Professor Guida de Abreu

This literature review was conducted to describe the range of organisations and informal groups providing peer support to personal budget users in the UK between the launch of direct payments in 1997 and 2016. Forty-five research reports included relevant evidence. This has been aggregated to show how peer networks supported individual users, as well as to describe their wider role in policy development and implementation. Despite their diversity, the support they provided often had common characteristics. Peer networks fostered collaboration, enhanced communication, built confidence amongst people who were entitled to a personal budget, and applied specialist knowledge that was often derived from the lived experience of network members. None of these characteristic was exclusive to peer networks. However, they may have been more deeply culturally embedded here than in other settings, which perhaps accounts for the positive experiences of support reported in the research literature.

This article examines how vignette methodology can aid understanding of cultural identity. This is demonstrated through a study of child language brokers, wherein a child is engaged in the cultural contexts of both the host culture and the home culture and must therefore negotiate new cultural identities. Participants were young people aged 15 to 18 years; some of them were brokers, others were not. Drawing on notions of adequacy and inadequacy, visibility and invisibility, theoretical ideas around cultural identity theory and dialogical self-theory can provide an understanding of how the young people moved through different (often conflicting) identity positions.

This article examines teachers' accounts of their experiences with Portuguese children and adolescents in British schools. Specifically, teachers' accounts of "bright" students and students' "needs" are examined to investigate understandings of their immigrant students. Valsiner's conceptualisation of the psychological construction of difference as a process that is socio-culturally constituted and value-laden and Hermans and Kempen's notion of "contact zones" are used as a conceptual framework. The analysis shows that processes of "normalisation" and "stigmatisation" underline the interpretation of differences. The "bright" Portuguese student becomes assimilated to the category British - the difference is eliminated. The student with difficulties, "not-bright", become assimilated to the category other - the difference is valued as a "deficiency" (e.g. special needs). Teachers acting within different contact zones provided alternative representations, and in particular, those from immigrant background take into account the cultural dimension in their conceptualisation of the immigrant learner. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In Japan, the practice of disclosing the diagnosis of cancer to young people varies between hospitals. Some hospitals respect parent's wishes and do not to tell young people about their diagnoses whereas others encourage parents to adopt their policy of informing patients. Unfortunately, there is no research about parents' adjustment to either course of action. This study examines parents' perspectives regarding this decision. Parents (55) and grand-parents (3) were interviewed about their experience of sharing or not sharing the diagnosis with their children. Analysis of the interviews reveals a complex picture in which parents struggle to balance their emotions, their representation of 'cancer as death', their views of their children's level of understanding as well as the positive and negative effects of disclosure on their children. We suggest that knowledge of parents' perspectives can be useful to health professionals who support parents living with this dilemma.

Drawing on dialogical self theory (Hermans, 2001) and employing a case study approach, this article aims to provide insights into the dialogical processes through which two British-born siblings of Pakistani background construct and negotiate their cultural identities. The analysis suggests that both young people were moving towards their multivoiced cultural identities through a constant positioning and re-positioning within their communities, which resulted in dialogical negotiation of aspects of differences/similarities and belonging within their majority and minority communities as well as living in a multicultural society. When their negotiation is a struggle shaped by issues of racism and religious discrimination, two opposing processes are constructed, a dynamic dialogical and a monological one. We introduce the notion of hibernated I-positions as a resource to deal with rapid change, threat and uncertainty. I-positions that are inactive, or are in a hibernated state and silenced, are always available to re-emerge and become engaged in a new dialogue to help retain identity continuity. In this article, we challenge linear assumptions which assume that all immigrant groups undergo the same kind of psychological acculturation process.

In this article we examine two concepts that aid our understanding of processes of identification in multiethnic schools. The first concept focuses on the complementarity of "three processes of identity" (identifying the other, being identified, and self- identification). This is brought together with the concept of sociocultural coupling introduced to examine the co-constructions of changes in practices (across places and times) and changes in identification. The analysis draws on an interview with a pupil, Monifa, a Black African (Nigerian) girl (aged 10 years), and on an interview with a Pakistani teacher, Shazia. Although Shazia and Monifa belonged to different generations (i.e., a pupil/daughter and a teacher/mother) and different cultural groups (British-born Black African and Pakistani Kashmiri), the same identity processes could be applied to the data. They both articulated accounts of "identifying the other," "being identified," and "self-identification," which emphasized their transitions between cultural practices and multiple communities. Furthermore, we propose that sociocultural coupling has enabled us to understand the means by which aspects of cultural practices borrowed from home and school allows them to reproduce aspects of their home cultural identity and at other times to transform these identities.

There has been a great deal of attention paid to young carers in recent research, social policy and service provision. In this paper we report on a survey and interview study of 46 young people aged 15 to 18, nine of whom had experience as young carers, to explore the ways in which young people construct the young carer and their disabled parent. A key theme arising from the interview data analysis is the construction of a series of normative assumptions about 'normal' childhood through which young carers and their disabled parent are viewed as non-normative and deficient. The predominantly negative construction of both parent and child/carer is critically analyzed and alternatives suggested in the discussion of these findings.

This paper examines the processes by which cultural identities develop through the use of symbolic resources (Zittoun, 2006). The notion of symbolic resources provides a framework that enables one to consider developmental transitions between practices and between historical times. For Portuguese students, these transitions initially involved a rupture, a loss of social resources and linguistic resources, which resulted in a cultural awareness. This cultural awareness led to alterations in the positioning of their cultural selves, either by themselves personally or by others. Social resources mediated access to new symbolic resources, and this included experiencing the"other" as constructive and meaningful to the self. This"other" became symbolic and thus the physical presence of that person is not necessarily needed. We argue that in order to comprehend cultural identity development, the notion of symbolic resources can be extended to include the social resource as that which is"symbolic" .

In this article we argue that the societal-level change caused by the creation of cultural contact zones due to increased immigration has implications for nationals' cultural identities. We propose that the resultant instability of cultural I-positions demands the development of identification strategies in the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 2001a) that will enable the individual to maintain their identity continuity. Our focus involves a detailed textual analysis of three case studies of Irish nationals to investigate what identification strategies are used and to examine the sign-use these strategies employ. Using insights from Cultural Continuity Theory (Chandler & Lalonde, 1998), this article discusses the relevance of societal level processes to the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 2001a).

Recent patterns of migration and population change in the UK have led in some places to a need for child language brokering (CLB). Although there is only limited evidence on CLB in the UK, the research that has been published indicates the diversity of the phenomenon and suggests its frequency and significance in the lives of some families. In this paper we review a range of small scale studies from different research centres to illustrate that diversity. The research has highlighted ways in which language brokering often elides into cultural brokering with young children playing a brokering role within as well as outside their families. An important line of enquiry has been research on the CLB process itself, but detailed studies of how children and young people respond to the challenges of translation in different settings remain elusive, as do studies of the impact that the activity has on their interactions with others. A key issue for the children and parents involved is others" perceptions of and reaction to CLB, including not only the professionals and officials with whom they deal but also their peers at school and elsewhere who are not involved in language brokering. Ultimately CLB is of theoretical interest not only for the light it throws on children" s language learning and acculturation but also for the challenge it presents to traditional notions of child development and family roles