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This paper outlines best practice in the commissioning of emergency accommodation for children and young people who run away, identifying: levels of need; models of accommodation provision that have existed in the UK; approaches to funding; costs of emergency accommodation; the commissioning process; and service delivery issues.

This paper is an expert opinion piece drawing upon a project commissioned by The Scottish Government based on extensive research including a review of the pre‐existing evidence base and new data.

Fixed refuge has been the most common form of emergency accommodation for young runaways in the UK and provides positive outcomes for young runaways relating to improved general well‐being, mental health and schooling. The costs of refuge can compare favourably to alternative specialised accommodation and support and prevent other costs relating to future episodes of running away, future offending, substance misuse and youth homelessness.

Evidence‐based learning has identified best practice in the commissioning of emergency accommodation related to a number of issues including: scoping activity; the commissioning process; costs; approaches to funding; effective future commissioning of emergency accommodation; why the third sector is best placed to deliver emergency accommodation; and ensuring key elements of service delivery are included to meet children and young people's need and achieve positive outcomes.

The commissioning of emergency accommodation for young runaways has received little attention in research; this paper goes some way to rectifying this omission alongside providing evidence‐based learning for commissioners and service delivery organisations.

The case for involving the users of health services in the NHS decision‐making process is clearly identified in a range of Government policy and guidance documents. A gradual shift from seeing users as passive recipients of care to active consumers of care has led to a belief that the opinions and views of users must be heard in particular in relation to clinical audit. Alongside this shift is the increasing recognition that the views of children and young people should be sought in decisions which affect their lives. Highlights the case for involving children and young people in clinical audit. Examines the background to user involvement in general, reviews the arguments for involving children and young people and identifies some of the barriers to that involvement. Introduces briefly new research being carried out with children and young people to explore ways of involving them in clinical audit.

Using a mixed methodology comprising interviews, case file analysis and descriptive statistics, this study aims to examine the experiences of all 43 young people in Wales subject to secure accommodation orders between 1st April 2016 and 31st March 2018.

Children in the UK aged 10–17 years who are deemed to be at a significant level of risk to themselves or others may be subject to a secure accommodation order, leading to time spent in a secure children’s home (SCH) on welfare grounds. Following a rise in the number of children in Wales referred to SCHs for welfare reasons, this paper describes these young people’s journeys into, through and out of SCHs, giving insight into their experiences and highlighting areas for policy and practice improvements.

Findings indicate that improvements in mental health support and placement availability are key in improving the experiences of this particularly vulnerable group of young people throughout their childhood.

Other practical implications of the study’s findings, such as improvements in secure transport arrangements, are also discussed.

While the findings are limited by the reliance on self-report methods and the size of the study, namely, the small number of young people with experience of SCHs who were able to participate, the findings build on the existing knowledge base around children’s residential accommodation and provide new insights into how best to support these children.

The purpose of this study is to examine how children and young adults form attitudes toward food products in unbranded gaming mobile applications and the degree to which product category attitudes can generate responses to brands in the category through the generalization process.

Two experiments exposed children and young adults to mobile games featuring food products in a between-subjects treatment versus control design to examine both affective responses and belief formation toward food brands within the category.

It was found that both children and young adults favored branded food items in the product category after playing with an unbranded mobile game assembling food products. Young adults also developed specific beliefs about nonrepresented brands in the category, which were found to be stronger under high involvement. Parents and public policymakers must be vigilant in controlling access to food-related games, even when they are not commercial in nature because of the attitudes and beliefs formed in unbranded games.

This research demonstrates that attitudes and beliefs around food brands can be formed through unbranded game play when children and young adults generalize attitudes. Because of the emphasis on “advergames,” no studies have examined the impact of unbranded games on children and young adults through the generalization process.

This study aims to offer insights into the presence and nature of an information environment provided for young children to support their learning and explore how an information environment for young children can be characterized.

Observations of video-recorded public library storytimes were used to investigate the presence and nature of an information environment for young children’s learning.

The observations revealed that storytimes provide a rich, multimodal information environment where information is shared with young children and they are encouraged to interact with it in a variety of ways. The storytime participants take on several different roles that help to foster and sustain the information environment.

This study tests the applicability of Eisenberg and Small’s (1993) information-based education framework for exploring an information environment and recommends revisions to improve the framework’s effectiveness for characterizing information environments for young children.

This paper summarises and updates the report of one of the seven Expert Working Groups established by the UK’s Health Education Authority (HEA) in October 1996 to look at the potential for health promotion with key populations – in this case that of children and young people. It seeks to establish a revitalised agenda for research into the health and wellbeing of children and young people in the UK. The article describes how contemporary sociological understandings of children and childhood have implications not only for the way in which health and health promotion strategies are conceived, designed and implemented, but for our understanding of what health and health promotion initiatives should constitute. The article calls for more research into children’s and young people’s understandings of health, and the linguistic idioms in which those understandings are expressed, as well as into the social networks and social action spaces in which children and young people operate. It argues for better integration of research and policies concerning the health of children and young people, to include institutions, agencies and organisations that have an impact on the health of children and young people.

This paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older children's technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age.

The study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a “preparatory classroom” or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video‐ and audio‐taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young children's web search behaviour.

The findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young children's web searching and technoliteracy.

The use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers.

This is the first study of young children's interaction with a web search engine.

The recognition of children and young people as active agents, not merely passive subjects, has become a cornerstone of much research undertaken in the social sciences over the last three decades. Reflecting on research with young carers, this paper describes the research techniques employed to actively engage these children and young people in order to gain insight into their experiences of providing care. It concludes with a discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of the research methods, and the issues of ethics and consent.

Based on father‐child dyadic responses, this paper is aimed at revising and validating the scales of fathers' communication structures, identifying Jordanian fathers' communication structures and patterns.

Based on two different studies, group interviews face‐to‐face, self‐administered questionnaires and drop‐off self‐administered questionnaires were respectively employed to solicit young children's and fathers' responses. While the first study (n=100) depended on convenience sampling procedures, proportionate stratified random sampling technique that relied on young children of ages 8‐12 was conducted to select the participants of the second study (n=916). Fathers' consent on the participation of their young children in the group interviews was obtained before collecting data.

Children of ages 8‐12 can precisely perceive family communication patterns (FCP) as adolescents and mothers. The influence of culture on fathers' communication structures and patterns is not clear. Jordanian fathers are principally classified as pluralistic fathers in their communication related to consumption issues and there is significant association between fathers' consumer socialisation goals and their communication structures and patterns.

The development of fathers' communication dimensions was based on a single‐country study and the two research samples were restricted to the public schools of Amman metropolitan.

Marketers can directly target Jordanian children in their advertising campaigns since children are more likely to make their own purchasing decisions. The marketers may focus on young children in their promotion campaigns to influence the family decision making related to products and services since their fathers adopt concept‐oriented communication structures.

An important contribution of this study is that neither fathers' communication structures nor young children's perceptions were previously used in revising and validating the scales of family communication structures and patterns at the level of collectivistic or individualistic cultures.

In the UK, the Children and Families Act aims to create one assessment process for children with special educational needs or disability, through Education, Health and Care Plans. It also aims for greater participation from children and young people in decisions about their own lives. Current evidence suggests that children’s needs and desires across education, health and social care are not being fully met, partly because adult agendas drive policy, practice and standards of care. Furthermore, little attention is paid to the way in which disabled children and young people are included either within decisions about their own support or within research processes. The purpose of this paper is to present a research process designed to address these issues.

Six disabled young people co-led this participatory research project; for the first time, disabled young people had the opportunity to define a research agenda which spoke to what “quality” might look like in planning for their own future and that of other disabled children and young people.

This paper presents findings from this process, addressing important ethical issues relevant for policy, practice and research, identified through this rights based, collaborative way of working in partnership. Three key issues were identified and are explored here. They include first, tensions between young people becoming leaders and dominant ideas about safeguarding and child protection; second, being empowered through engagement within the project yet restricted in other areas of personal life and, finally, the emotional impact on new researchers of gathering evidence of a continuing lack of autonomy for disabled children and young people. We argue that challenging dominant notions concerning the participation and protection of disabled children is required in order to ensure that they access their right to be decision-makers in their own lives, and to being empowered within research processes.

This is the first disabled young people-led study to investigate quality and rights for disabled children and young people using this rights-based methodology.