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No description available.

The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of young and young adult carers during an era of targeted family welfare provision associated with the UK Labour Governments of 1997-2010. Drawing on the concept of intergenerational mutuality (Philip 2003), the study focussed on what happens to child-adult relationships when young and young adult carers move beyond normative intergenerational boundaries. Qualitative biographical interviews with 13 young and young adult carers and in-depth interviews with 10 young carers' workers were carried out and analysed, using a grounded approach (Bertaux 1981). Young and young adult carers' accounts of their caring roles were used to explore their relationships with significant others, and their perceptions of the impact of these roles on transitions from childhood to adulthood. Interviews with young carers' workers were used to explore their views about the balance between promoting efficacy for young and young adult carers and sustaining their rights to self- development and education. The research makes an original contribution to knowledge. It does so by providing in-depth comparisons between young carers' workers' and young and young adult carers' views about the impact of the latter's caring role on their transitions to adulthood and personal relationships. The former tended to pathologise the situations of young and young adult carers. In contrast, major concerns for young and young adult carers were: the barriers to relationships with peers arising from their role; the rigidity of the education system; and poor support for their dependent relatives, which could have helped them indirectly to manage their caring role.

This qualitative research study focuses on the lived experiences of young carers in Northern Ireland with the purpose of increasing awareness of the factors and processes which contribute to or challenge their resilience, as a means to inform regional policy, service design and practice and, to add to the theoretical understanding of resilience. After giving consideration to the numerous theoretical perspectives on resilience, the study identified the relevance of context, self-identity and social ecology as central tenets to exploring the resilience of young carers and the need to move beyond what might be considered a snapshot approach in order to develop a more holistic understanding of their lives. In total, twenty two children and young people drawn from eighteen households across Northern Ireland participated in the study; aged between eight and eighteen years, they were accessed via Barnardo's Young Carers Project and Action for Children Young Carers Project. Each young carer took part in one semi-structured interview which lasted approximately one hour. While the individual familial contexts in which young carers were located tended to be quite disparate, most were involved in the provision of informal care to a parent and/or a sibling. The findings generated by the research were later analysed using thematic analysis. The overall findings of the study suggest that the factors which promote or challenge the resilience of young carers are contingent and multidimensional and involve processes which interact to produce shifting patterns of resilience over time. The study concludes by suggesting that there is no universal set of factors which can be considered to protect all children and that rather, as a concept, resilience is best regarded as a means by which to identify protective and risk factors associated with particular groups of children and young people who share a common identity including that of young carer.

In a context dominated by media reports of the historical institutional abuse of children and young people in residential homes by those adults charged with their care, and where the voice of residential childcare workers is largely silent, this study explores residential care workers views and experiences of effective relationship-based practice. This focus coincides with the resurgence of interest in relationship-based practice and the purpose of the study is to ascertain, from the perspective of residential childcare workers, whether this has translated into practice. Using an exploratory, qualitative approach and informed by Appreciative Inquiry (Al), in-depth, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 26 residential care workers in the Republic of Ireland to elicit their views and perspectives. The findings highlight that relationship-based practice has not been fully embraced in practice. In attempting to understand why this is the case, the study uses concepts from the sociology of fear to argue that residential childcare practice has been shaped and constrained by a culture of fear that permeates the child welfare system. The effects of this are amplified given the current low status of residential care workers, the impact of media reports and the influence of current discourses around professional practice in which objective and emotionally detached practice is viewed as synonymous with efficiency and effectiveness. The study argues that placing the perspectives of residential childcare workers into the public domain is an important way of contributing to debates and further enhancing an environment conducive to relationship-based practice. It is hoped that this study represents a step in that direction.

Positive parent-child relationships are integral to child wellbeing. In the UK, it is estimated that there are 52,000 young carers caring for parents with mental health difficulties. However, there is a lack of research speaking directly to these children about their relationships with their parents. This may hinder professional understanding of these children's lived experiences. This study explored the experiences of 10 seven-to-eleven year old young carers' relationships with parents who had mental health difficulties. A qualitative design applying Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of semi-structured interviews was used. Four super-ordinate themes were identified from the analysis of the interviews. Children said that they did not fully understand their parents' mental health and suggested that they contributed to both the cause and the care of it. The young people expressed unconditional love and loyalty to their parents, whilst outlining the mutuality of the relationship and their trust in their parents to act in their best interests. Children described their enjoyment in being with their parents and how their interactions varied dependent on their parents' mental health. Other relationships as well as those with their parents were important to the young people. The young carers disliked talking about negative feelings and experiences. They described a range of coping techniques, carried out on their own or, at times, using support from their parents, relatives, peers and young carers' organisations. This research demonstrated that children in middle childhood are well able to articulate their experiences. The findings validate the importance of listening to all the perspectives in the family, in order to ensure that services can understand and work within the family's experiences. The findings are discussed in relation to existing research on young carers and the impact of parental mental health. Clinical implications for working with these families are suggested.

The study aimed to address the question of what represents the most therapeutic response when a client self-harms on an acute inpatient mental health unit. The null hypothesis was that nurse response type would have no bearing on how long it was before a client went on to self-harm again. Pilot studies and qualitative analysis led to the development of questionnaires which sought to measure nurse-client interactions across four dimensions: 1) The content of what the nurse said to the client; 2) The length of time the nurse spent with the client; 3) The emotional tone of the response; and 4) The strength of emotion expressed by the nurse. The participants were 19 inpatients and 29 nurses who described incidents of self-harm. Nurses and clients completed questionnaires describing the nurse's response type the first time that a client self-harmed during a new admission. Most of the statistical analyses supported the null hypothesis that nurse response type has no bearing on how long it is before a client engages in self-harm again. There was no evidence that the content, duration or emotional tone of a nurse's response had any bearing on how long it was before the client self-harmed again. The only statistically significant finding was that nurses perceiving themselves to be more strongly emotional was correlated with a longer delay before self-harm was repeated. A finding not directly related to the hypotheses was that nurses and clients perceived behaviour differently. There was poor agreement in terms of their perceptions of the number of minutes that an interaction lasted, how strongly emotional the nurse was, and the severity of the clients' self-harm. The implications of these findings are discussed, together with suggestions for future research.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.