Rethinking Research in the care system

What is research? At first glance, it’s a question with a textbook answer: research is a systematic process of inquiry designed to explore, understand and explain. But when your subject is something as urgent and human as care-experienced young people navigating housing insecurity, that answer isn’t enough. Research becomes something deeper. It becomes personal, political and ethical. It becomes an act of listening, of witnessing and hopefully of transforming the systems that too often fail.

My own PhD research sits within a very particular wheelhouse: the emotional and practical realities faced by care leavers as they approach their 18th birthday. It is research driven by a simple yet profound question: What does it mean to belong, to be safe, to feel at home—especially when the state has been your parent? Through a comparative ethnographic study between Wales and Finland, I explore how different systems of care either support or undermine these young people at a critical life stage.

But this isn’t research for the sake of research. This is social science that speaks to practice. I want my findings to resonate with frontline workers, policy makers and most importantly, young people themselves. That’s why my approach is values-led, participatory and emotionally intelligent. I work from a place of compassion and curiosity, not detachment. I don’t just ask what’s happening—I ask why, how, and what could be different.

Finland’s Housing First for Youth model, for example, offers a powerful counterpoint to the UK’s often transactional approach to care. Where one system assumes that young people must prove their readiness for adulthood, the other assumes that stability is a right, not a reward. That contrast matters—not just theoretically, but materially, emotionally and relationally.

The question at the heart of all this is: So what? Why does this research matter? It matters because real lives are at stake. Because policy too often reduces care leavers to risk profiles and outcome measures, while ignoring their stories, their feelings, their strength. It matters because systems built without love, safety, or continuity cannot produce belonging. And it matters because we can—and must—do better.

In many ways, my research is an invitation: to think differently about care, to feel differently about housing and to act differently in policy and practice. As a social scientist, I believe research should not only describe the world—it should help build a more just one.