When I used to tell people that I was doing a PhD, they would often ask me, \u201cWhat is it about?\u201d My PhD was about adult support and protection, in the sense made standard by the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007. For people familiar with this legislation and its history, this answer made some immediate sense. For most other people, including academics in many other disciplines, \u201cadult support and protection\u201d rang few bells at all.<\/p>\n
If they were asking just out of politeness, we would sometimes leave it at that. But more often, I would try to explain what ASP was. And I wanted to do this in a way that was accurate. In the field of ASP there have been so many struggles over terminology. Phrases that used to be relied upon to sum the field up have been rejected now in Scotland, for reasons that some important stakeholders feel strongly about (6<\/a>). So reinstating these phrases didn\u2019t feel right, even for the sake of a simple explanation. For instance, people with some knowledge of social care would sometimes ask, \u201cdo you mean it\u2019s about vulnerable adults?\u201d And I would fumble through an answer that probably made things more rather than less opaque \u2013 trying to explain that the answer is \u201cyes and no\u201d \u2013 that ASP is not about a defined group of people who we\u2019re prepared to think of as generically \u201cvulnerable\u201d, but that the idea of \u201cvulnerable adults\u201d is related to ideas that have now developed into ideas about ASP.<\/p>\n Even dated terminology was no help for people with no social care or related background, or people familiar with very different state systems for organising welfare and related services. I once got into a discussion about my research with a Czech professor of philosophy on an overnight train from Amsterdam to Prague. Or I tried to. I still cringe when I think about how little I probably managed to convey \u2013 even about the basic subject of my PhD \u2013 how very few coherent words I seemed to have to set this out. And I was once asked by an older acquaintance if \u201cadult support and protection\u201d is the study of \u201cbattered wives\u201d. Again, I fumbled through a confusing, \u201cyes and no\u201d answer, trying to articulate that it isn\u2019t so gender- or marital-status specific, and there\u2019s this element of \u201cvulnerability\u201d (for want of a better word) tied up in ASP somehow: that it\u2019s a type of \u201cvulnerability\u201d that might come from something like an impairment or frailty, though it doesn\u2019t always have to \u2013 it\u2019s more about the circumstances people find themselves in \u2013 but it definitely isn\u2019t just about gender. Trying to put this in a way that made some sense raised some puzzling questions for me (5<\/a>), quite aside from those it no doubt raised for the unfortunate person who had asked the question, and I\u2019ll come back to this later.<\/p>\n So I would try another way. I would try by beginning, \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like child protection, except\u2026\u201d and then spend a long time trying to articulate how ASP isn\u2019t<\/i> like child protection. Or I began, \u201cit\u2019s kind of about abuse, except\u2026\u201d and then spent twice as long explaining how it\u2019s much broader than the kinds of things you might stereotypically think about when you hear the word \u201cabuse\u201d. The term \u201charm\u201d, now preferred in Scottish policy, was no help at all. You can be harmed if you catch a serious disease or if you\u2019re knocked down by a car, but ASP isn\u2019t really about that.<\/p>\n I would give up comparing it to anything, and just try to start from the beginning. I would explain that it\u2019s about a very broad range of responses to help keep people safe and well where there may be some limits on their abilities to do this for themselves. But then I found it difficult to articulate the distinction between ASP and a much broader swathe of adult services. I also found it was easier to give the impression that ASP is entirely about social care, or entirely about criminality, than to convey that it\u2019s a blend of some parts of these and other things. \u201cSo it\u2019s like bath rails for older people things like that?\u201d I might be asked. Well, yes, kind of \u2013 but no, not really. \u201cSo it\u2019s to do with crime<\/i> against older people?\u201d \u201cSo it\u2019s to do with looking after people who can\u2019t make their own decisions?\u201d Well, yes \u2013 but also no.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mention all this out of any disrespect for people whose expertise lies elsewhere. There are plenty of people whose professional and academic work I don\u2019t understand very much about. I also appreciate that immediate accessibility to those without a grounding in the subject is not necessarily the hallmark of \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cauthentic\u201d social science. Nevertheless, this almost complete absence of a language to articulate the basic topic<\/i> of my PhD to almost anyone who wasn\u2019t an adult health or social care professional, or an ASP specialist in a related field such as the police, played on my mind. I thought it might be telling me something quite important. Bear in mind that non-ASP specialists are still pretty likely to have heard of instances that ASP professionals might classify as \u201charm\u201d, or indeed to have experienced them, first or second hand. We could generally find shared ground over examples<\/i>. These were typically extreme ones though: Winterbourne View; Steven Hoskin; the Borders case. The more inclusive \u201cbox\u201d that ASP draws around the gamut of things that fall within its remit in contemporary Scotland was still not a familiar \u201cbox\u201d to many people. They might be more inclined to conceptualise things that are clearly criminal in quite a separate \u201cbox\u201d from things that aren\u2019t. They might \u201cbox\u201d interactions in families quite separately from staff practice in care homes; or older people\u2019s concerns quite separately from the concerns of younger adults with learning difficulties; or services to adults who lack mental capacity quite separately from services to adults who don\u2019t. They might \u201cbox\u201d anything to do with the quality of care provided to those who require it together, blurring the boundary between things that we might call \u201cASP\u201d and things that we might call \u201ccare regulation and inspection\u201d or \u201ccare management\u201d or just \u201ccare\u201d. In short, they might struggle to see how the kinds of issues that currently \u201ccount\u201d as ASP have been conceptualised as similar enough to each other, and different enough from other things, to constitute a distinctive category of phenomena that someone might be doing a PhD about.<\/p>\n Four years later, and I have still found no better way to explain what ASP is than to explain its history. This works better for training sessions or conference presentations, though, than for chance conversations with people who may wish they\u2019d never asked \u2013 because I need to start as far back as I can. I need to talk about the long-stay institutions, and the concerns that arose around and within these, and then the different but related concerns that arose with the move to \u201ccare in the community\u201d. I need to talk about changing approaches towards \u201crisk\u201d in health and social services, and towards \u201crights\u201d, and towards \u201caccountability\u201d. I need to talk about the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of elder abuse and of the abuse (primarily the sexual abuse) of adults with learning difficulties. I need to talk about huge shifts in social work and its relationship with other services, and in particular the introduction of the care management role and the purchaser\/provider split. I need to talk about \u201cprotection of vulnerable adults\u201d policies and how they developed, and why they were superseded, and all the debates around the legislation we now have.<\/p>\n I also think that people\u2019s own \u201cboxes\u201d for conceptualising things when they\u2019re not steeped in ASP can only really be understood in the context of their<\/i> histories, and of the building-blocks of sense-making of which they\u2019re made up. For instance, people might be starting from a different set of assumptions about independence and its relationship to dependence, or about what \u201ccare\u201d is and why people might need it, or about the distinction between a private issue and a state concern.<\/p>\n And it seems to me that there is just no neutral ground. Or at least, there\u2019s no suitably nuanced shared language by which we can cut to the chase, and say what we \u201creally mean\u201d without all this background needing to be got through or else getting in the way. And if we need to engage with a myriad of trajectories of meaning-making in order to find some common ground, at least when we step out of our professional silos, then this changes the conversation about ASP in my view. It helps us to look more critically at what we\u2019re doing, and what it\u2019s really all about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I used to tell people that I was doing a PhD, they would often ask me, \u201cWhat is it about?\u201d My PhD was about adult support and protection, in the sense made standard by the Adult Support and Protection (Scotland) Act 2007. For people familiar with this legislation and its history, this answer made … Continue reading “What is your research about?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.researchunbound.org.uk\/adultprotection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}