This thesis poses a selection of recent research of the author in a common context. It starts with a selected review on research concerning the role entanglement might play at quantum phase transitions and introduces measures for entanglement used for this analysis. A selection of results from this research is given and proposed as evidence for the relevance of multipartite entanglement in this context. A constructive method for an SLOCC classification and quantification of multipartite qubit entanglement is outlined and results for convex roof extensions of the resulting measures are briefly discussed on a specific example. At the end, a transformation of antilinear expectation values into linear expectation values is presented which admits an expression of the aforementioned measures of genuine multipartite entanglement in terms of spin correlation function, hence making them experimentally accessible.