Welfare Research

First published in 1998. This book attempts to contribute a new framework for social research in the welfare field. As such, it engages with new theories, new approaches and new methods, alongside a constructive critique of both the old and the new. It attempts to illustrate approaches to conceptualization and operationalization within policy-relevant research, to reflect and explore both new thinking in social theory and in welfare policy, as well as to maintain a connection with old concerns. Our concern is with welfare research-both theory and method- broadly defined as the wider landscape of policy and provision captured, in the past at least, by the notion of the welfare state . The new thinking with which the book is primarily concerned involves a shift away from seeing people as the passive beneficiaries of welfare provided through state interventions and professional expertise and from seeing them as fixed single social categories of poor , old , single parent or as one dimensional, objective socio-economic classifications.