social networks

This report aims to demonstrate how poor mental health is a significant cause of wider social and health problems, including: low levels of educational achievement and work productivity; higher levels of physical disease and mortality; violence, relationship breakdown and poor community cohesion. In contrast, good mental health leads to better physical health, healthier lifestyles, improved productivity and educational attainment and lower levels of crime and violence.

This study examined parenting during early and middle childhood within different social and cultural groups in Britain, using a ‘parenting score’ derived from different measurements of parents’ relationships with their children. The study was based on parents’ reports of attitudes, feelings and behaviour recorded in response to specific questions relating to parenting. The study also assessed changes in parenting across time.

This episode of Radio 4's Thinking Allowed series includes two segments. The first looks at research published in 1960 on social change and kinship patterns in Swansea which showed how extended family networks operate. Forty years on, a group of social scientists decided to replicate the 1960 survey and track the changes that have taken place in that time.

Host, Laurie Taylor, is joined by Professor Nickie Charles, one of the co- authors of the new survey to talk about the ways in which family networks persist despite the instability of 21st century life.

This working paper forms part of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Economics of Migration project. It looks at how Polish migrants have increasingly used social networks to find employment in the UK. Although this has allowed them to maintain high employment rates it brings a risk that migrants will be "locked in" to low-skilled jobs and less integrated into the wider economy and society. The integration policy agenda is currently focused on long term settlement but many migrants only come to the UK for a short period of time.

Produced on behalf of the London Safeguarding Children Board and in conjunction with the Essex Safeguarding Children Board, the aim of this document is to provide practice guidance to support practitioners working with children and families affected by adults viewing child sexual abuse images – particularly via the Internet; to identify key principles to help inform assessments; to consider some of the practice implications; and to provide an overview of current messages from research and underpinning knowledge.

Report based on evidence from a small-scale survey carried out between April and July 2009 in 35 maintained schools in England. It evaluates the extent to which the schools taught pupils to adopt safe and responsible practices in using new technologies, and how they achieved this. It also assesses the extent and quality of the training the schools provided for their staff. It responds to the report of the Byron Review, Safer children in a digital world.

Four Radio 4 programmes in a series about the health and wellbeing of the seven ages of humanity. These four programmes explore life experiences and issues for people in their sixties and seventies.

The first programme looks at memory loss, the second discusses chronic conditions such as osteo-arthritis and the inability to hear, the third examines retirement, and the final programme looks at how medicine can fix some of the physical problems of old age.

This episode of Radio 4's Woman's Hour series discusses a recent report by the Economic and Social Research Council which claimed that more Britons live alone than ever before and that loneliness seems to be the one thing people dread. But does living alone necessarily mean we're lonely? Jenni Murray is joined by Helen Wilkinson, a social commentator and founder of Genderquake and Professor Christina Victor, a gerontologist at Reading University.

Social prescribing is a method of affecting the wider determinants of health such as economic factors by connecting people with health problems to non-medical sources of help and support in the community, normally by referral. This pilot study aimed to inform the development of a full proposal for exploring social prescribing practice in primary care.

Report of an evaluation of the Young Children’s Voices Network (YCVN), a project, begun in 2006, which focuses on participation in the early years. The purpose of the evaluation was to analyse the nature of YCVNs and discover what has helped and hampered local authorities in developing both their network and a culture of listening.