Building resilient and Healthy Family Practices, Protecting Children and Reducing Crime: Identifying Support Needs and Early Interventions – A Multi-Agency Approach

The proposed PhD project will focus on the support needs of families where domestic abuse is connected with parental-substances misuse (Featherstone et al. 2014, Axford et al. 2017). The aim being to develop a multi-agency model that intervenes in such families early, to support members to build resilience, reduce domestic abuse offending and substance misuse issues, which thus far, is an under researched area. Approaches have tended to focus on individual needs of parent(s) or the child and usually social care agencies intervene too late, reducing the efficacy of such interventions (O’Connor et al. 2014).

The candidate would undertake a qualitative research project that develops a more holistic needs assessment of the family that includes all family members and agencies which is suggested to produce better outcomes for all involved (O’Connor et al. 2014). Digital technology in the form of an ongoing research blog will be used to disseminate regular updates about the project key findings to partners and participants in this research.

The PhD candidate would be joining a supervision team who have been working on improving local responses to domestic abuse offending for a number of years in collaboration with the Safer City Partnership Team and Public Health Commissioners within the local authority of Stoke on Trent. Thus the PhD project would be a continuation of this research, continuing to influence local partnerships and domestic abuse provision and has the potential to contribute new insights into policy debates and national Government strategies for tackling domestic abuse.

The School of Law Policing and Forensics
The School of Law Policing and Forensics at Staffordshire University are inviting applications for Partial Scholarship PhD projects within our school. This scheme gives you the opportunity to enrol on to a PhD project without having to pay any tuition fees. In exchange for this, you would be expected to provide a maximum of 250 hours of teaching support to the Academic Staff. Please note, that no bursary or any other funding will be provided.

If you have any further questions regarding the scheme, please contact Dr Graham Williams at [Email Address Removed]

Applications
To apply, in the first instance contact the relevant supervisor with your interested project who will discuss the project with you and advise you on how to apply for the PhD. You will need to contact the supervisor directly before applying for the PhD project.