Social Sciences

Centre for Applied Social Science (CASS)

CASS creates a space to develop new ideas and collaborations within and beyond academia, uniting academics from the social sciences to engage in research and practice-based collaborations that aim to: 

• Address inequalities and social exclusion
• Promote social and criminal justice
• Contribute to policy, practice, and service development

Our research is primarily made up of staff within the School of Social Sciences, but also includes members from other faculties. We carry out practice-based research in diverse areas including health and social care, education, community and youth work, social work, and criminal justice. We use a variety of approaches and methodologies, including participatory research, feminist and trauma-informed methodologies, creative and arts-based approaches, ethnography, discourse analysis, and statistical analysis. 

Aims

We focus on social issues affecting the region and beyond and carry out pioneering research concerning: 

• Adult social work, including safeguarding policy and practice
• Children, young people, and families, including child safeguarding
• Creative, critical, and sustainable pedagogies
• Neurodiversity Research and Practice
• Offender rehabilitation, desistance, and risk management
• Place, space, and wellbeing
• Policing, probation and prisons
• Practice Research
• Sexuality, gender and identity
• Social harm and social (in)justice
• Violence and abuse across the life course
• Interdisciplinary research

Social Science academics also contribute to the University’s research culture as staff are core members of cross-faculty research networks such as University of Sunderland Gender network (SunGen), Vulnerability and Criminal Justice Research network (DisCrim) Race, Class and Ethnicity interdisciplinary research network (RaCE), Adverse Childhood Experiences Research network (ACE) and Participatory Approaches to Research and Practice network.

As members of this research group are interdisciplinary social scientists, they typically have associations with Childhood Studies, Community and Youth Work, Criminology, Health and Social Care, Policing, Social Work and Sociology. 

Who we are

For more information about CASS please contact our co-convenors:
Dr Nicola Roberts (nicola.roberts@sunderland.ac.uk) and Dr Lesley Deacon (lesley.deacon@sunderland.ac.uk).

Research areas

Communities, health, and social exclusion

We adopt a critical and analytical approach to notions of:

• community
• behaviour
• social interaction

In this research area, we conceptualise social exclusion as both a policy approach and a way of thinking about how access to goods, services, and resources may be more or less restricted for some social groups. We also consider how ‘community’ may be positively or adversely affected by policy developments. The University has an established reputation for social research in this area, dating back to the 1980s. Our team currently consists of a multi-professional range of researchers and practitioners from disciplines such as Sociology, Social Work, Health and Social Care, Criminology, Youth and Community, and Childhood Studies.

Crime victims and social justice

We consider contemporary criminological, sociological and social policy studies in areas of community policing, sex work, domestic violence, and abuse and its impacts on victims/survivors, alongside developing an understanding of perpetrators of domestic violence and abuse (DVA).

The university also has a long tradition concerning sociological research of crime and punishment. Research methodologies include qualitative and quantitative work using interviews, surveys, and document analysis. It has been explorative, sometimes pioneering in its scope and impact, and it has also been evaluative, developing recommendations for developing best practices and policies or laws.

Colleagues’ contributions have often been theoretical, creating models and/or new ways of understanding social problems, there is also a growing awareness of how and the extent to which research carried out under this theme can be applied to improve understanding and responses in society to achieve social justice.

Social histories

The Social histories strand is an interdisciplinary group that works on applying historical viewpoints to current public policy problems. We aim to inform current issues by looking at historical precedents and the origins from which current debates and issues emerge.

We focus on issues such as racial and sexual inequalities in this country and internationally, on medical ethics issues such as suicide, assisted dying, and euthanasia, and on social issues such as adoption.

Our members take both a theoretical and practical approach to policy, having served as political leaders, reported to the Supreme Court, and testified to Parliamentary Committees. Our team includes historians, political scientists, social scientists, sociologists, and psychologists, who study specific contemporary problems as they presented themselves historically.

Through our research, we aim to further policymakers’ abilities to make well-grounded policy decisions. Some of our members have established international reputations on many of the above issues.

Children, young people, and families

In this area of research activity, we focus on the well-being of children, young people, and families and on changing family forms.

Research is informed by both practice-based priorities and by theoretical approaches to understanding the changing nature of families, childhood and constructions of youth.

Our work has regional, national and international recognition. However, this work is not new to the Faculty of Education and Society. This research strand builds on a long tradition of placing children, young people and families at the heart of social science research interests at Sunderland since the 1970s at least.

News and events

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Upcoming events