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What is CAVA? ‘CAVA’ is short for ‘Care, Values and the Future of Welfare’. This is an exciting, innovative and interdisciplinary research programme based in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. The research is concerned with how we all fulfil our different family responsibilities and how social policies can help us – whether that is looking after children, earning money and going to work, spending time with spouses and partners, caring for other relatives and/or helping friends. CAVA is supported by £1.3m from the Economic and Social Research Council, representing a significant investment by central government. This offers the rare chance to evaluate how well our social policies serve us as we all try to juggle family and work, caring and earning. The last time researchers and policy makers systematically thought about these issues was in the 1940s when Beveridge developed the post-war welfare state. He did this assuming that certain areas of life were relatively fixed and secure: gender roles, marriage, steady jobs and full employment, firm moral and national boundaries. When the welfare state was set up, policies presumed that people would marry in their early twenties, that women would leave the labour market, that men would be primarily breadwinners and that women and children could rely on men’s contributions to the insurance based benefits system if they ever needed extra support. However, these presumptions are no longer valid, because there have been many changes – divorce has increased, men’s and women’s employment is very different, expectations of close relationships have changed. In addition, such changes have been different across ethnicity, calss and family structure. The CAVA research team is interested in how these changes have altered day-to-day life and perceptions of familial responsibilities as well as how they have affected the demands on social policies. The West is entering a period of major welfare resettlement – governments are seeking to restructure policy provision – and for this to be successful we, as a society, need to know how the changes in parenting and partnering are transforming the meanings and practices of care, intimacy and obligation. The aim of the Care, Values and the Future of Welfare research programme is to develop a new framework of values to underpin the social policies that support us in fulfilling our varied family responsibilities. How will CAVA achieve its aim? The research will be exploring the different sets of beliefs, values and moral frameworks that we all draw upon when trying to negotiate the sorts of dilemmas we are faced with in our everyday lives, for example:
In trying to find out more about how we sort these issues out, researchers will be asking:
This part of the research will take place between October 1999 and October 2003. There are five strands which will focus on different aspects of these issues. Strands One and Two reviews what knowledge already exists. Strand Three looks at actual practice in Britain – this will be studied in a number of different ways including in-depth, intensive empirical investigations of different groups of people in four different localities in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Strand Four extends these questions into the international arena: there will be cross-national studies based in Sweden, Spain, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, Finland and the USA – this will show what is ‘peculiar’ to Britain, as well as how things can be different. Strand Five will look at the sorts of issues and challenges to social policies which have been raised by self-help and campaign groups, locally and nationally. What will happen next? The final part of the research – Strand Six – lasts from March 2003 to September 2004 and attempts to build the new normative framework for social policy. This will involve two key processes.
Through these Citizen’s Dialogues and Feedback Forums the CAVA research team will seek to develop a common vocabulary of values which also respects a diversity of practices and beliefs. CAVA email:cava@leeds.ac.uk |
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