the book. The following chapters, which focus on the application of theory to practice, are preceded by references to National Occupational Standards, learning outcomes and case study material. Throughout the book you are encouraged to reflect upon your learning through selected questions, exercises and further reading. We hope you will find the book particularly interesting through its use of diverse case material illustrating the many types of mental health problems that individuals and families experience, and how this experience is shaped by issues of age, class, gender, ethnicity and religion”.

Post-Qualifying Mental Health Social Work Practice is published by Sage.

The Phenomena of Age (rounded to 3 decimal places) by John Moriarty

11.689 was the mean average age on September 1st, 2000, expressed in decimal years, of the 5,285 people who completed a questionnaire for the Belfast Youth Development Study (BYDS) between 2000 and 2005. That number is derived from the date of birth supplied by each partcipant, which can be entered into an operation standard to most data packages (Excel, Stata, etc.) which counts the number of days between the date in the cell and another date you supply. I supplied the closest likely date to the participants’ first day of secondary school. Given their age in days, you then divide that number by 365.25 to get the number of years since their date of birth.
11.689 equates to 11 years and 244 days, which is almost precisely 11 years and 8 months. The standard deviation, which I’m obliged to report beside any mean, is 0.313 years, around 114.5 days. The standard deviation is like an average of how close everyone is to an average, so on average everyone was just under 4 months either side of the average starting school. The youngest was 10 years 231 days and the the oldest was 13 years and 62 days.

Now say something about age. What is it like to grow older, to become an adolescent in this society?

For some, the self-contained facts above are as far as statistical analysis can proceed without regressing into conjecture. Others might question the value of those facts themselves. Who cares about the mean age of a theoretical school-starter, was there anybody even born on the “average birthday”? (Answer: 28 were born one day either side of the average). Still others are plain bored already.

I calculated this age variable because I wanted to find out how the rate of cannabis use among and individual’s classmates affects the likelihood of that individual having used cannabis. In most studies (mine included) the older the participant, the more likely they have used an intoxicating substance. So that I didn’t confuse the effect of being older with the effect of being in a class with more cannabis users, I used the age variable to control for this effect. The best estimate I have of the effect of age is that having been been 10% older when starting school (which equates to just over 1 year older in this sample) is associated with an increase of between 7% and 8% in the likelihood of having used cannabis by third year of secondary school.

But what does this really mean? Does this even pass as sociological knowledge? What does it mean to say that an individual’s age  determines their behaviour? Surely we are not constantly aware of our age, particularly in an environment where everybody is of equal status and approximately the same age. And surely everybody ages and matures at different rates in any case. And even if this were fact, what do we do with this information; propose that people be younger?

To understand age as a phenomenon, one needs to exit the stats lab and get one’s hands dirty. Find some teens and talk to them. Ask them how they feel about being 11 (or 23 or 72 or whatever age they are, though you may feel be rude asking). Chances are, it’s a window into their world and they’ll tell you something of what it’s like to be them. You can read it back later and examine how much reference they make to “age markers”, to how the current phase of their life relates to the overall narrative of their life so far and from here out. If the conversation dries up, you might want to ask about birthdays, or how they perceive slightly older/ slightly younger/ much older/ much younger humans (as Lynn Johnston has done to good effect). If you’re interested in drugs, ask about drugs, see if they make the link between being older and smoking more dope.

Alternatively you could analyse public discourse, find idiomatic representations of age. You’ll find that some of these directly confront the idea that age is a mathematical fact, e.g. “Age is just a number, you’re only as old as how you’re feeling” (or, as I recently saw on a birthday card “who you’re feeling”). You could analyse the politicisation of age, from the march of the pensioners in Dublin 2008 to save universal medical cards for OAPs, to the introduction of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in Britain in 2006.

Then you write up the interesting bits and that’s your contribution to the literature on age. Is that it?
Perhaps it doesn’t have to be.

Perhaps we didn’t look closely enough at the data we had to begin with. Young people who were 11 in September 2000: what else can we say about them? They were born between 1988 and 1990. They were between 4 and 6 when the 1994 PIRA Cease Fire began; between 8 and 10 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Being from Northern Ireland, many will have witnessed a key period in the evolution of discourse in the region, though in a diversity of ways.
We know that by the time of the second survey the following year, they will have seen and read news about aeroplanes flying into the Twin Towers, at around age 12.
We know that David Beckham will have been one of the most famous people in the world for most of their childhood, while the career of Britney Spears, who is 7 years older than them, will begin an infamous decline before any of them have taken GCSEs.
We know that mobile phone ownership is beginning to increase as they are starting school, and that in a short few years this will be their main mode of social communication.
We can guess that only a few tech-aware individuals will have heard of Google before starting school, but that by the time they are 23 in 2012, the search engine will be used over 320 million times per day worldwide, and its name passed into standard English.

In all of this, we don’t know which aspects, if any, would feature if we were to read back on anything they were to write or say about growing up. But we have some hints of the cultural era they belong to. We can even extrapolate, if we wish, that any study of the BYDS survey, partially captures these phenomena, provided we are cautious about the breadth of our claim.
Above all, we can posit that those at the elder end of the age distribution will have experienced all of these events differently from the youngest in the sample, by dint of having been at a different developmental stage at the time of each event.

My point is this. There is much valid criticism which can be offered about quantitative approaches to social science, particularly on how genre of research is presented. Here I’ve tried to illustrate how a variable can be mathematical in nature, but touches on perhaps the quintessential human experience, the passing of time. I believe the mistake would be to rule out one source of information in favour of another, be it ruling out the experiential in favour of the mathematically demonstrable, or vice versa.

I’ll be speaking about the interface of quantitative and qualitative research at the SSPSW Postgraduate Conference on Friday at 10:30am. I hope to prompt a lively discussion and that, in the mean time or afterwards, you’ll take the time to comment below.

Queen’s celebrates International Social Work Week: 20th – 26th March 2012

Social work is an international profession with shared knowledge, ethics and values. Towards recognising the international influences on the social work profession, QUB staff and students have been involved in organising and presenting work that links the local context of Northern Ireland with the global. These include:

• Celebrations by the Northern Ireland Association of Social Work , which included presentations from Professor John Pinkerton on the increasingly important role of research within the profession and PhD student Kwabena Frimpong Manso on young people leaving care in Ghana. The event also recognised the work of Ciaran Traynor, Development Manager at Extern, a local NGO,  and tutor at QUB. He was awarded the prestigious lifetime achievement award for his work with disadvantaged people.
• Peer led workshop on learning from international contexts and issues of employability for social work students on 28^th March 2012.
• Poster presentations by social work students at QUB sharing experiences and inspiration from other schools and contexts of social work practice that have both shaped their commitment to social work and/or informed their social work educational experience. These are available to see online and are on display at the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, QUB from 20^th -26^thMarch 2012.The School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work will also host a Peer-led Workshop on learning from international social work (details attached)

  For more on what’s happening for International social work week around the world, see:

  http://ifsw.org/get-involved/world-social-work-day/

  http://ifsw.org/get-involved/world-social-work-day/world-social-work-day-news-coverage/

  http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/swork/UN/

   

Third class rating for welfare reforms: Mike Tomlinson responds to the Welfare Reform Bill

On 27th February, Owen Patterson MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland visited Queen’s and to debate the implications of the Welfare Reform Bill for Northern Ireland. Mike Tomlinson, Head of the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work was the respondent and here is the text of his speech:

Secretary of State, Dean, guests and colleagues. As we have just heard, the Welfare Reform Bill is part of a broader set of changes designed to address sovereign debt, the role of the public sector and an economy in or on the verge of recession. I have ten minutes so will be selective in my comments. I will concentrate on Welfare Reform but I also want to make a few comments about ‘rebalancing the economy’. Most of what I have to say is not about N Ireland as such but perhaps we can focus on this during the questions.

The Coalition is committed to a major restructuring of welfare benefits and public services that takes the UK in a new direction.  Within the space of a few years, the role of the state is to be pegged back to a level of intervention below that in the United States. This unprecedented development involves new models of privatization in which the users of welfare services become a commercially exploitable business opportunity. In this new world the emphasis is on individual responsibility and changing individual behaviours to achieve a place in the labour market, good health and overall well-being. Surrounding this transformation is a climate of ideas that is generally hostile to working age people who do not or cannot work. But it celebrates the enterprise of employers whose businesses depend almost exclusively on government contracts or who are dependent on tax credits to subsidise their wage bills, and celebrates the enterprise of landlords dependent on housing benefits.

The Welfare Reform Bill has some laudable objectives but it is constructed around the idea that people, especially the sick and disabled, need to be hassled rather that helped into employment and that once there, that’s the end of the story. One critic has described this as incentivizing the lame by kicking away the crutches.  If the financial incentives are right, so the argument goes, then there is no excuse not to work, even if work will not necessarily lift individuals and families out of poverty.

[The research evidence surrounding the transition from welfare to work paints a much more complicated picture of motives, barriers and incentives. Research on the recession of the 1990s showed that the long-term unemployed remained remarkably active in job search and job applications, were flexible in the type of work they were prepared to take, and were prepared to work for modest wages. The biggest problems were the risks to income security of moving from benefits to work, as well as other barriers – lack of flexible and affordable child care being the major one. People risk punishment rather than reward for showing the initiative to get some albeit casual work when unemployed. The idea that the main barrier in the transition from welfare to work is one of a lack of work motivation, especially financial motivation is simply not borne out by the research. In areas of high unemployment the evidence is that people generally have a low ‘reservation wage’ (the minimum they will work for).]

Having said that, there remains a classic problem within all welfare systems concerning high effective marginal tax rates – the rate at which credits and benefits are withdrawn for every extra pound of income.   For decades, many within the social policy academic community have argued for a smoother and more supported transition from unemployment to work, and a lowering of punitive marginal tax rates as high as 100% (and historically even more than this) – the so-called poverty trap. In this regard we treat people on low incomes much more harshly than we treat middle or high earners. The Welfare Reform Bill’s strength is that it aims to tackle the problem of high marginal tax rates at the lowest end of the income spectrum so that, in theory, most (but not all) Universal Credit claimants will gain by taking on varying amounts of work [– the marginal effective tax rate is to be 65% (above the highest income tax and Nat Insurance rates). Some currently in work will find their marginal effective tax rate going up slightly from 72 to 76%. {The Government’s plan to withdraw Child Benefit from families containing a higher rate taxpayer will introduce a ‘cliff-edge’ resulting in marginal tax rates in excess of 100% for some families. Families with one earner above the threshold will lose Child Benefit but families with two earners each earning below the threshold but with a higher total household income will keep Child Benefit. As it stands the proposal is clearly unfair.} A preliminary analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that 2.5 million working age families gain, 2.5 million stay the same and 1.4 million lose. Lone parents will lose on average in the long run.]

Whether economic security and overall well-being of the bottom half of the income spectrum will improve as a result is a matter for debate and empirical analysis, but certainly poverty reduction is not the principal objective. Some of the practical issues are ongoing – such as the treatment of carers allowance and child care costs, [the interaction of locally-based benefits and credits such as housing benefit and rates/council tax credits, the treatment of mortgage costs, the impact of housing benefit caps, and the phasing in of Universal Credit, being the major ones].

If lowering marginal tax rates is one important objective for Universal Credit, another is to “cut a swathe through the massive complexity of the existing benefit system and make it less bureaucratic to run” (to quote Ian Duncan Smith). One objective is to cut down on fraud and error within the tax credit and benefits systems through the use of HM Revenue and Customs’ proposed real-time PAYE system and through the use of private companies to ‘prevent, detect, correct and punish’ fraud.  £1.4billion will be saved by 2015. When we hear the tough rhetoric around claimant fraud we should bear in mind that twice as much is lost through error than through fraud. And benefit underpayments exceed estimates of fraud. Losses through tax fraud are estimated to be 15 times those through benefit fraud.

The price of simplicity is that more groups of claimants will be brought into the sort of regime previously reserved for the unemployed only. The Welfare Reform Bill introduces a ‘claimant commitment’ or contract, setting out the responsibilities to seek work alongside the penalties for not doing so. Although anti-claimant sentiment continues to run high according to opinion polls, compulsion has its limits and there are clear sensitivities around supermarket chains and others providing no-pay work experience placements. It is hardly credible to take a hard line against the unemployed when there are two people chasing every vacancy in the economically most buoyant areas, 35 per vacancy in the worst area and 6 per vacancy across GB as a whole (we don’t have comparable vacancy data for Northern Ireland).

Effectively, what happened in the 1990s was that activation and benefit policies diverted sizeable numbers of claimants from unemployment to incapacity – from the ‘active’ to the ‘inactive’ category.  What we are doing now is to question the inactive status of the long-term sick and disabled, transferring a proportion back to the ‘active’ (unemployed) category. This has nothing to do with a change in the characteristics of individuals but everything to do with a change in policy and the treatment of individuals. This project is underpinned by Employment Support Allowance (introduced by the Labour Government in 2008). Employment Support Allowance applies a Work Capability Assessment to new claimants and eventually to 2 million existing claimants of Incapacity Benefit across the UK. The Work Capability Assessment either finds that people are fit for work or that they have ‘limited work capability’ in which case they are placed in a Work Related Activity Group or, because of the severity of a disability, a Support Group. This sifting process to date has attracted serious criticisms. As the Daily Telegraph commented a couple of weeks ago (15^th Feb 2012) among Whitehall’s ‘hidden scandals’ are last year’s 197,000 appeals against the Department for Work and Pensions over employment support allowance decisions… 39 per cent of which were successful. Limiting contributory Employment Support Allowance to one year only is designed to save £2 billion by 2014. A similar sifting process for Disability Living Allowance (soon to become Personal Independent Payments) will yield a further £1 billion in cuts by 2014. Thus one sixth of the total benefit and tax credit cuts to be realized by 2014 will come from the long-term sick and disabled (and that’s not counting their share of inflation indexation cuts). These reforms will impact disproportionately in Northern Ireland given that long-term sick and disabled claimants are a relatively high proportion of all working age claimants (66%) and that Disability Living Allowances run at 103 per 1,000 of the population compared to 53 per 1,000 for Great Britain.

So – what we have here is a reform that delivers £18 billion in cuts across the UK (£600m in N Ireland) while aligning the benefits/tax credit systems to a more unpredictable and flexible labour market. This is a labour market increasingly characterized by more short-time working, more part-time working, a feminization of unemployment, more jobs effectively de-regulated to precarious self-employed sub-contracting, and wider extremes of income inequality. Welfare Reform is raising fundamental questions about the distribution of costs and benefits within the labour market: are tax credits to be seen as support for the low paid (1 million of whom work in supermarkets) or as a way of subsidizing corporate profits and bonuses? Welfare Reform may spell the final death knell of national insurance given that many are arguing for a merger between income tax and national insurance contributions: can/should National Insurance be rehabilitated? As one of the early sites of ‘payment by results’-style contracts to the private sector, is Welfare Reform the proving ground for a policy that puts a price on a whole range of non-employed people, or an experiment floundering on fraudulent results, poor service and profiteering, as appears to be the case with A4E? With all the emphasis on moving people into work, the Welfare Reform agenda does not speak to the poverty line or statutory child poverty targets: child poverty will increase as a result of welfare reform – by 400k in relative terms and 500k in absolute terms (Child Poverty Act 2010 definitions).

We have limited power to address such questions in N Ireland. If we choose to break with parity of benefit rates or we choose not to copy the Westminster legislation on welfare reform, the Treasury will most likely make an equivalent deduction from N Ireland’s block grant for Departmental expenditure. So our fortunes on this and on the economy more generally are very much tied to Britain, for the foreseeable future and until the Executive persuades the Treasury otherwise. So the question of rebalancing the economy is one we should ask of the UK Government, as well as of ourselves.

Secretary of State, you have laid out one vision of rebalancing – but I suggest there are other challenges – reducing the financialisation of the economy relative to services and manufacturing; changing the regional dominance of the South East of England; revaluing sectoral growth in manufacturing, the knowledge economy, education and cultural industries; gender proofing policies to rebalance the economic roles of men and women; shifting business practice and accounting towards reduced or zero carbon emissions; and, perhaps the biggest challenge of all, rebalancing the rewards for work from the richest to the low paid.

So it’s time conclude in time-honoured university style. Secretary of State, I’m afraid your Government is only awarded a third class honours mark for its contribution to social justice and child poverty eradication (a fail was debated); a 2.2 for simplification promised through an untried and untested real time computer system – though the external examiner might have something to say about that; a 2.1 for the reduction of effective marginal tax rates at the lowest end of the income spectrum and a first class honours for the Welfare Reform Bill’s achievement of being voted down 8 times in the House of Lords – which must be close to a record (second only to Labour’s Identity Card Bill).

Owen Patterson’s speech on Welfare Reforms (given at Fisherwick Place on 1st March is available here).

Stormont Knowledge Exchange Seminar Series

QUB School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work

and the

Northern Ireland Assembly Research and Information Service

22 March – 5 July 2012

Venue: Room 115, Parliament Buildings, Stormont Estate

Time: 1.30 – 3.30pm

Promoting evidence-led policy and law-making within Northern Ireland’ – that is the  underlying aim of the upcoming ‘Knowledge Exchange Seminar Series’.  In an attempt to encourage debate and improve understanding, the Series will provide an opportunity for the presentation of local research findings about diverse social issues faced in various sectors, such as health, social development, education, children/young people and older people.

Seminars will be free and will run on Thursdays from 22 March through 5 July 2012.  Each seminar will take place from 1.30-3.30pm in Room 115, Parliament Building, located on Stormont Estate, where parking is easily accessible.  Refreshments will be served. The Series will also provide excellent networking opportunities.  We aim to have a spectrum of attendees, including MLAs and their staff, Assembly staff, public and private sector employees, and academia, together with voluntary and community groups.

Please reserve your place by emailing eileen.regan@niassembly.gov.uk.

Seminar attendees will also have the opportunity to tour Parliament Buildings at the conclusion of each seminar.  Kindly indicate your interest when emailing.

22 March – Sally Shortall: What counts as ‘evidence’? The complexities of providing evidence to inform public policy Evidence-based policy implicitly assumes a linear relationship between research evidence and policy formation. The reality is much more complex. There are power struggles between different groups presenting different interpretations of the world, political ideology is a key driver of policy making, resources are finite, and policies must be palatable with the electorate. This paper will explore the complexities of evidence based policy.

26 April – Mike Tomlinson: Defining the breadline. Is there a Northern Ireland consensus? Measures of poverty typically combine low income with indicators of deprivation – items and activities that people lack because they cannot afford them.  Which deprivation indicators are the important ones for defining poverty is a matter of debate. The seminar will present findings from a population-wide survey of Northern Ireland asking people’s opinion about items and activities that everyone should be able to afford and not have to do without.  A total of 76 items and activities were tested and the seminar will explore the degree of consensus within the population on ‘the necessities of life’.

3 May – Madeleine Leonard: young people’ attitudes to peace walls in Belfast The purpose of this presentation is to present young people’s attitudes to peace-walls in Belfast and whether they feel peace-walls should be temporary or permanent structures.  The presentation will underline how important it is for policy-makers to consult with young people on their attitudes to these walls as a prelude to finding ways to challenge taken for granted assumptions about the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland.

10 May – Lynn Johnston:  The life-course, age and intergenerational relations Our planet’s changing age demographic has sparked economic debates relating to intergenerational equity and exchanges. This seminar focusses on the social aspects of intergenerational relationships and will present findings from a neighbourhood case study. At the local level, issues which impact on intergenerational relationships are presented around three themes: social exclusion, age discrimination and the legacy of the conflict.

17 May – Gavin Davidson: Supported and Substitute Decision Making under Mental Capacity Legislation: a review of the international evidence The Mental Capacity (Health, Welfare and Finance) Bill for Northern Ireland is currently being drafted. The proposed law is a potentially progressive approach to providing a comprehensive legal framework for substitute decision making for people whose decision making is impaired. An important aspect of the law, policy and practice in this area is ensuring that, before substitute decision making is used, all practicable steps are taken to support the person to make their own decision/s. This seminar will review the international evidence on supported and substitute decision making frameworks.

31 May – Karen Winter: Addressing the educational underachievement of children in care It is well known that across the U.K and elsewhere children in care have poor educational poor outcomes in comparison with the child population as a whole. The figures for Northern Ireland indicate that children in care here have the lowest attainment scores in Maths and English. This seminar will present the findings of a study that sought to ascertain the effectiveness of a scheme-the Letterbox Club-in raising attainment levels for primary school children in foster care ages 7-11 years.

7 June – Nicola Carr and Karen Winter: Improving court work skills in child care proceedings. The benefits of an inter-disciplinary approach are evident when working with individuals and families with a range of complex needs, and who have contact with multiple services. This is particularly apposite in the area of child protection and welfare. This seminar will present an overview of an innovative inter-professional training initiative, which focuses on developing court work skills for practice in child care proceedings. The importance of comprehensive evidence-based assessment and competency within the judicial setting is highlighted.

14 June – Karen McElrath and Julie Harris: Institutional stigma and the delivery of methadone maintenance: A comparison of clients’ experiences from North/South Ireland  Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) is widely recognised as an intervention that is used to treat opioid (namely heroin) dependence. It is highly regulated and is available in both North/South Ireland.  Using data collected in four different studies in North/South Ireland, we describe clients’ experiences with MMT.  Methadone provision in both jurisdictions was characterized by social control and institutional stigma, that served to reinforce “addict” identities, expose “undeserving” patients to the public gaze, and create barriers to reintegration. We discuss these findings in terms of the challenges for policymakers and service providers.

21 June – Janet Carter- Anand: Older people’s perceptions of elder abuse: Implications for policy and professional practice The development of elder abuse services has traditionally been defined from the perspective of policy makers and professionals. This presentation will outline the findings from the first all-Ireland study that consulted older people as to their views on what interventions and services support people experiencing abuse. The subsequent report found that older people perceived elder abuse more in terms of “personhood abuse”. The policy implication of these findings for service development is that enhanced attention and resources should be directed to community development activities that empower older people to share their concerns informally thereby gaining confidence to seek more formal interventions when necessary.

28 June – Ann-Marie Doherty: Health in All Policies. It is well know that health expenditure is costly. The introduction of a “whole of government approach to health” is gaining increasing momentum around the world.  We know little about how policy to improve the health of the population gets made and the evidence and influence that has a bearing on this.  This seminar focuses on Health in All Policies as an emerging paradigm across Government. It will present findings from a PhD study, where a range of ‘elite’ interviews were carried out with Departmental Officials, Members of the Legislative Assembly and Advisors.

5 July – Joanne Wilson:  Understandings of well-being: Implications for public policy This seminar explores the Government’s current desire to measure the nation’s well-being. Well-being is a complex and nebulous concept and different people will use different words to describe it. While this lack of clarity has not hampered our ability to measure the construct, it does pose significant implications for its use as a public health goal. Based on a conceptual map, we discuss how two different discourses (i.e. the individual and the collective) can shape the types of policies developed, the targets set, and the choice of indicators used and the types of interventions applied to advance well-being.

Olympic Games, Mega-Events and Civil Societies

Olympic Games, Mega-Events and Civil Societies

Globalization, Environment, Resistance

Dr. John Karamichas, Lecturer in Sociology, has co-edited (with Dr. Graeme Hayes; Aston University) the volume, Olympic Games, Mega-Events and Civil Societies,published recently by Palgrave Macmillan.

This volume explores sports mega-events; their social, political and cultural characters; the value systems that they inscribe and draw on; the claims they make on us and the claims the organizers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create; and the responses of civil societies to them.  Sports mega-events are not simply sporting or cultural phenomena.  They are also political and economic events, characterized by the generation and projection of symbolic meanings and by social conflict.  Because of their peculiar spatial and temporal organization, they raise questions about the relationships between global cultural and economic flows and particular local and national spaces.  Because of their evolutionary characteristics, they ask us to consider not simply the time of the event but also the effects of the event on the long-term direction, implementation and consequences of public policy.

This volume is designed to fill a major lacuna in the literature on sports mega-events.  Despite the inherently controversial nature of the conditions under which sports mega-events are staged, they have given rise to relatively little on the way of analysis addressing the importance of globalization, environmental performance, claims to sustainable development, and social and civic responses from either sociology or political science.  This book therefore focuses on a series of specific characteristics of these events, characteristics which appear to us to be increasingly central to their staging and design, and of our understanding of their functions.  These are the questions of globalization, be it political, economic or cultural, and particularly in its neo-liberal guise, and the effects of mega-events on urban infrastructural development; of the increasingly corporate nature of sports mega-events, and their consequent social impacts; of the role of mega-events in showcasing and promoting sustainable development programmes, but also the impacts of mega-events on the physical environment; of their elite nature, and of the relationships between political elites and publics; and finally, especially given their promotion as popular cultural celebrations, of the nature of democratic participation in their design, and the subsequent responses of civil societies to mega-events.

The contributors come from different academic disciplines; from sociology and from political science most obviously, but also from architecture and design, from management and urban studies, not to mention from social movements themselves.

Dr. John Karamichas is currently adding finishing touches to The Olympic Games and the Environment.  A book that examines the environmental credentials of Olympic Host cities and the opportunities afforded by hosting the Games towards the ecological modernization of the host nation by using perspectives offered by environmental sociology. It also sets out projections for the environmental legacy of London 2012; scheduled for publication by Palgrave Macmillan on 15 July 2012.

Diversity now? What’s Wrong with Student Evaluations of Teaching

Do students’ course evaluations properly measure the quality of teaching? Quantitative and qualitative research have underlined many biases, the most well-known being that students tend to give a lower rating to a course when the mark they obtain for it is low. Conversely, the higher their mark, the higher they are likely to rate the course. But there is more: lecturers’ personality and perceived beauty, gender, ethnicity, skin colour and accent all impact on the ways in which students rate courses and lecturers. Many studies have shown that women are overall rated lower regarding their competence. Furthermore, students expect lecturers to fit social stereotypes: female lecturers receive equal evaluation than their male colleagues only if they display a behaviour that is stereotypically feminine – caring, friendly and approachable. In other words, as in other workplaces, women are compelled to undertake ‘emotional labour’: being likable rather than competent becomes a central factor for their professional success[1]. Various studies also find that ‘minority’ lecturers obtain significantly lower ratings and are perceived as less credible and intelligible than ‘white’ lecturers. Regarding language, ratings of lecturers’ effectiveness are systematically lower for those whose first language is not English, other things being equal. This lower rating is not attributable to less proficiency in English but results from student perceptions of less teaching preparation, less enthusiasm, a less interactive teaching mode and looser marking standards. In other words, there is a form of antilocution, which entails negative evaluation of foreigners and their ability to behave in accordance with the norms and habits of the host country. All of these factors are not independent but interact with each other: for example, in American universities black female lecturers tend to be rated particularly low.

In other words, we can question the accuracy of these evaluations. For instance, like me you may have received low evaluations for the accessibility of your course readings, despite the fact you only include works that are available online or in the library. Being a sociologist, I know that no survey is perfect and totally reliable. I also know that numbers do not speak for themselves and they need to be interpreted. But we face a problem of paramount importance when the university management perceives students’ course evaluations as a self-evident ‘truth’, and hence uses them as an objective indicator of teaching quality for the purpose of staff probation and promotion. Not only does it introduce arbitrariness in the management of human resources, but acting on faith on evaluations that are affected by lecturers’ gender, ethnicity and accent unavoidably maintains or intensifies discrimination. You thought discrimination was not an issue in HE? At Queen’s, like elsewhere in the UK, four professors out of five are men. The reports of the Equality Challenge Unit have thrown light on Black and Ethnic Minority staff’s widespread experience of prejudice in UK universities. They express feelings that their leadership ability is questioned, feel isolated and marginalised, and report heavier workload, scrutiny, lack of support and difficulties in gaining promotion.

Students’ evaluations are a relatively useful tool to reflect on our teaching and try to improve it. But acting on the basis of their content to promote or make staff permanent might simply institutionalise sexism and racism. If Queen’s wants to claim that equality and diversity are central to the culture of this university, the ways students’ evaluations are currently used in an unquestioned manner need serious and urgent consideration.

 

Véronique Altglas

v.altglas@qub.ac.uk

 

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[1] See S. Cunnane, ‘It is a popularity contest, sisters’ THE, 7 October 2010.

Deciding who decides: the assessment of mental capacity in Canada

 

Gavin Davidson, a lecturer in social work in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, recently returned from a research visit to Canada funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (www.wcmt.org.uk). A new law, the Mental Capacity (Health, Welfare and Finance) Bill is planned for Northern Ireland to provide a much needed legal framework for people whose decision making capacity is impaired. In most jurisdictions, including within the rest of the UK, there are separate laws covering mental health and mental capacity. In Northern Ireland it is proposed that there will be no longer be a separate law for people with mental health problems and the Mental Capacity Bill will apply, in a non-discriminating way, to everyone who has impaired decision making capacity. This approach would be unique but some states in Canada have elements of it and so Gavin visited two such states, Ontario and Saskatchewan.  There he spoke with researchers, practitioners, advocates and policy makers about how having capacity as a gateway criterion for substitute decision making works in practice.  In general this approach appears to work well in these Canadian states and provides an appropriate level of protection for people who are able to make decisions about their own lives as well as a comprehensive framework for making decisions for those who cannot.  In Northern Ireland there is the opportunity to learn from these systems, such as their review processes, and perhaps provide an even more accessible and coherent framework. One particularly important aspect of the framework for Northern Ireland will be consideration of how people can be supported to make their own decisions before any form of substitute decision making is considered. It is anticipated that the draft Mental Capacity (Health, Welfare and Finance) Bill will be published for consultation during 2012 and, as well as the potential benefits and protections, it will be important to consider the complex range of issues this new approach may raise. If anybody is interested in this area, Gavin is happy to discuss these issues and can be contacted at g.davidson@qub.ac.uk.    

You can also listen to a podcast discussion between Gavin and Dr Nancy Hansen Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Disability Studies at the University of Manitoba on this topic, which was recorded at the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work at Queen’s in November 2011:http://soundcloud.com/sspsw-qub/episode-7-capacity