Emma Hitchings is a Professor of Family Law at the University of Bristol Law School. She is an expert on financial remedies on divorce and family justice issues, and has been the lead or joint investigator on a range of empirical studies in family law and family justice, including Financial settlements following divorce (Nuffield); Pre-nuptial agreements (Law Commission); Everyday financial remedy cases (Nuffield); Fee-charging McKenzie Friends (Bar Council) and Litigants in Person in private family law cases (Ministry of Justice). She has written widely on issues in family law. A key theme underpinning her research has been exploring how family law works in practice and its impact on individuals, professionals and the family justice system. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law and is a co-author of the new edition of Bromley’s Family Law (OUP, 2021).

Caroline Bryson, Bryson Purdon Social Research LLP, is quantitative social science researcher with over 30 years’ experience. She has been the Principal Investigator on two scoping studies related to family separation - Understanding the Lives of Separating Families and Improving the survey representation of non-resident parents as well as a study of Public Attitudes to Child Support. She was a Co-Investigator on the Finding Fault divorce study led by Professor Liz Trinder and Kids Aren’t Free, a study of the child maintenance arrangements of single parents on benefit led by Gingerbread. She is currently doing a PhD at the London School of Economics on the predictors of child maintenance receipt. Prior to setting up BPSR in 2009, she was Co-Director of the Families and Children Research Group at NatCen Social Research.

Dr Susan Purdon, Bryson Purdon Social Research LLP, is a qualified statistician with research interests in the design, implementation and analysis of sample surveys, social experiments, and quasi-experiments. She has considerable expertise in complex sampling and estimation, including standard error estimation for complex surveys, non-response and missing-data assessment; weighting; and statistical tests. She is expert in the statistical aspects of evaluation impact studies and has many years’ experience of techniques such as propensity score matching and regression as well as the design and analysis of RCTs. Prior to setting up BPSR in 2009, she was Head of Evaluation and formerly Head of Survey Methods at NatCen Social Research.

Gillian Douglas FBA, FAcSS, FLSW is Professor Emerita at King’s College London, having retired from the position of Executive Dean of The Dickson Poon School of Law in 2020. During her career, she taught at the University of Bristol, Cardiff University and National University of Singapore. She has written and researched on all aspects of Family Law and has conducted several empirical studies into the legal aspects of family breakdown, including the perspectives and experiences of children whose parents divorce and how parents cope financially when they first separate.