Post-separation families and shared residence: setting the interdisciplinary research agenda for the future.

Fewer children in the UK are being raised by families consisting exclusively of two biologically related parents and their other off-spring. Post-separation family life raises important issues in both law and moral philosophy about how the care of children ought to be divided between parents and the extent to which certain types of family practices should be encouraged over others. The competing interests, rights and responsibilities on all sides must be addressed: for instance, how an equitable distribution of family responsibilities and privileges between parents can be achieved; how meaningful relationships, perhaps including wider kin networks, can be promoted within the context of this distribution; and how the interests and well-being of children should be defined, safeguarded and prioritised. This project will explore these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective and will receive contributions from non-academic stakeholders. It will concentrate on shared residence - where children alternate their family life across the two households of their separated parents, as a model for post-separation family life. Its aim is to develop a coherent, interdisciplinary research agenda for the ethical and legal issues raised by post-separation family life in general, and SR in particular.

This aim will be achieved by establishing a network of interested academics, from a variety of disciplines (philosophy, law, social policy, sociology, social psychology, and health science), the majority of which already have an established research records in their own fields, but a significant majority of whom are early career researchers. The network will also include specialists working elsewhere in the European Union. Vital to the network will be its non-academic stakeholders, drawn from interest groups and independent organisations. The network and its activities will be co-ordinated from the University of Birmingham by Heather Draper and Alex Masardo.

The network will come together for five themed workshops. These will explore the ethical and legal issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, identify challenges and cross-national differences in approach, and work towards generating a future research agenda. The expertise within the network will be supplemented by that of high profile invited speakers, particularly from other relevantly similar non-EU jurisdictions.

Workshop 1: Shared residence and post-separation family life
Workshop 2: Equitable distribution of parental responsibilities and family privileges
Workshop 3: Child and family wellbeing in the context of post-separation families
Workshop 4: Learning from other jurisdictions
Workshop 5: Support for, and obstacles to, successful post-separation family life

The outputs for this project include publications that will be informative for academic researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and other stakeholders, and an open access website that will contain summaries of all the papers presented during the lifetime of the project at workshops and other meetings, extended abstracts of the resulting publications and an annotated bibliography.

The separation of parents and subsequent care arrangements for their children is having an impact in most major post-industrial societies. A successful family life, in all its forms, contributes to the individual health and well-being of all its members and therefore to society as a whole; and the family - however defined - is central in public policy, social identity and cultural activity. Most of us are members of evolving and growing families and therefore have a stake in how family life is defined, encouraged, prevented or promoted by policy and law, and how family responsibilities are determined.

Immediate impact will be generated by the engagement through our workshops with a variety of practitioners (for example, solicitors, social workers, family mediation and welfare services) and representatives of charities and interest groups. Although practitioners operate on a case by case basis, the guidance they are required to follow can be confusing. Interaction in the workshops will help to inform the way shared residence, for example, is considered among professional agencies dealing with the post-separation care of children. The regular presence at workshops of representatives of interest groups will serve to ground the workshops and generate truly inter-disciplinary dialogue and thereby impact on debates surrounding best practice. Workshop 3, for example, concentrates on the protection of the welfare of the child in post-separation families and Workshop 2 on the equitable distribution of parental responsibilities and privileges, which will help, among other things, to define the scope of the obligatory, the desirable and the supererogatory.

In the medium term, the outputs of this network will benefit a range of non-academic audiences, such as practitioners, public sector agencies, policymakers, charities and interest groups working with families in a variety of roles and settings. For example:

The judiciary: Judicial approaches to shared residence are proving to be varied and controversial both within the UK and abroad. While English law has seen the 'rise and rise' of the shared residence order, other countries are approaching shared residence in different ways, for example, enshrining the right to seek such arrangements in their Civil Code. It is important therefore that the judiciary are able to get oversight of different approaches. This will be addressed in our 4th workshop.

Solicitors: Lawyers are coming under increasing pressure to act as mediators in cases of divorce and separation. The intended publications from this project will help those working with separating families better to understand the interplay of some of the issues that practices such as share residence raise.

Representatives from the UK interest groups, charities and institutes: are at the forefront of debates, including with policy-makers and government, concerning the post-separation care of children. Many of these groups post information about related academic publications on their websites. We will ensure that these groups are aware of the publications arising from the network, particularly by encouraging links to, and use of, our own website, which will provide extended abstracts, alongside reports of our workshops that can then be disseminated through these groups. An email distribution list will also be compiled and expanded to disseminate information about meetings and remind stakeholders about the website.

The aim of establishing the network is to set a future interdisciplinary research agenda on post-separation families in general, and shared residence in particular, involving collaborative work among the network members. In the longer term, the outputs of this future research will be highly relevant to policy both nationally and internationally.

The immediate, medium and longer term impacts apply equally to the acad