In this presentation, Gillian Calvert and Trish Malins broadly consider the theme of children's participation in research. They begin by providing an overview of a recent large-scale qualitative research project conducted by the NSW Commission for Children and Young People with the Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre, University of Western Sydney. This study considered how children and young people define well-being, factors that contribute to their sense of well-being, and factors children identify as affecting their wellbeing. They then discuss the conceptual and practical aspects of the methodology incorporated in the project, and outline the study's most significant findings on the issue of children's wellbeing. Having provided an overview of this unique study, the issue of participatory research with children more broadly is considered. Since the late 1980s there has been a steady increase in participatory research with children and young people. Underpinning this development is the belief that participating in research will benefit children and young people (either the individuals who participate or the well-being of children and young people collectively). Gillian and Trish will argue that this type of research requires methodological, ethical and practical approaches that may not always lead to particularly positive experiences for children and young people, or to identifiable benefits. Finally, they will briefly outline the research the Commission is currently undertaking and the Commission's research plans for the future.

Gillian Calvert is the NSW Commissioner for Children and Young People. The Commission is an independent body reporting directly to NSW Parliament and aims to make NSW a better place for children and young people. Under her leadership, the Commission acts as a bridge between children and government, business and local communities so that children have a voice in decisions that affect them. Gillian champions issues that are important to children to improve their lives and circumstances. Through her work at the Commission, children consistently tell her that relationships with parents and family life are vitally important to them, demonstrating that one of the best ways to help children is to help families.

Trish Malins is the Research Manager at the Commission for Children and Young People in NSW. She has 26 years of policy, practice and research experience in the area of children and young people and is an experienced business analyst. Her research interests include children's participation in research; infant and child fatality; early childhood; assessing risk in families and workplaces; and the wellbeing of children and young people.

View the Commission's presentation (PDF 904 KB)

Although international research suggests that the neighbourhoods in which children live influence their development, limited research has been conducted on this issue in Australia. In this seminar, Dr Ben Edwards will present findings based on his recent research into neighbourhood influences on Australian children's development. These studies are based on data from 'Growing Up in Australia', the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Specifically, Dr Edwards will consider (a) whether neighbourhood socioeconomic status influences children's developmental outcomes; and (b) the extent to which neighbourhood social processes mediate the influence of neighbourhood socioeconomic status on children's behavioural and emotional outcomes. After exploring the mediating role of neighbourhood social processes, Dr Edwards will discuss the pathways through which neighbourhood social processes influence children's behavioural and emotional outcomes. In particular, Dr Edwards will consider factors that are likely to have a more direct influence on children's outcomes such as parenting and parental mental health. To close, Dr Edwards will address several 'thorny' methodological issues in conducting neighbourhood research, as well as offer some suggestions about future research developments in the area. He will also outline the policy and practice implications of his findings.

Ben Edwards is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. He joined the Institute in 2004. His PhD focused on the psychological impact of a cancer diagnosis with patients and families and was supported by a scholarship from the National Health and Medical Research Council. Since joining the Institute, Ben's research has focused on how neighbourhoods and communities influence children and their families as well as how ill health such as disability and cancer affects families. Ben also has expertise in statistical analysis of complex data sets including longitudinal and family specific data. Ben acts as a statistical adviser to Institute research staff.

View Dr Edward's presentation (PDF 1.5 MB)

In this seminar, Lyn Craig will discuss her research on the impact of parenthood on household time-use. It is this research that underscores Lyn's new book: Contemporary motherhood: The impact of children on adult time (Ashgate). Using large-scale quantitative time-use data, Lyn will provide a unique picture of how parenthood affects daily life within households, and how people's paid and unpaid workload is affected by parenthood. Lyn will also compare how parents divide their time between caring for children, housework, paid work, and leisure in Australia and other nations. Following a careful analysis of the data and an astute conceptual synthesis of the issues at hand, Lyn will provide an insightful and comprehensive account of the time demands of parenthood and outline the 'big picture' of the costs and benefits of children in modern society.

Lyn Craig is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales. Her research interests include the gendered time impacts of children, work-family balance, the division of domestic labour, and comparative family policy.

View Dr Craig's presentation (PDF 433 KB)

About 16 percent of all employed Australians work 50 or more hours per week. Close to another 10 percent work at least 45 hours per week. This presentation will examine this phenomenon, focusing on:

• trends in long hours working;
• how Australia compares internationally;
• the extent to which long hours of work are in accord with worker preferences;
• the degree to which long hours working is persistent; and
• the consequences of long hours of work, particularly in terms of job and life satisfaction, and marital separation.

The presentation will make large use of data collected over the first five waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

Mark Wooden is Professorial Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne. He is also the Director of the HILDA Survey Project, Australia's major national household panel survey. Prior to joining the Melbourne Institute in 2000 he had been Acting Director of the National Institute of Labour Studies, Flinders University, where he had been employed for 19 years.

View Prof. Wooden's presentation (PDF 674 KB)

In contemporary society sexual abuse of children within the family unit continues to challenge professional and social responses across a range of settings. Law, as a locus of authority and social control, has a history of endemic failure in terms of protecting children and prosecuting intrafamilial sex offenders. Legal trials are a site where the psycho-social construction of family, children, women and sexual violence is played out in ways that reflect dominant masculinist perspectives about family and children. Crimes committed against one's own children have historically been relegated as crimes less worthy of legal intervention and despite contemporary rhetoric, the legal response continues to fail children and very often the supporting parent. Legal trials have the very real capacity of symbolically replicating the self-same abuses of power and disrespect experienced by the child in the original abuse. Child victims are routinely silenced within a legal domain and their experiences are moulded to fit a legal narrative and legal script that negates the most basic rights of children. Alongside this specific construction is the legal construction of child victims and the mother who is most often the supporting parent who believes their child/children and seeks assistance and redress of the criminal justice system and also the family court. The concept of law as a locus of authority that serves citizens equally and impartially without regard for class, gender or race has been shown to be an untenable and indeed fanciful notion that is dismantled through critical analyses. In this seminar, Dr. Caroline Taylor will present research to illuminate and demonstrate the legal treatment directed towards victims/survivors of child abuse within the family unit and why this treatment is tantamount to 'court licensed abuse'.

Caroline Taylor is currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Ballarat. She is author of 'Court licensed abuse' (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). She was awarded (as co-winner) the 2000-2001 Jean Martin Award, a biennial award for the best PhD in social sciences from an Australian university. In 2006, she received a High Commendation from Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for her work in the area of sexual violence and commitment to the human rights of children and women, and was included in the 2007 edition of the Who's Who of Australian Women.

The focus of this seminar is Peter Saunders' new book Tax-welfare churning: The government giveth, and the government taketh away. Prof. Saunders asks how the Australian welfare state might be transformed to give ordinary people more control over key areas of their lives, which are currently managed for them by government. We tend to think of the welfare state as a system for redistributing resources from rich to poor, but many people who receive government benefits and services pay for most or all of what they receive through their taxes. This 'tax-welfare churning' is most conspicuous in the middle of the income distribution (where people are paying a lot of tax and are eligible for many benefits), and in families with children (because so much government expenditure is directed at family support and education), but over a whole lifetime, even relatively poor people also end up financing many of their own benefits. Saunders claims churning erodes people's independence and politicises civil society, and he outlines a strategy which would allow people to retain more of their own income in return for reducing their demands on government benefits and services while still supporting those who cannot provide for themselves.

Peter Saunders has been Social Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) in Sydney since September 2001. He is also Professor Emeritus of the University of Sussex in England, where he taught sociology for nearly twenty-five years. Professor Saunders has held visiting academic posts at universities in Australia and internationally. Between 1999 and 2000 he was Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne where he worked on family and welfare policy and published Reforming the Australian welfare state (2000). Professor Saunders's research at CIS has focused mainly on issues of poverty, welfare reform and tax reform, and these interests are reflected in CIS publications such as Poverty in Australia: Beyond the rhetoric (2002), Australia's welfare habit, and how to kick it (2004), and Taxploitation: The case for income tax reform (2006).

Visit the Centre for Independent Studies website for further information or to access its publications.

In May 2007, the Australian Institute of Family Studies released the report: 'Allegations of family violence and child abuse in family law children's proceedings: a pre-reform exploratory study'. The study was commissioned by the Federal Attorney-General's Department to provide baseline data to assist in informing the Australian Government's Family Law Violence Strategy. The study examined: (a) the prevalence and nature of allegations of family violence and child abuse in children's proceedings; (b) the extent to which alleging parties provided evidence in support of their allegations, and to which allegations were denied, admitted or left unanswered by the other party; and (c) the extent to which court outcomes of post-separation parenting disputes appeared to be related to the presence or absence of allegations. The study was based on a detailed content analysis of 300 court files randomly selected from the Melbourne, Dandenong and Adelaide registries of the Family Court of Australia and the Federal Magistrates' Court. In this seminar the authors will consider the major findings from the study and consider possible implications arising from the findings.

Read the research report - Allegations of family violence and child abuse in family law children's proceedings: a pre-reform exploratory study.

In the context of an ageing population, with increasing workforce participation by women and older people, one of the biggest challenges facing Australian families is balancing paid work with unpaid care. In 2005 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) began a two-year project to examine the way in which Australian men and women balance their paid work and family responsibilities. This project had multiple aims, including: to broaden the 'work and family debate' to better include men's role in family life; to include forms of care other than child care (such as elder care and care for people with disability); and to highlight the relationship between paid work and unpaid work. Following extensive community consultation, the HREOC recently released the project's final paper: 'It's about time: Women, men, work and family'. In this presentation the Hon. John von Doussa will summarise the HREOC's key findings on experiences in the home and the workplace, and outline legislative proposals to support working and caring across the life cycle.

The Hon. John von Doussa was appointed President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in May 2003. At the time of his appointment he was a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia, an appointment he had held since 1988. He was also the President of the Australia Competition Tribunal, a Presidential Member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and an Additional Judge of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. The Hon. John von Doussa presently represents the HREOC as a member of the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights based in Geneva, and is Deputy Chair of the Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions.

View the presentation (PDF 131 KB)

It's about time: Women, men, work and family - Final report on the HREOC website.

This presentation will adopt a cross-disciplinary approach to assessing the potent effects of early environments on human development. Drawing from research in economics, developmental psychology, and neurobiology, a set of common principles that account for the lifelong importance of the early childhood years will be presented. First, the structure and functioning of the brain, and the development of critical life skills, are influenced by an inextricable interaction between genes and experience. Second, both behavioural and brain development follow hierarchical rules such that later attainments build on foundations that are laid down earlier. Third, early experiences have a uniquely powerful influence on the development of cognitive capacities, social skills, emotional well-being, and health; the capacity to change our life trajectories in both positive and negative directions is retained through-out our lives, but is highest earlier in life and decreases over time. Evidence from the animal and human literatures on early intervention, the neurobiology of stress and health, the vital importance of early relationships with our caregivers, and the importance of early peer relationships will be presented to illustrate these principals. Implications for public investments that will reap benefits for the workplace of the 21st century, for communities, and for the next generation of children will be discussed.

Deborah Phillips, Ph.D., is currently Professor of Psychology and Associated Faculty in the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University. She is also Co-Director of the University's Research Centre on Children in the U.S. Prior to this appointment, Deborah was the first Executive Director of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council's Commission on Social and Behavioural Sciences at the Institute of Medicine. Deborah also co-edited 'From Neurons to Neighbourhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development' and she is now a member of the organisation that was created to continue the work of Neurons to Neighbourhoods: The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (based at Harvard University). Deborah's research focuses on the developmental effects of early childhood programs, including both child care and pre-kindergarten settings. Some of Deborah's current studies include: investigating how children who vary in temperament are differentially affected by child care experiences; and an evaluation of the Tulsa Oklahoma pre-kindergarten program as it affects both cognitive and social-emotional development.

View the presentation (PDF 1.4 MB)

Dr Zoë Morrison has a wealth of research experience in relation to sexual assault having worked at the Victorian Law Reform Commission on family violence, and as a lecturer at Oxford University in human geography and gender studies. She has also held consultancies with Monash University and the Ministry Development Council of the Anglican Church (Adelaide) where she produced what became known as the 'Morrison Report' on reporting and responding to sexual assault and child abuse. This report will form the basis of her seminar presentation.