Behaviour change in action: understanding agency and contextualised interaction in benefit recipients’ encounters with street level advisers

This PhD studentship is designed to advance in-depth understandings of benefit recipients’ behaviour as lived experience. Recognising that a person’s subjective reality involves being influenced and influencing others simultaneously, the study will examine the ways in which agency is experienced and exercised by benefit recipients within an intersubjective context. The focus is on investigating dynamic processes of interaction, tracking benefit recipients as they negotiate advice encounters with a range of street-level bureaucrats. The methods are ethnographic, including qualitative interviewing of benefit recipients and, where possible, the advisers they interact with. The intention is to observe directly the advice encounters of research participants, offering a distinct methodology capable of generating authentic insights into the interpersonal dynamics of conditionality in practice. This innovative project will build on two main bodies of work. First, it contributes to studies of agency in social policy, which have highlighted the importance of context in influencing motivation, choice and action. Second, it draws on the newly re-invigorated field of street-level bureaucracy studies, which focuses on the implementation of policy in its enacted form to understand the tensions experienced by front-line welfare advisers in their daily work. In relation to both types of research participant – benefit recipients and advisers – the focus is on understanding their interpretations of agency as lived experience.

Research questions:
• How are behavioural change/conditionality measures experienced and accomplished in practice?
• What are users’ experiences of conditionality and how are these shaped by processes of interaction and in relation to interdependencies?
• How do front-line advisers view conditionality as lived experience in their working lives?
• How do processes of intersubjective interaction bring conditionality into being?

• The studentship is funded by the ESRC and linked to the project ‘Sanctions, Support and Behaviour Change: Understanding the Role and Impact of Welfare Conditionality’. It will be supported by the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science.
• Applicants are expected to have an Upper Second or First Class undergraduate degree in a social science, or related, subject and must have completed recognised ESRC research training or equivalent in social policy, sociology, economics or a related discipline.
• ESRC studentships are open to UK residents on a +3, full-time basis only – for information on eligibility see: http://www.esrc.ac.uk