The Department of Social Policy and Criminology has an active and developing research culture, and a strong commitment to the production of innovative, high quality, socially relevant and policy-oriented research. The Department has a developing commitment to postgraduate research and has ESRC 1+3 recognition.

Three international journals are edited by members of staff - Global Social Policy (in partnership with McMaster University, Canada, and STAKES, Finland), Youth Justice (in partnership with Liverpool University) and Crime Media Culture (in partnership with City University, London, and Texas Christian University, USA). Social Policy is the institutional home for the Sage Dictionary of Criminology 2001; 2005 (in partnership with City University, London).

Many staff in the Social Policy and Criminology Department play an active role in two major University supported research centres. For details of the full range of research carried out in the department, consult the individual staff profiles.

The Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance (CCIG) draws its members from across the Faculty of Social Sciences. Seven members of Social Policy are members of CCIG and contribute to the 3 main strands of the centre's research programme.

Recent research projects include:

Changing Governance and Social Welfare examines new forms of control and coordination in the remaking of welfare states. The ESRC/AHRB funded project Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Relationships and Identifications in its Cultures of Consumption programme has examined the implications of recasting citizens as consumers in the delivery of public services.

The Modernising Adult Social Care research initiative focuses on the progress and impact of modernisation in adult social care. This initiative investigates the impact of the British government's modernisation strategy on adult social care services.

Members of staff are actively involved in research into the global and transnational dimensions of social policy.

Discourses of Social Care, Family and Kinship forms a focus for contemporary and historical work about family formation and identities in relation to social policy. This includes studies of gender and household formation; the family in law and social policy; and discourses of abuse, care and danger. Research funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is exploring how young people react to bereavement and loss, and children's experiences of their sibling relationships. Other members are currently researching the remaking of identities in historical and contemporary constructions of parenting, step-parenting, fatherhood, childhood and family lives, and sibling relations between brothers and sisters.

A project funded by the Leverhulme trust has studied the formation of identities and ethnicities in contemporary rural England.

The International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) is an interdisciplinary criminological research centre drawing on expertise from history, psychology and sociology as well as criminology. Six members of Social Policy are currently active researchers within ICCCR contributing to its three main strands of policing, community safety and prison research. The group combines work on international youth justice; historical and contemporary studies of policing and prisons; and work on crime prevention and community safety, linking it to questions of governance, risk and fear in late modernity. It has recently attracted ESRC funding to establish a seminar series on 'rethinking community policing in an age of diversity'.

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