Wednesday 7 May 2025: Dr Dorottya Cserzo and Dr Harriet Lloyd
Interdisciplinary Miniloquia: Wednesday 7 May 2025 (Week 12 of term) 1.10-2pm
Topics and methods in children’s social care research
Dr Dorottya Cserzo and Dr Harriet Lloyd (both CASCADE, Cardiff University)
Here are the two abstracts for this session:
What can service data tell us about child criminal exploitation?
There is an increased awareness of child criminal exploitation (CCE) in Wales, yet there are no exact figures regarding the number of young people affected. CCE is tackled through multi-agency collaboration between children’s services, education, health, housing, police, youth justice and youth work. Children’s services are tasked with leading the collaboration, despite being set up to handle intra-familiar harm rather than extra-familial harm.
This project examines referral routes, service approaches, interventions and education, health, social care and offending outcomes for criminally exploited children in a local authority in Wales. The project is unique not only in its focus on service outcomes, but also the innovative design which combines a case study approach with administrative data linkage and visual and descriptive exploration of the data. We found that missing episodes, additional learning needs, and sibling involvement in CCE, all crucial indicators of exploitation, were poorly recorded.
Realist-Informed Research on Peer Parent Advocacy
CASCADE is currently looking at peer parent advocacy services across England, taking a realist-informed approach to data collection and analysis. A realist approach aims to generate (or deepen) a ‘programme theory’ for subsequent testing (Bonell et al, 2022). Realist research seeks to understand how complex social programmes ‘work’ for different people in different contexts. It does so by identifying the mechanisms and moderators of causal pathways that lead to different outcomes.
Peer Parent Advocacy (PPA) offers a potential means of forging less adversarial relationships between parents and social workers, supporting parents to have a more meaningful voice in decision-making processes, and even reducing the need for children to enter state care (Fitz-Symonds et al. 2023; Lalayants 2019; Polinsky et al. 2010). Research over the last two decades recognizes PPA’s potential to support families (Berrick et al. 2011; Saar-Heiman et al. 2024) and to rebalance the roles of professionals and parents in deciding on how children should be supported (Sears et al. 2017).
In this presentation, I will share our developing programme theory, discussing how advocacy services are working in different contexts.
This session will take place at 1.10pm in Room 3.58 of the John Percival Building at Cardiff University or can be accessed online using this link.