Research projects

Research summary
This longitudinal research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, aims to understand the nature and scope of early intervention programmes targeted at young people at risk of not being in education, employment or training (NEET). It will provide the first comprehensive national picture of early intervention provision focusing specifically on the typology of intervention, target groups and prediction tools used to identify young people at risk. Both short and longer-term outcomes for young people will be recorded to explore the factors that make particular interventions effective. Additionally, it will foreground the voices of young people accessing provision using a longitudinal ethnographic approach. This will provide an understanding of how their experiences of early interventions connect with previous experiences of school, education and the labour market.

Methods 
This is a three-stage mixed methods research project comprising of three phases:
•    Mapping
•    School-based data collection phase
•    Post-16 data collection
Data will be generated with research participants in six social sites of investigation across England using an ethnographic approach. This will involve semi-structured interviews with young people, observations and extensive field notes. The views of key stakeholders will be gathered through semi-structured interviews.

Outcomes
We’ll share findings and updates on this page, in our newsletter, and at an international conference in 2026. We’ll also publish journal articles and a monograph.

Image competition
We invited young people with experience of being NEET to depict how it felt in images. A prize for the competition was provided by Oxford Ethnography and Education. The two paintings by the winning artist, aged 18, illustrate how she felt while NEET. She shared how her perspective has changed since attending a support programme.

Find out more the research project

This project involves using a collaborative action inquiry approach working with stakeholder organisations and people with lived experience to explore how to evolve effective and meaningful creative health approaches across West Yorkshire. Rooted in stories from people with lived experience of community-based creative health approaches and the challenges encountered in practice by partner organisations, the project has co-generated in-depth learning about challenges and potential of sustaining creative health provision. Through active multi-stakeholder involvement the project has built a strong consortium of creative health champions across sectors to engage in co-inquiry and development of systems and practices needed to mobilise and sustain community-based creative approaches in response to health inequalities. Our aim is to bring about the systems change needed to integrate community-based creative assets into local commissioning and delivery systems.

Find out more the research project

Dr Nic Stenberg is also a Co-I in the National Creative Health Hub. Find out more about the hub.

In 2024, Dr Jim Reid received a prestigious International Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to work with colleagues at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa to propose a new framework in the emerging field of family capabilities and to co-produce an intervention for use by practitioners working with families. With Professor Nicolette (Nicky) Roman, South African Chair (SARChl) Human Capabilities and Social Cohesion through the Family, and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Children, Families and Society (CiSCFS) at UWC, we are leading on the development of the concept of family capabilities as a new area of research globally.

The research aims to make an original contribution through a dialogue between the majority and minority worlds to co-design  a new framework of family capabilities that will be significant across geographical boundaries, disciplines (e.g., humanities and social sciences), and beyond the academy (e.g., to practitioners, policy makers, and communities).   We have taken risk by exploring, in the historical and colonial context of South Africa, intersections, including ethnicity, race, and gender, and what families do in moving from precarity to sustainable wellbeing. We have also added to methodological understanding and adapted voice-centred, multi-modal methods through a South African lens. 

Key Highlights from the research so far:

• How we define families is important because families are fluid and their structure extends beyond blood and union.

• Families need both tangible support (food, housing, jobs) AND intangible care (love, respect, trust). Families often struggle to communicate intangible needs.

• Women, especially grandmothers, carry most caregiving responsibilities, often the "glue" holding families together. Many burn out because they don't receive care themselves.

• When care needs aren't met, families experience various forms of harm and breakdown. These unmet needs are often intangible needs.

• Historical inequalities continue to impact family dynamics. The "Black tax", for example, which are financial obligations with families, often create resentment.

Exploration of family capabilities is new within the academy and globally and the research challenges dominant ideas on families and work with families. It redefines how we understand family wellbeing, moving beyond individual needs to focus on collective care capabilities to ensure it is both relevant and impactful in addressing the unique needs and challenges of families, specifically in the South African context. The project introduced multimodal creative techniques to explore expressions and emotions within families—an area that was underexplored in the South African context, and the research team are developing richer and deeper data with families. It is important to acknowledge that the methods have been validated by families, community representatives, practitioners, and academic peers as culturally relevant and appropriate to research with racially and culturally diverse families.

While the Fellowship has been completed successfully, the research is continuing and Dr Reid has been appointed an Extraordinary professor at UWC where the focus is on developing an intervention for working with families and continuing to refine the theory and concept of family capabilities.