We believe that matching well qualified, able, and enthusiastic PhD and MPhil students with supervisors who have relevant experience, expertise, and research interests, makes a healthy research department. To this end we design our procedures to give candidates as much information as possible about research in the Department and to allow us to judge a candidate's ability to undertake research at this level.

Our research record is well established in the fields of drugs, crime and the criminal justice process, youth offending, disability studies, theories of welfare, gender and sexuality, child and family care, community care, social work, hate crime and racist violence. Recent work has been informed by a growing emphasis on issues of equal opportunities, social justice, poverty and social exclusion. We have various joint research projects with other departments and are interested in promoting collaborative research.

The Applied Social Science Unit of Research and Evaluation (ASSURE) is also based in the Department. Members of staff have developed considerable expertise in community based evaluation which provides systematic information that will strengthen projects during their life cycle and provides outcome data to assess the extent of change. The primary purposes of community based evaluation are to identify problems and opportunities in the project's host communities and to provide staff and stakeholders with reliable information from which to address problems and build on strengths.

The Department welcomes applications from students wishing to undertake their research degree within this unit.