Childhood Maltreatment and Lifetime Resilience: an archival pilot study. (360G-Wellcome-109336_Z_15_Z)

Childhood maltreatment and lifetime resilience is a new research project that seeks to understand the lives of people who experienced maltreatment during childhoods in Britain c.1930-1975. The project is innovatively interdisciplinary and collaborative, combining historical and psychological approaches to study how, and to what extent, people navigated pathways to resilience across their lives. Existing studies of resilience in the face of maltreatment have focused on protective factors in child hood, so that little is known about pathways to resilience over the life-course and how historically-specific understandings of maltreatment affect these. This research begins to fill these gaps in academic scholarship, so as to also contribute to improvements in policy-making and practice. Our application relates to the first stage of this research, in order to conduct a small pilot study using the archives of The Children's Society. The relevant case files relating to children who grew up i n charitable care following identified maltreatment are uncatalogued and have not been subject to previous academic study. It is therefore necessary to conduct an initial systematic examination of these files, so as to plan future research with the knowledge of possibilities and challenges these sources pose for qualitative and quantitative analysis.