Family Support: Direction from Diversity

John Canavan is a full-time researcher with the department of political science and sociology at the National University of Ireland in Galway. His work over the past five years has focused on evaluating health and education service interventions targeting disadvantaged young people. He has recently been involved in the development of self-evaluation systems with regional health authority social work teams. Pat Dolan is regional coordinator of the Adolescent and Family Support Services at the Western Health Board in Galway, Ireland. He worked for many years as a practitioner in the child care field and has recently been engaged in important research into social network maps and their use as a tool in working with vulnerable teenagers and their families. John Pinkerton is Senior Lecturer in Social Work/Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Child Care Research at Queen's University, Belfast in Northern Ireland. His particular research interest is community-based social work as the meeting point for state and civil society. He has published widely in the fields of child care and social work.