SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Work

This study focuses on the contribution that studies of the post-war 'welfare state' can make to debates about welfare. Drawing on community care debates from 1971 to 1993, it illuminates contemporary concerns about issues as rationing care, the health and social care divide, residential care and growing emphasis on provider competition.

This report investigates the circumstances, needs, views and life experiences of black young people with caring responsibilities. It highlights significant gaps in service provision, which result in young people undertaking caring responsibilities, and makes recommendations to improve services.

Describing social assistance 'careers' in different national and urban contexts, this innovative book documents the strong interplay between personal biographies and policy patterns - a particularly useful perspective which complements the more structural, top-down approach of much international work in social policy.

This book provides a rigorous and challenging review of recent research in the realms of communication and cultural diversity. Focusing on health communication interventions concerning service users who may lack fluency in English, it shows that meeting the needs of all health service users depends on both structures and processes of communication.

Using the idea of the social division of welfare as a template, this book assesses different approaches to retirement pensions policy, highlighting their relative strengths and weaknesses. An invaluable resource for social science students and for those who teach them. Economists and pension practitioners will also find food for thought here.

This book brings together a selection of Richard Titmuss's important writings on a range of key social policy issues, together with commentary from experts in the field.

The companion volume is, Private complaints and public health: Richard Titmuss on the National Health Service edited by Ann Oakley and Jonathan Barker (The Policy Press, 2004).

This book examines the contribution of the NHS to the multi-agency and inter-professional child protection process. It examines the roles played by health professionals within child protection and investigates the nature and operation of the central policy community and local provider networks.

As the prospect of a legal right to advocacy inches closer, so the need to scrutinise its key values and practices becomes urgent. Although widely acclaimed as a 'good thing', there is little agreement as to how advocacy should be implemented, funded or evaluated. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the benefits of advocacy.

Social Policy Review is an annual selection of commissioned articles focusing on developments and debates in social policy. Social Policy Review 13 reviews a varied and interesting selection of social policy developments in Britain and internationally, and sets current policy developments in a broader context of key trends and debates.

The government's NHS Plan emphasises the importance of services users' views. This report provides practical guidance on how to ensure that older people's views are heard, acted on, and monitored, in relation to service quality. It makes recommendations for ensuring that older people's views become an integral part of home care service provision.

'An offer you can't refuse' compares, in depth, international 'work-for-welfare' (workfare) policies objectively for the first time. It considers well-publicised schemes from the United States alongside more overlooked examples of workfare in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Norway.

Cultures of care uses an innovative biographical case study approach to compare caring situations and caring strategies in Britain and East and West Germany. The findings underline the significance of caring within social policy agendas and the need to change the parameters of comparative social policy.