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This study aims to explore the challenges of being simultaneously “intimate insider” and “relative outsider” whilst undertaking an ethnography into a statutory child protection team. As a novice researcher seeking to explore a world of which he was already part, ethnography was considered the most suitable means for exploring child protection social workers’ discretion. However, by subscribing to binary notions of “insider” and “outsider” at the commencement of the study, the author underplayed the dilemma of reconciling friendships with his researcher role, as well as the barriers that his more junior organisational status could create.

This study provides an autoethnographic account of these challenges, and the author’s evolving status and movement between “insider” and “outsider” relative to different groups within the children’s services department.

The implications include the potential for being simultaneously “insider” and “outsider” when undertaking research within one’s employing organisation; the need to reconcile challenging social work tasks with researcher responsibilities; and the difficulty of maintaining pre-existing relationships, whilst also cultivating an objective research profile.

This paper offers an important contribution to the limited accounts of conducting research from “inside” a statutory children’s services department and will be of benefit to early career researchers considering a research project within their own “backyard”.

The backdrop to the Munro Review of Child Protection was a narrative propagated in the British national press, and perpetuated particularly by the then opposition Conservative Party, that the case of “Baby P” evidenced the English child protection system was “failing” and in need of reform. Subsequently, the review asserted that the system had become “over-bureaucratised” and “defensive” at the expense of social worker discretion in the interests of the individual child, highlighting the need for “radical reform”. This paper aims to report on the extent of, and continued barriers to, social worker discretion within the contemporary English child protection.

As an ethnographic case study of a single English child protection team, the study used a sequential and iterative mixed method design, encompassing observation, document analysis, focus groups, questionnaire, interviews and “Critical Realist Grounded Theory”.

The study found that social worker discretion was continuing to be undermined by the “Baby P effect”; not only in the sense of increasing numbers of children within the system but also by the perpetual fear of being “named”, “blamed” and “shamed”, akin to Peter Connelly’s social workers.

The paper considers how discretion is manifested in contemporary child protection, especially in the context of the “child-centred” system envisaged by the Munro Review. It concludes that the British media and politicians have a continued role to play in reducing the risk associated with the social worker’s discretionary space.

Theories of ethnic conflict often assume that the cause of political violence is the same across actors and constant over time. I propose that causes differ, depending upon the identity, grievances, and strategy of the perpetrator as influenced by the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they operate. Together with Granger causality tests, multivariate time‐series analyses of political deaths in Northern Ireland support a multi‐causal perspective. Reflecting identity differences, Loyalist violence but not Republican violence was likely to increase during months when high levels of protest coincided with annual commemorations. By deepening grievances related to ethnic stratification, rising unemployment contributed to Republican violence, but not to Loyalist violence. Repression of Nationalists increased Republican violence but decreased Loyalist violence, supporting a see‐saw conceptualization of political opportunities in divided societies. The findings highlight the need for sensitivity in both conflict research and management to differences between actors and across social contexts.

This study uses the ‘Dragon Age’ series by BioWare as a case study to examine the impact of video game player diversity on the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) content in mainstream games. It explores the degree to which the perception of video games as ‘hegemonically masculine and heteronormative’ accurately reflects gamers’ own experiences.

The study is based on an online survey in the Dragon Age community forum, including open-ended qualitative questions.

The main findings show that male and female respondents widely believed in the presence of heterosexual (male) privilege within gaming culture at large. However, respondents’ own personal views and experiences demonstrated that they largely accept the inclusion of LGBT content in games. Finally, respondents showed considerable ‘disinhibition’ when it came to experimenting with sexuality and sexual identity in video games as compared to in real life.

This was a small exploratory study and was limited by its size and a possible self-selection bias.

The findings indicate that gender diversity, diversity of sexualities and acceptance of LGBT content are all greater than previously thought. Moreover, role-playing games are fertile ground for experimentation with sexual identities among gamers. These results call for more research in this area.

THE popular image of Ireland is of a land where one can enjoy the perfect holiday. If you are a golfer, fisherman, rambler or if you just enjoy good food and of course the black nectar for which it is famous, then Ireland is the place to go, take the word of TV Chef, Keith Floyd. Ireland however, unlike many small countries, is not content to base its economy on tourism.