The children of Coronation Street's Sally and Kevin Webster look set to be caught up in a bitter divorce and custody battle.

And the question of whether folk in Bradford would react the same way as the Wetherfield pair is to be the subject of a major research programme.

A team of academics based in Yorkshire, including social policy expert Dr Simon Duncan of Bradford University, are to tackle the riddle of whether northerners would deal with everyday moral dilemmas in the same way as people from America, Sweden, Spain or Hungary.

Now, with the help of a £1.3 million grant from the Government, they are to investigate the moral framework used by different people from different areas, classes and ethnic backgrounds.

The team, based at Leeds University, is led by Professor Fiona Williams and the project will take five years, employing an 11-strong research team.

And Dr Duncan says the research is of fundamental importance.

"As a country we spend billions on social welfare and there has been a great deal of change in welfare policies in the last few years," he said. "We want to find out about people's expectations and moralities and how they are related to their partners."

Examples include looking at whether your average Bradford wife would be as forgiving as Hillary Clinton in the face of infidelity, or should the mother of a young child go out to work. Who lives where after a divorce is another type of common but complex difficulty people face all the time.

Social policy was undergoing a huge shift, said Dr Duncan, with new legislation on the cards regarding the family which recognised that there were different ways of parenting, but said marriage was the best way. "It is possible a lot of people in the country do not agree with that," he said.

The team will be using census information to discover trends in society, then targeting specific groups and conducting in-depth interviews to get to the heart of why certain things have changed. Similar interviews will be conducted in America, Spain, Sweden and Hungary.

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