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Participation is the active involvement of children and young people in decision-making regarding issues that affect their lives. It is crucial in the context of child protection and welfare systems and how they respond to the needs of children and young people. The purpose of this paper is to report on the evaluation of child and family participation in an early intervention and prevention programme implemented by the Irish Child and Family Agency. It provides an analysis of a comprehensive, “whole organization” approach to understand how participation is embedded in policy and practice.

This paper reports on a comparative qualitative case study of the perspectives of managers and practitioners about participation practice, identifying the facilitators and barriers, as well as their perspectives of the sustainability of participation within the agency and its partners. The authors draw on two complementary, theoretically informed studies evaluating participatory practice within the Agency using qualitative interviews with participants.

Overall, managers and practitioners had a positive attitude towards participation and identified examples of best practices. Facilitators included training, access to resources and the quality of relationships. Challenges for meaningful participation remain, such as the need to engage, hard to reach populations. Differences were identified regarding how embedded and sustainable participation was.

This paper provides a critical understanding of participation in practice and how to embed a culture of participation in child protection and welfare.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and map the shifting relationship between the settlement process and the information practices of newcomers from the Philippines as they migrate and settle in Canada.

This research employs two semi-structured in-depth interviews, each with 14 newcomers from the Philippines to Canada. Participants were selected because they had migrated to Winnipeg through the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program within 1–4 years of the date of interview.

Eight settlement information tables are identified that demonstrate participants' migration experiences, including participants' thoughts and feelings related to migration and settlement, their information questions and needs, the information resources they consult and the activities in which they engage.

This paper argues that this phased model approach documents the shifting relationship between settlement processes and migrants' information needs, activities, resources and practices. Articulating study findings using this phased model approach can support information institutions, such as the settlement sector and libraries, to provide support to newcomer groups in a timely and targeted manner.

Studies on the information behaviour of immigrants including refugees across the globe show a significant dependency of immigrants on their informal networks for meeting various settlement and everyday life information needs. Although there are quite a few studies in LIS that globally report the dependency of immigrants on their personal networks, very little is known about their experiences with their informal personal networks in the contexts of their settlement in informational terms. This paper explores the information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada consulting informal networks including broader Bangladeshi community people in pre- and post-arrival contexts.

The study uses a mixed-method approach including semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Interview data were analysed thematically, and descriptive statistics are used to describe the survey data relevant to this study.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the information experience derived from an analysis of the interview data with some relevant references to the survey data when deemed appropriate. This paper provides insights into the information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants within their personal networks, including friends, family and ethnic community people. The findings of this study show that participants sometimes received discouraging, unhelpful or wrong information from their personal networks. The multiple dimensions of the information experiences of the study participants show the many consequences for their settlement lives. For some participants, settlement was particularly impacted by the concept of “information sharing fear” that emerged from the interviews. Information sharing fear relates to concerns that sharing information about the challenges faced by newcomers could be considered by potential immigrants as a kind of active “discouragement”. Participants described being sensitive to charges of envy or jealousy when they shared information related to challenges newcomers face, as friends and family see them as trying to prevent competition for social status.

The findings related to the information experiences of immigrants consulting informal networks has potential implications for research in various discipline such as LIS, migrational studies and psychology that explore the benefits of social networks in newcomers' settlement. The study also sets a ground to take a more holistic approach to the information experiences of newcomers, not just naming the sources newcomers utilize in settlement and everyday life contexts. The study also provides some future directions to comprehensively understand the culturally situated information behaviour of various immigrant groups.