A framework for analysing the evidence

This chapter sets out a succinct version of the methodology of the evidence review upon which this book is based, including the questions, terminologies, search and screening strategy, and the framework approach to analysis. An integrated way of defining extra-familial risks and harms is outlined, alongside offering approaches to subcategorisation that illustrate where these forms of harm, and the responses to them, vary and align. Five themes established through the framework analysis are presented, which characterise promising or effective practice interventions or organisational/whole-system responses. They are combined with the harm-type analysis to create a typology of social care responses to extra-familial risks and harms. The limitations of the review and the nature of the evidence it identified are then discussed. The chapter ends by explaining how each of the five promising or effective social care responses to extra-familial risks and harms form the focus of Chapters Three to Eight.