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This exploratory study aimed to investigate law enforcement officers’ decision-making processes in high-stress scenarios, exploring variations based on experience and how cognitive demands influence officer decision-making processes.

Employing a naturalistic decision-making approach and macrocognitive framework, the study utilizes scenario-based virtual reality simulations and qualitative interviews to examine the decision-making processes of law enforcement officers in high-stress policing contexts.

Thematic coding of interview data from twelve LEOs immediately following a high-stress virtual reality task revealed differences in decision-making processes and cognitive demands between novice and expert officers. Findings also revealed differences in the type of cognitive demands experienced by officers at key points in the simulated scenario.

The authors offer theoretical and practical contributions toward an increased understanding of officer decision-making, factors and conditions that impact LEO decisions and potential mitigation strategies that law enforcement organizations may leverage to improve officer decision-making in high-stress contexts.

This introductory chapter provides the context for this edited collection: Care and Coronavirus: Perspectives on Children, Youth and Families which aims to understand care in the context of COVID-19, the practices, experiences and potential futures of it for children, young people and families. In this chapter, the authors begin by exploring COVID-19 and its implications for children, young people and families. This includes a consideration of how particular discourses of childhood and youth often led to the marginalisation of children in care policy and practice during the lockdown periods. The authors then discuss interdisciplinary literature on care to identify directions in policy, practice and research, drawing attention to the political nature of care and the need for scholars of childhood, youth and family to engage with these critical and political approaches to care. The authors argue that developments in the field of Childhood Studies can be brought into productive dialogue with care to forge new ways of thinking through care and childhood. The final part of the chapter provides an overview of the ensuing chapters and concludes with the implications of this work for future research, policy and practice. The authors argue that COVID-19 heightened the attention paid to care and the ways in which care is vital for the maintenance of ourselves and the world around us, while also cautioning about the inequalities and the commodification of care that was revealed in these times. The authors end with a call for reflection on the failures and successes of caring during the pandemic and in its aftermath so we might plan a more caring, hopeful future.

This article explores in a qualitative manner the motivations of women entrepreneurs who start and run ethnic food businesses in London.

Our approach is qualitative and deploys phenomenographical analysis of interview narratives around categories of motivation.

We find that women ethnic food entrepreneurs are driven by a combination of desire for self-actualisation, identity-maintenance and community considerations. We demonstrate that women ethnic food entrepreneurs often go against the logic of the market, and they do so not because they lack other options, but for reasons that have to do with their (self-)identification as women and professionals, their prerogatives as mothers and daughters, their ethnic heritage, their emplacement in urban and global communities and their need to contribute. Our findings enrich understanding of female-led ethnic food entrepreneurship not as a demanding, overall unproductive undertaking for women with no other options, but as a realm of inspiration, community engagement and female-led innovation.

Our main contributions are the qualitative interrogation of perceptions and experiences of identity and difference in urban entrepreneurship from the point of view of our interviewees; providing concrete empirical evidence for it through our sample and proposing an approach to thinking women-led ethnic food entrepreneurship as a vehicle for translating urban superdiversity into social interactions across barriers of difference. We speak to the field of women entrepreneurship studies but specifically to the understudied realm of women-led food entrepreneurship, and to the cross-disciplinary field of (im)migrant entrepreneurship.

The importance of including victims of abuse within prevention responses has recently received some attention within the sport sector. This chapter reports on a UK initiative, funded by a national sport agency, which aimed to provide a platform for individuals with a ‘lived experience’ of child abuse in a sport context to deliver awareness-raising events for stakeholders within the sport sector. Interviews were conducted with the participants to explore their experiences. This chapter reports on their primary motivations for participation, the concerns and anxieties they experienced, as well as wider issues relating to engagement with the sport sector. The discussion reflects on the challenges and potential of such activity and will be of interest to those with a personal experience of abuse, practitioners and researchers working with survivor-activists and those working in safeguarding and child/athlete welfare more broadly.

In England and Wales, adult male registered sex offenders (RSOs) are risk assessed and managed using a tool known as the Active Risk Management System; a risk assessment designed specifically for police management of RSOs and carried out by a specialist group of police officers known as Management of Violent or Sexual Offenders (MOSOVO) at the RSO’s home, known as “the home visit”. The purpose of this paper is to explore RSOs views of the home visit and risk assessment and to make recommendations to MOSOVO to improve future home visit & risk assessment practice.

This study aimed to examine a sample of adult male RSOs’ views of the risk assessment and home visit process. Three police forces in England and Wales agreed to facilitate the sampling of 10 RSOs who varied in their level of risk, namely, low, medium, high and very high.

Three themes were developed from the analysis: anxiety and shame; perceptions of the first home visit; and the property search and observations. This paper discusses these experiences in light of the growing call for MOSOVOs to both manage risk and assist desistance and present recommendations for improving both the home visit and risk assessment practice.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to understand and explore RSOs views of the home visit and risk assessment process.