Jane Ribbens McCarthy is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. She has long-standing interests in family sociology, particularly around parent-child relationships, and her research has included, among other things, mothers and their children, parenting and step-parenting, and the family lives of young people aged 16-18. She has published extensively on these areas, on qualitative methodologies, including auto/biography, and on theories of public and private. Her most recent book, with Rosalind Edwards and Val Gillies, is Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting, Sociologypress, 2003. She is currently engaged on a literature review on 'Young People, Bereavement and Loss'. Further details of her work can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/staff/jribbens-mccarthy/ Rosalind is Professor in Social Policy, and an elected member of the Academy of Social Sciences. Ros recently joined the Division (December 2010) from London South Bank University where she directed a 5-year ESRC research group programme of work concerned with families and social capital. She is founding and co-editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (with Julia Brannen).