Profile

Thesis supervisors

• Professor Ian Shaw
• Dr Mark Hardy

Research interests

• Mental health policy and practice
• The policy-practice relationship, specifically the policy implementation process and the role of street-level bureaucracy
• Professional decision-making and discretion
• The position of ethics in professional practice
• The boundaries between the voluntary and involuntary status of service users
• Governmentality theory
• Qualitative methodology, especially ethnographic approaches

PhD research topic

Community Treatment Orders: Their Implications for Mental Health Policy and Practice in England.

Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) are relatively new to England, having been enacted as part of the Mental Health Act 2007.  They give mental health professionals the power to impose conditions on how certain service users live in the community, particularly in regards to medical treatment, and provide a mechanism for detention and treatment enforcement if these conditions are not met or if the service user is deemed to becoming a risk to themselves or others. 

My PhD (begun in October 2010) seeks to understand how CTOs are being both practised and experienced by mental health practitioners, service users and carers.  Mental health law and policy are based on certain assumptions about human behaviour and there is a need to understand how micro-social mechanisms unfold in order to gain a clearer picture of how CTOs are actually being used, and with what implications for stakeholder groups.  To this end, the research will take a broadly ethnographic approach, including participant observation, interviews and case analysis, which will illuminate how everyday practice of CTOs occurs within the local cultures of Community Mental Health Teams.  This focus on finding out how practice is done, as well as how it is experienced, will move the research beyond previous qualitative studies of CTOs that have solely examined stakeholder perspectives and experiences.

Brief biography

I first came to the University of York in 2006 to study social work, having worked for a number of years in social care in the UK, Australia and South Africa with a variety of groups, including young people, people with learning difficulties and refugees. 
I continue to practise alongside working on my PhD, specifically as a qualified sessional case worker for York Youth Offending Team and in the recent past as a facilitator of the Stronger Families, Stronger Communities parenting programme.

My experiences in social care and social work have led to an enduring interest in how social work practitioners negotiate the various policy mandates and pressures that are placed upon them as the mediator between individuals and society, and in particular how this impacts on their perception of the work they do, and their relationships with service users.  The PhD draws strongly on these themes and follows on from my Master’s dissertation, which explored how Family Intervention Projects, on the face of it a draconian policy initiative, were being translated into practice by professionals whose beliefs could be at odds with prevailing policy discourse. 

I also have a side-interest in service user and carer participation in services, which has led to a collaboration with the York SUPA Group to develop an on-going research project on the impact of service user and carer participation in social work education on the practice of students.

Teaching

I have given seminars, lectures and workshops across a range of modules in the Department, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, including:

Social Policy

• Introducing Social Policy
• Social Research Methods
• Youth Justice

Social Work

• Evidence and Knowledge for Practice
• Social Work Research 1

Publications and conferences

Jobling, H. (2010), ‘A Literature Review: Service user and carer participation in social work education - Impact on students’ practice’, University of York

Jobling, H., Walton, P. And York SUPA Group (2011), Beyond student appreciation - how does service user and carer involvement affect social work students’ practice in the challenging world of services and how do we find out?  Workshop and paper presented at the Authenticity to Action conference, June 22nd 2011.

In 2010 I helped organise the Regional Seminar for PhD Social Work Research held on July 16th 2010.