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Supervisors:
Ruth Gilbert and Matthew Jay
Project Description:
Family courts determine disputes about children, including between parents (private proceedings) and where social services seek to remove a child from the home (public proceedings). Parental health is an important but poorly understood predictor of court involvement, and court itself can have adverse impacts on parental health. This has been difficult to investigate at a population level, especially for fathers, who are historically under-researched in this context. Exciting new linkages, however, between court and health data mean it is now possible to investigate the relationships between paternal health and family court activity.
We have linked data on mothers in public proceedings in England, provided by the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass), to data from all hospital admissions, outpatients and A&E. We are extending these permissions to (1) fathers, (2) both parents in private proceedings and (3) analogous data from Wales, which also includes primary care, substance misuse and household composition data.
Initial work has demonstrated that linkage of fathers’ data across Cafcass and health is feasible. However, while Cafcass provides information on fathers involved in family cases, which can be used to explore paternal health before and after court, establishing comparison groups is difficult. By comparison, hospital data provide near-complete coverage of mothers and children born in England, as 97% of births occur in NHS Hospitals. Additionally, healthcare seeking behaviour of men may affect who are detected in health settings, and with what.
The first aim of this PhD is, for fathers involved in family court, to evaluate linkage quality and selection bias using these resources from England and Wales. Findings from aim 1 will feed into aim 2, which is to understand what paternal health factors are most relevant in predicting and explaining variation (court, local authority and region) in proceedings. You will develop skills in managing and analysing large, administrative datasets, linked between family justice and healthcare. You can also develop experience in primary care data linked across households in Wales and England.
You will advance understanding of fathers’ health trajectories before and after court, which is poorly understood currently. Using a public health approach to study law and legal processes, and their relationship with health, is an emerging discipline (legal epidemiology). Findings will be highly policy relevant and you will be encouraged to engage with key stakeholders (Ministry of Justice, Cafcass and Department for Health and Social Care). You will also contribute to creating data infrastructures that will facilitate future research using linked data from courts and health. Completion of this project will strike a solid ground for a career researching child and family health, not only in family justice but other areas of law, too.
We encourage applicants from a range of backgrounds. For example, you may have experience with quantitative methodology and you wish to gain more experience working with whole population, administrative data and data from health and legal settings. Alternatively, you may have a legal or related background and wish to develop your quantitative skills using administrative data.
Contact Information:
Matthew Jay