The paper reports findings from a research study that explored children's experience of divorce. It shows that children experience parental divorce as a crisis in their lives but that they are able to mobilise internal and external resources to regain a new point of balance. In doing so, children demonstrate the degree to which they are active and competent participants in the process of family dissolution. The implications of the data are then considered in relation to engaging with children involved in divorce and in relation to some of the cultural presumptions that might militate against hearing what they have to say about their experiences.

Faces represent a “special” class of physically similar stimuli but it remains uncertain whether they are processed by cognitive systems that are functionally separate from those used for objects. This paper reports two experiments, which examine whether there exist qualitative differences in the semantic and associative priming of faces, “structurally similar” objects (living things), and “structurally distinct” objects (artefacts). Recognition was examined in Experiment 1 using the familiarity judgement task for faces and the object decision task for objects, and naming was examined in Experiment 2. Both experiments compared, within subjects, priming by associates (e.g. Eric Morecambe → Ernie Wise, lion → tiger and lock key) and priming by non-associates from the same semantic category (e.g. Keith Richards → Paul McCartney, bee → spider and nail-file → comb) against both “neutral” and unrelated prime conditions. Both experiments produced a remarkably similar pattern of results. For faces, there was a substantial priming effect from associates but no reliable priming from non-associates of the same semantic category. In contrast, both structurally similar and distinct objects were primed reliably by both associates and semantically (i.e. categorically) related non-associates. The results are interpreted within a model that proposes that the semantic representations of objects are inter-connected by abstracted superordinate categories, but that the representations of people (the elements of which, we propose, are specific biographical descriptive information units) are inter-connected by networks of inter-personal relatedness rather than by “categories” of celebrity.

There is a substantial body of quantitative evidence that documents the incidence of legal problem clusters, the tendency of problems to occur together. It has also been shown that some people are at greater risk of multiple problem experience than others, in particular, disadvantaged groups. Various policy initiatives, most recently in England and Wales, have been implemented to address the links between civil legal problems. However, to date there has been little empirical research on how clients present with clusters and the success of legal advisors in detecting multiple problems, including the barriers and facilitators that might be relevant. This article presents findings from an extensive empirical study on Community Legal Advice Centres, which were introduced in England and Wales to deliver integrated advice provision. The data are drawn from a triangulated qualitative study comprising advice session observations, and first and follow‐up interviews with clients and advisors. The data confirm the existence of problem clusters, but provide a new dimension to research on problem clusters by demonstrating in detail how and why multiple problems are difficult to detect. This systematic insight offers important lessons for policy and service developments that target vulnerable groups with multiple problems.

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