Jan Mason is Emeritus Professor at the Western Sydney University, where she was Foundation Professor of Social Work, 1995 to 2010.  She was also Foundation Director of the Childhood and Youth Policy Research Unit and then the Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre at the University. Jan's employment prior to her university career, in various positions in the NSW Department of Community Services, informs her academic work. Her research focuses on linking theory, policy and practice on children’s issues. She has published on child welfare and protection, child and family policy, child-adult relations, children's needs in care, kinship care, child well-being and researching with children. She is a member of the Board of the International Society for Child Indicators (ISCI) and an Expert Adviser to the research project, 'Children’s Understandings of Well-being: Global and Local Contexts’.

Dr. Elizabeth Watson is a retired academic who most recently was Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and, before that, with the Social Justice andSocial Change Research Group at the University of Western Sydney (now Western Sydney University). She taught for many years at UWS. She has a particular interest in research methods, methodology, epistemology and ethics, especially in exploring ways of researching collaboratively with more marginalised groups. Her recent research has been in a number of social policy areas – children’s well-being, kinship care, care and caring work, including men’s caring work, and women’s human rights. Over the last 13 years, she has collaborated with both Jan Mason and Tobia Fattore in a number of research projects, of which the research underpinning this book has been the most significant.