The Centre for Child and Family Justice Research is co-hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Lancaster Law School, and works in close collaboration with the Data Science Institute.

Bringing together academics, practitioners and policy makers, the work of the Centre is focused on the formal operation of family justice systems, but also broader social justice concerns. The Centre’s mission is to progress cutting-edge research that has real-world impacts with an explicit aim of improving the lives of children, young people and families.

Members of the group have a particular interest in the use of administrative and survey datasets for population-wide analyses. This is complemented by novel qualitative methods, to include qualitative text mining as well as visual methods.

The Centre Directors are Professor Karen Broadhurst and Professor Judith Harwin. Projects include work focused primarily on the UK as well as international comparative research. By fostering a culture of support for early career researchers through to more senior members of staff, the Centre serves to incubate new ideas as well as progress major programmes of externally funded work.

Members of the group have held a variety of grants from the Department of Education, the Department of Health, the ESRC, the AHRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy and UNICEF.

Visit our website to read more about our work.