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The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on the challenges associated with evaluating the costs and cost-effectiveness of interventions for people with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges.

The paper is a commentary on a range of evidence relating to the findings of “Positive behavioural support for children and adolescents with learning disabilities: an initial exploration of service and costs”. Specific attention is paid to gaps in the literature and the evidence base for the cost of care for people with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges.

Recommendations for person-centred support and increased use of behavioural and psychological interventions for people with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges are based on limited evidence. The literature is particularly sparse in relation to the cost implications for service providers or informal carers of implementing such interventions and the question of whether they reduce costs through preventing residential placements and long-term inpatient admissions.

More high-quality research is required in the area of behavioural and psychological interventions for people with learning disabilities and behaviour that challenges. Trials in this area should include high-quality economic evaluations including budget impact analysis to provide information on the cost implications for different government agencies and cost-effectiveness analysis incorporating impact on quality of life.

Reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Young people are often targeted heavily in advertising campaigns for new and growing products, and there are several reasons that companies might go down this marketing road. Brand strategists could feel that going for the youth market makes the product seem more attractive, or “sexy”. There is also the commonly‐held view that young consumers are easier to attract, because they have less fixed views on brands and therefore are not inhibited in their choices by brand loyalty.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

This paper aims to provide instructions on how to implement an adapted version of the standard repertory grid technique (VARGT). The purpose of which is to provide practitioners with a tool, which enables active engagement by participants in research and clinical practice. This tool has been used effectively with people convicted of stalking offences.

Repertory grids, developed from Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory (1955), had never been used with those who stalk, either clinically or in a research context. Visual and kinaesthetic adaptations were made to standard RGT procedures (Grice, 2002; Tan and Hunter, 2002), for use in a mixed methods research study (Wheatley, 2019, p. 77) due to expected challenges in engaging with this group. This manuscript presents theoretical underpinnings and step-by-step instructions for practical application.

The VARGT is easy to administer and produces rich data, in both qualitative and quantitative formats. This adapted approach encourages active participation and an interpreted therapeutic collaboration (Wheatley et al., 2020).

This novel technique has engaged men convicted of stalking offences collaboratively in research activities and showed potential for its use as a clinical tool. This instructional technical paper allows the technique to be replicated.

This novel technique has engaged men convicted of stalking offences collaboratively in research activities and showed potential for its use as a clinical tool. This instructional technical paper allows the technique to be replicated.

Ridley Scott’s 1982 cinematic production of Blade Runner, based loosely on a 1968 story by Philip Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), is read within a general context of critical theory, the purpose being twofold: first, to highlight the film’s fit with, and within, several issues that have been important to critical theory and, second, to explore some questions, criticisms, and extensions of those issues – the dialectic of identity/difference most crucially – by speculations within and on the film’s text. The exploration is similar in approach to studies of specific films within the context of issues of social, cultural, and political theory conducted by the late Stanley Cavell. Interrogations of dimensions of scenarios and sequences of plotline, conceptual pursuit of some implications, and assessments of the realism at work in cinematic format are combined with mainly descriptive evaluations of character portrayals and dynamics as these relate to specified thematics of the identity/difference dialectic. The film puts in relief evolving meanings of prosthetics – which is to say changes in the practical as well as conceptual-semantic boundaries of “human being”: what counts as “same” versus “other”? “domestic” versus “foreign”? “integrity” versus “dissolution”? “safety” versus “danger”? And how do those polarities, understood within a unity-of-opposites dialectic, change, as human beings are confronted more and more stressfully by their own reproductions of “environment” – that is, the perspectival device of “what is ‘text’ and what is context’?” – and variations of that device by direct and indirect effects of human actions, as those actions have unfolded within recursive sequences of prior versions of perspectival device, a device repeatedly engaged, albeit primarily and mainly implicitly, as a “prosthetic that could not be a prosthetic.”

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Public Health in licensing following The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act of 2011, which added ‘health bodies’ as responsible authorities in licensing; in practice, Directors of Public Health undertook this role in England. Despite this legislation facilitating the inclusion of public health in partnerships around licensing, wide variations in involvement levels by public health professionals persist.

This paper is based on the findings from interviews that explored the experiences of public health professionals engaging with local established partnerships around alcohol licensing. Qualitative data were collected through 21 interviews in a purposeful sample of London boroughs. These data were combined with analyses of relevant area documentation and observations of 14 licensing sub-committee meetings in one London borough over a seven-month period. Thematic analysis of all data sources was conducted to identify emerging themes.

This study highlighted the importance of successful navigation of the “contested space” (Hunter and Perkins, 2014) surrounding both public health practice and licensing partnerships. In some instances, contested spaces were successfully negotiated and public health departments achieved an increased level of participation within the partnership. Ultimately, improvements in engagement levels of public health teams within licensing could be achieved.

The paper explores a neglected aspect of research around partnership working and highlights the issues arising when a new partner attempts to enter an existing partnership.

A recently published survey found that slightly over 14 million persons age 16 or over hunted in the United States in 1991 and spent over $12 billion on hunting. By comparison, the same survey determined there are over 35 million anglers. Another source estimates that nearly 18 million participants age seven and older hunted with firearms in 1992. That ranks hunting well below the participatory sports of swimming, bicycling, and bowling in popularity, but ahead of football, skiing, tennis, and target shooting. Estimates vary, and while these numbers are substantial, they indicate that hunters comprise well under ten percent of the total U.S. population. Hunters have come under increasing fire from animal rightists and others who claim the sport is cruel and unnecessary. Hundreds of articles and a number of books have been written in recent years on both sides of the issue, or, more accurately, all sides. Many writers as well as the population at large see hunting as not entirely “good” or “bad” but some of each, depending upon the context.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a methodology for critical welfare practice research, “recollection-as-method”, and to use this to demonstrate the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The paper analyses a series of personal recollections from the author’s experiences of academic life and welfare work to establish a methodology for critical welfare practice research. This uses concepts memory, dirty work, shame and complicity, and is grounded in critical feminist and critical race work, and psychosocial and socio-cultural approaches to governance.

The paper establishes a methodology for critical welfare practice research by demonstrating the significance of using an ontologically driven approach to governance, to achieve a realistic and complex understanding of statutory welfare work.

Recollections are post hoc narrations, written in the present day. The ethics and robustness of this approach are deliberated in the paper.

The focus of the paper is on statutory welfare practice that involves the assessment and regulation of homeless people. Principles and arguments developed in this paper contribute to reflective and reflexive debates across “front-line” social welfare practice fields in and beyond homelessness. Examples include assessment of social groups such as unemployed people, refugees and asylum seekers. Arguments also have application for criminal justice settings such as for prison work.

This foregrounds practitioner ambivalence and resistance in order to theorise the social relations of social welfare institutions.

The recollection-as-method approach provides a methodology for critical practice research by demonstrating an alternative way to understand the realities of welfare work. It argues that understanding how resistance and complicity operate in less conscious and more structural ways is important for understanding the social relations of social welfare institutions and the role of good/bad feeling for these processes. This is important for understanding interventions required for anti-oppressive social change across the social worlds of policy-practice life.

The UK Mental Health Act (MHA) Reform (2021) on race and ethnicity promotes new governmental strategies to tackle inequalities faced by ethnically racialised communities detained under the MHA. However, there is a scarcity in personality disorder and ethnicity research. This study aims to investigate what is available in the UK in relation to prevalence, aetiology and treatment provisions of personality disorder for ethnically diverse patients, and to understand their interconnectedness with mental health and criminal justice service provisions. Three key areas of investigations were reviewed, (1) UK prevalence of personality disorder amongst ethnically diverse individuals; (2) aetiology of personality disorder and ethnicity; (3) treatment provisions for ethnically diverse individuals diagnosed with personality disorder.

A scoping study review involved a comprehensive scanning of literature published between 2003 and 2022. Screening and data extraction tools were co-produced by an ethnically diverse research team, including people with lived experience of mental health and occupational expertise. Collaborative work was complete throughout the review, ensuring the research remained valid and reliable.

Ten papers were included. Results demonstrated an evident gap in the literature. Of these, nine papers discussed their prevalence, three papers informed on treatment provisions and only one made reference to aetiology. This review further supports the notion that personality disorder is under-represented within ethnic minority populations, particularly of African, Caribbean and British heritage, however, the reasons for this are multi-facetted and complex, hence, requiring further investigation. The evidence collected relating to treatment provisions of personality disorder was limited and of low quality to reach a clear conclusion on effective treatments for ethnically diverse patients.

The shortage of findings on prevalence, aetiology and treatment provisions, emphasises the need to prioritise further research in this area. Results provide valuable insights into this limited body of knowledge from a UK perspective.