Foreword

This is the 33rd issue of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, and it covers a wide range of policy issues and topics. The main themes are family violence, older people, and care and protection issues. This issue also includes papers on programmes for the long-term unemployed, capacity building and the personal impact of stroke. We are particularly pleased to include two papers reporting findings from the Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS), an important source of longitudinal data about New Zealand.

Family violence is an issue of ongoing concern. Greg Newbold and Jenny Cross’s paper centres on policing policy and practice in response to domestic violence. Data from CHDS are analysed in a paper by Dannette Marie, David M. Fergusson and Joseph M. Boden. They explore the associations between ethnicity and aspects of intimate partner violence.

Three papers address matters relating to older people in New Zealand. Judith Davey takes up the issues of our ageing work force in her analysis of results from the Health, Work and Retirement study. She combines qualitative and quantitative data to develop a nuanced understanding of what influences the decision to retire. Bevan C Grant’s paper explores how best to incorporate awareness of the value of exercise into the healthy ageing programme. In their study of older people living at home using low-level home support, Penny Hambleton, Sally Keeling and Margaret McKenzie
use in-depth interviewing to understand what these services mean to their clients’ quality of life.

Care and protection services are addressed in two papers in this issue. Kathleen Manion and Jane Renwick analyse the findings of a large-scale study of case notes of Child, Youth and Family investigations. They explore what happens during investigations that are closed without a formal intervention to follow. Bev James focuses on the movements of child clients of Child, Youth and Family, the data being part of a study of overall residential mobility in four case study locations. Her paper looks at how the findings concerning these children were used by one of the communities to engage agencies in a practical response to community concerns, initially through the local research reference group established for the wider study.

Donna McKenzie, Te Atarangi Whiu, Donna Matahaere-Atariki and Keryn Goldsmith discuss the interim findings of Te Puni Kokiri’s ongoing trial of the co-production model of community development. They describe co-production as going beyond the promotion of community planning and user-focused services to involve a much more active role for iwi and Maori authorities in designing and delivering local services and influencing the policy process. The impact of stroke on Maori is the topic of Lorna Dyall, Valery Feigin and Paul Brown’s paper. Their work comes out of the wider Auckland Regional Community Stroke study and focuses on in-depth interviews
with Maori stroke survivors and their caregivers.

Findings from the Christchurch Health and Development Study are analysed by Myron D. Friesen, Lianne J. Woodward, David M. Fergusson, L. John Horwood and Anna Chesney, who look at the members of the cohort who were already parents at the time of the age-25 follow-up in 2002. The focus of their paper is on a description of the circumstances of these young parents and their dependent children, and the life-course pathways and concurrent risk factors that place them at a higher risk of material hardship during the early parenting years.

Robert Maxwell explores motivational intervention programmes for the long-term unemployed. He develops a framework for thinking about motivation with respect to this population, integrating classic ideas on needs, values and goals, and he presents a theory of how the programmes can increase motivation through participants’ effective goal-setting.

Issue 33 is rounded out with two book reviews. Robert Stephens discusses Radical Welfare State Retrenchment: A Comparative Analysis by Peter Starke, and Graeme MacCormick reviews Alison Sutherland’s Classroom to Prison Cell.

I hope that you find this issue of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand to be both informative and stimulating.

Don Gray
Deputy Chief Executive
Social Development Policy and Knowledge