In recent years, a wave of reforms known as ‘nudges’ or ‘behavioural interventions’ have emerged in public policy and administration. ‘Nudge’ policies are created to lightly influence groups in society to change their behaviour, using behavioural insights to solve complex policy problems. Generally, behavioural approaches focus on the psychology underlying the implementation and effects of policies in practice.First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics journal, this bo...

Policy-making in public health is highly complex, which is one reason why the behavioural turn is now playing a significant role in this field. Against this backdrop, this book aims to develop a theoretical understanding of how policymakers take up public health challenges and how policies change over the course of time. Accordingly, the book reveals policy-makers' underlying assumptions, which influence the way in which public policy seeks to promote the health status of citizens. In a se...

Evidence-based practice is now a core element of many governments’ approaches to policy-making and social intervention. It has become a powerful movement that promises to change the content and structure of social work and its allied professions. Its emergence has generated much debate and raised challenging questions, however, particularly at the interface of research, policy, and practice.This book provides a critical analysis of evidence-based practice in social work. It introdu...

Domestic violence affects all areas of social work. This book shows how social workers can intervene in everyday practice with victims, their families and perpetrators of domestic abuse. It provides students with knowledge of theory, research and policy to put directly in practice across a variety of legal and service-user contexts.Topics covered include:Child protectionInterprofessional collaborationThe policy and legal contextWorking wi...

While categorization has always been one of the primary focuses of the social sciences, recent trends within these disciplines have tended to categorize various behaviours as disorders. Researching Resilience challenges this tendency to pathologize, and marks a profound shift in research methods from the study of disorder to the study of well-being.This collection assembles qualitative and quantitative studies from a diverse group of scholars and disciplines, stressing the...

At the clinical, management, and policy levels, the use of knowledge and evidence in health care has become a worldwide priority. The contributors to Using Knowledge and Evidence in Health Care seek to broaden our understanding of the complexity involved in health care decision-making by integrating social science knowledge and exploring some of the challenges and limits of evidence in different health care contexts.Louise Lemieux-Charles and François Champagne have brough...

The IAAP Handbook of Applied Psychology, an up-to-date and authoritative reference, provides a critical overview of applied psychology from an international perspective.Brings together articles by leading authorities from around the worldProvides the reader with a complete overview of the field and highlights key research findingsDivided into three parts: professional psychology, substantive areas of applied psychology, and special topics in appli...

Health communication is key to promoting good population and individual health outcomes. As the field has developed, there is a growing need for a critical appraisal of the ideologies and theories underpinning health communication in order to ensure effective practice.This book clearly situates health communication within its social context. It provides a critical overview of three key disciplinary areas – education, psychology and communication. Drawing on international examples t...

Diversity arising from the mixing of peoples from different cultural backgrounds has long been an issue in nations such as the United States and Australia, and in recent decades, European nations have reached unprecedented levels of cultural diversity due to increased migration. This phenomenon of increasing cultural diversity at the national level sets the context for current social science research on the consequences of diversity for social integration, institutional functioning, and in...

Crossing the traditional divide between social work with children and families and adults, this text applies a lifecourse perspective, within an ecological frame. Based on the principle that practice drives theory, a practical approach for social work is put forward using five interconnected themes:• duality of support and protection• life transitions and life events• intergenerational relations• civic partnership and engagement• health and wellbeing...

The second edition of The SAGE Handbook of Special Education provides a comprehensive overview of special education, offering a wide range of views on key issues from all over the world. The contributors bring together up-to-date theory, research and innovations in practice, with an emphasis on future directions for the role of special education in a global context of inclusion.This brand new edition features:" New chapters on families, interagency collaboration and issues ...

It is impossible to understand human behavior without understanding the critical role that groups play in people’s lives. Most of us belong to a range of formal and informal groups, including families, work teams, and friendship cliques. These groups absorb a great deal of our time and energy and are instrumental in satisfying our most fundamental needs. In addition, they connect us to larger social aggregates (e.g., political parties, business organizations, religious denominations) that ...