Bren Neale

Dialogues with Children: Children, Divorce and Citizenship

The notion of listening to children so that they can participate in decision-making about their everyday lives has become an established principle of child law and policy in England and Wales. That there are fundamental constraints to putting this principle into practice, however, is widely acknowledged, particularly in the context of divorce and parental conflict. This article shows how the operation of the welfare principle in an English context constrains childrens participation within private law proceedings. It goes on to explore childrens own discourses around the issue of being listened to and reviews current debates about their participation in the light of this evidence. The childrens commentaries offer fresh insights into what it means to listen to children, along with some new ways of thinking about young peoples citizenship within and outside their families.

Researching lives through time: an introduction to the Timescapes approach:

This special issue of Qualitative Research explores recent advances in Qualitative Longitudinal (hereafter QL) research methods and the building of QL data resources for sharing and re-use. Our main focus is the work conducted under the ESRC Changing Lives and Times Initiative (Timescapes, 2007–12), which we attempt here to place in the broader context of methods and infrastructure development in the UK. QL research – qualitative enquiry conducted through or in relation to time – is hardly new; it is part of a rich ethnographic tradition, spanning fields as diverse as social anthropology, oral history, and theatre studies (e.g. Kemper and Peterson Royce, 2002; McLeod and Thomson, 2009; Saldana, 2003; Thomson and Holland, 2003). However, until recently QL methodologies were under-developed, datasets were scattered and unavailable, and the literature that explored the contours of the method and promoted its use was sparse. This has begun to change over the past decade, with QL research gaining recognition as a distinctive way of knowing and understanding the social world (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003). Researchers are routinely seeking to incorporate QL methods into their research design and a growing number of studies, ranging from the lived experience of welfare reform to the dynamics of transport and energy, are being funded by government, the ESRC and the main UK charities.

Experiments with Parenthood

Recent policy changes in the area of family law have promoted changes in the organisation of the post-divorce family. These shifts place emphasis on consensual joint parenting after divorce and emphasise agreement rather than conflict between parents. In addition, these policy changes have given a new status to fatherhood and seek to maintain relationships between men and children. These policy shifts, as well as the social changes that underlie them, have been the focus of work by Beck (1992). Here we consider (1) how parents are actually negotiating parenthood in the light of this policy experiment; and (2) how pertinent Becks thesis appears to be by drawing on the results of a qualitative research project which has interviewed sixty parents who have divorced or separated since the new legislation came into effect.

Adding Time into the Mix: Stakeholder Ethics in Qualitative Longitudinal Research

This paper explores the ethical considerations that arise in the conduct of Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) research, drawing on work undertaken as part of the ESRC Timescapes initiative. Adding time into the mix of a qualitative study heightens the need for ethical literacy. Well established ethical principles take on new meaning and need reworking when seen with a temporal gaze – for example, those relating to consent as an ongoing process; sustaining confidentiality when the risk of disclosure is magnified over time; and the ethical representation of lives in the construction, display and re-use of research data. The challenges are magnified in relation to the tenor, flux and recurrent nature of the research process. The elongated time frames for empirical research create long term, reciprocal research relationships that need careful consideration and nurturing over time. More broadly, as QL research unfolds, a wider constituency of individuals and organisations become implicated in the process, necessitating new thinking about their varied needs and claims. QL researchers find themselves navigating through a broader ethical landscape, which this paper seeks to capture through the concept of ‘stakeholder’ ethics. A stakeholder approach allows for the varied needs of those implicated in the research to be recognised and reconciled, and for a greater appreciation of how research relationships intersect and impact on the research process as it unfolds. Adding time into the mix also enables a distinction to be drawn between pro-active and re-active ethical strategies, both of which are needed in the longer time frames of QL enquiry. The discussion focuses on the conduct of QL research, illustrating the practices of researchers in the field as a starting point for a productive iteration between ethical principles and practice. The paper concludes that time is a complicating factor but also an important resource in the ethical conduct of qualitative research.

The Timescapes Archive: a stakeholder approach to archiving qualitative longitudinal data

ESRC funding for the Timescapes initiative included provision for the creation of a specialist resource of Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) data for sharing and re-use. In this article we document the development of this resource, focusing on the strategic and practical dimensions of its growth. In the process we explore the importance of effective communication and negotiation in the development of stakeholder collaborations between researchers and archivists. We reveal the potential of the archive to operate at the intersection of primary and secondary research, acting as a useful repository for the data of primary researchers to aid temporal QL analysis, and bringing related datasets together for enhanced analysis by both primary and secondary users.

New Structures, New Agency: The Dynamics of Child-Parent Relationships after Divorce

This paper explores how young people ‘work out’ (Finch 1989) their relationships with their parents across space and time, drawing on a study of the long term experiences of young people living with divorced or separated parents in the UK. As in other post-industrial societies, levels of divorce have grown considerably in England and Wales since the 1950s and although the rate of increase has slowed, divorce (or separation) is now a common experience in families. The familiarity of divorce suggests that fundamental and widespread changes are occurring in the way people conduct their personal lives and relationships and this in turn has necessitated the search for new ways to conceptualise and understand the complexities of contemporary family life (e.g. Smart and Neale, 1999). The research reported in this paper was informed by theoretical and methodological developments in the field of divorce and childhood research, which are reviewed below.

‘I Hadn’t Really Thought About it’: New Identities/New Fatherhoods

It has become almost cliched to remark upon the so-called crisis in fatherhood in western societies in the 1990s. There are a burgeoning number of studies on both masculinities and fatherhood(s).1 Social policy and family law have turned their attention to fathers and fathering, and pressure groups continue to press for a greater recognition of fathers’ rights. Fatherhood has been problematized and virtually redefined as having minority group status (Dennis and Erdos, 1993). The reasons for this shift are complex and interrelated and we shall explore some of them in this chapter. What is clear, however, for most commentators, is that it is divorce or separation that seem to trigger the crisis, and that the apparent decline in the status of fatherhood is inexorably linked with recent advances in women’s status (Morgan, 1995; Phillips, 1997). Divorce exposes the taken-for-granted nature of gender relationships in heterosexual partnerships. Just as divorce exposes women’s vulnerability to poverty and their lack of standing in the labour market (Eekelaar and Maclean, 1986; Maclean, 1991), so too does divorce render visible the pretence of fatherhood as an active relationship rather than a passive status. By this we mean that, for the majority of heterosexual couples who follow traditional child-care arrangements, fatherhood still does not routinely provide an identity for a man nor necessarily an active, involved relationship with children.

Becoming a Young Breadwinner? The Education, Employment and Training Trajectories of Young Fathers

The entry into fatherhood is a major life course transition involving the acquisition of new adult roles and responsibilities. This transition is rarely planned for young fathers, and may involve a range of challenges, not least their capacity to provide materially and financially for their child. Drawing on a Qualitative Longitudinal study of young fathers in the UK, this article charts their very different pathways through education, training and employment, showing how these are shaped by a constellation of life circumstances. The implications for policy are considered in the light of a shifting landscape of welfare reform and ‘austerity’ measures.

Introduction: Young Fatherhood: Lived experiences and policy challenges.

The entry of young people into early parenthood has long been regarded as an issue for social policy and for professional practice in the UK and internationally. Despite a steadily falling trend, most notably since 1998, the UK still has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, concentrated in the most socially disadvantaged areas of the country (Office for National Statistics, 2015). The majority of these pregnancies are unplanned, with about half resulting in the birth of a child, although the extent to which this should be a cause for concern is a contested issue (Duncan et al., 2010). Considerable research evidence exists on the experiences of young mothers, with a range of interventions designed to meet their needs. However, young fathers (defined as those under the age of 25, a quarter of whom are estimated to be in their teens) have, until recently, been neglected in both research and policy. Over the past decade, small pockets of research evidence on the circumstances, practices and values of young fathers have begun to coalesce into a fledgling evidence base. However, the notion of ‘feckless’ young men, who are assumed to be absent, or disinterested in ‘being there’, or, worse, regarded as a potential risk to their children, continues to hold sway, particularly in popular media and some political discourses (Neale and Davies, 2015).

Supporting young fathers: the promise, potential and perils of statutory service provision

This article provides a case study of the challenges faced by one local authority in supporting young fathers, in a context of changing models of service provision, resource constraints and professional training needs. Developments in service provision are tracked over a decade, starting with a mentoring service set up under New Labour’s ten year teenage pregnancy strategy, and considering how this has been refashioned under new models of service provision. The article was developed in close consultation with local authority service providers and draws on both professional accounts and the perspectives of young fathers as clients of the service. Overall, the article contributes to debates around the relative strengths of mainstream and specialist support for young fathers, and suggests the value of specialist support within mainstream provision.