My husband Peter Wedge, who has died aged 89, was passionate about high-quality social research and its ability to represent objectively the experiences and needs of those whose voices are otherwise seldom heard.
His 1973 book Born to Fail?, written with Hilary Prosser (and based on data from the National Child Development Study of 17,500 children born in one week in 1958), documented the evidence of strong links between children’s poverty and social disadvantage, and their physical health and educational achievement. The book made a tremendous impact, selling many copies, influencing policymakers, and becoming a prominent text in the teaching of social science over the next several decades. That and Peter’s later work on the impact of imprisonment on families have left a lasting impact on social policy.
He was born in Wednesfield, Staffordshire, the son of John Wedge, a purchasing officer with an engineering company and Helen (nee Clemson), who ran a small clothes shop. Following national service, Peter, the first in his family to go to university, studied English at Brasenose College, Oxford and then studied to be a probation officer and social worker at LSE. He and I met as fellow students on the course and married in 1961, after graduating.
Peter’s early career focused on roles combining case work with social research and teaching in Lancashire. He moved to the National Children’s Bureau in London in 1968, shifting his focus entirely to research and thinking about impacts and effects at the systemic level. There he conducted, published and directed multiple studies into the impact of social disadvantage on children’s lives.
In 1981 he took up a post as senior lecturer in social work at the University of East Anglia, later becoming a professor, dean of the School of Economic and Social Studies and later dean of a new School of Health and Social Work. While developing the social work curriculum, he set up, raised funding for and supervised research pertaining to childcare and probation, creating the Social Work Development Unit.
After his retirement in 1995, Peter researched with Gwyneth Boswell the impact of imprisonment on parenting, publishing a seminal book, Imprisoned Fathers and their Children (2001), on this subject. He also conducted several other prison-related research projects, including two studies based in South Africa and Rwanda, interviewing people who had fought against apartheid and those imprisoned following the Rwandan genocide. His final research report in 2014 was a 10-year evaluation of a residential therapeutic community for damaged and damaging young men.
Peter was devoted to his family and is survived by me, our children, Sarah, John, David and Catherine, and 11 grandchildren.
