The research examines how far social changes, such as increases in divorce, changes in men and women's employment, different expectations of close relationships and cultural diversity have changed the contours of people's lives, and, in particular, the moral vocabulary underpinning the practices of care, intimacy and obligation. The aim is to investigate the changing moral ordering or parenting and partnering; to generate a new normative framework for future social policies in Britain. Background: The Beveridge welfare state was developed on the assumption that certain areas of life were relatively fixed and secure. This Research Group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare(CAVA) ran from 1999 to 2006 and was a study of changes in parenting and partnering in Britain and their implications for future social policy. At the heart of the programme was an investigation into the values that people attach to their parenting and partnering activities. The core empirical projects focused on key aspects of change in family lives and personal relationships: (1) motherhood, care and employment; (2) kin relationships and divorce; (3) care and commitments in transnational families; (4) practices of care and intimacy amongst those who live in 'non-conventional' ways without a co-resident partner.

The programme consisted of 6 interwoven strands. Strand 1 and 2 provide the conceptual and methodological frameworks. Strand 3 develops 4 empirical projects on care, diversity and family practices. Strand 4 reviews part of strand's 3 research in cross-national perspective. Strand 5 focuses upon social movements, pressure groups, and self-help groups. Strand 6 will use national and local feedback to develop the findings into policy recommendations. All the projects involved in-depth qualitative interviews. They were mainly carried out between 2001-3. The methodology was framed by a 'geography of family formations' based on analysis of large scale quantitative data sets, such as the Census(Duncan and Smith, 2002). The studied population consisted of: (1) Mothers, Care and Employment: 40 interviews with partnered mothers, 12 interviews with male partners; (2) Families after divorce: 58 individual interviews drawn from 41 family clusters; (3) Transnational Kinship: 69 individual interviews drawn from different generations of 17 family clusters; (4) Care, Friendship and Non-conventional Partnerships: 78 individual interviews (25 individuals were interviewed twice); (5) Collective Voices on Care, Diversity and Family Life: interviews with 62 key informants from national voluntary organisations, pressure groups, trade unions and grass-roots self-help organisations.