This paper explores the challenges the researcher faced when undertaking ethnographic fieldwork within a Probation Approved Premises. How access to research sites is achieved is increasingly being discussed, particularly in ethnographic accounts. These discussions often focus on the practical and ethical challenges of entering fieldwork sites. In contrast, how researchers leave study populations or sites is rarely explored, although perhaps as complex and sensitive to negotiate as access.This paper reflects upon the practical, ethical and emotional dilemmas experienced by the author when conducting research with sex offenders and staff in a probation hostel. The focus of the paper is on how access was gained and how the site and the people who took part in the research were left at the end of the fieldwork. Key issues include: formal and informal gatekeepers to study sites, participants and forms of data; rapport; attachment to researchers and; deciding when to end fieldwork. Issues of gender are alluded to in this paper, but will not be focussed on as they will be dealt with in detail elsewhere. It is concluded that negotiating access is different to gaining entry to a research site, and that these negotiations include considerations of the relationship between the researcher, the research and the researched.

2 Rural-urban differences in the effects on mental well-being of caring for people with stroke or dementia.Rural and urban differences in the effects of care-giving are not well documented. 3 Rural-urban differences in the effects on mental well-being of caring for people with stroke or dementia.

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Through reporting on an ethnographic study of a Probation Approved Premises, this article explores the informal social structures which shape life for sex offenders in hostels, and the significance of these in terms of social exclusion, support and the work of the institution. The findings illustrate how the practice of the hostel both demonises and reinforces the personal and social identity constructs of residents convicted of sexual offences to accord with the dominant discourse of 'sex offender'. Of note, the article identifies how informal structural and cultural processes define sex offender residents as essentially different from other people.

This paper reports on the observations of a combined level 2 and 3 Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Committees (MARAC) over a 12 month period. It considers agency representation and discusses this in respect to attendance and the nature of relationships between representatives. The key findings are structured around the experiences of three identifiable groups of panel members and leads to a discussion of how the status of agencies and the informal roles adopted by the different members are defined by power relationships based on possession of knowledge. These relationships reflect cultural traditions in working with high risk offenders, but are also shaped by statutory responsibilities placed on different agencies within the MARAC forum.