Using the child and family research arena as a base, and by generating and analysing empirical data according to the grounded theory methodology proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), this thesis adopts an empirical approach to the study of the research relationship. More specifically, it explores how researchers (n=13) understand the research process and, in particular, how they negotiate the process of doing research with people and organisations. Four key social actors are identified and discussed. These are: the researchers, the funding agencies, the gate-keepers, and the research groups. Whilst, the issues involved with the post-data collection stages of research are not presented here, the issues associated with the pre-data-collection phases and data-collection phases of research are articulated. Within the pre-data collection phases of research, the process of research generation and how the interests of researchers converge with funding agencies are examined and discussed. Similarly, the roles of gate-keeping groups, who straddle the pre-data collection and data collection phases of research, are also explored and the supporting mechanisms of these relationships highlighted. Finally, the thesis explores the nature of researchers' relationships with research groups by distinguishing between categorical, collective, and formal, research groups. The mechanisms that support and challenge engagement with these groups are identified and the ethical devices that researchers use to negotiate and manage these relationships are also explored.

Based on a data set of 72 semi-structured interviews, undertaken with 12 British Chinese families, this PhD sets out to explore the nature of the childhood experience within contemporary British Chinese households. By speaking to parents and children of each family using repeat interviews over a nine-month period, accounts of family life and their relationships with one another can be revealed from both generational perspectives. From this research, there appears to be a similarity between the practices of past and contemporary British Chinese households, which also coincides with accounts from pre-existing academic literature. Research findings suggest that Chinese parents (regardless of backgrounds and length of UK residency), not only identify themselves as being Chinese, but also hold strong attachments to 'traditional' Chinese values and norms. For some British Chinese families this causes domestic issues and problems between parents and their more Westernised offspring. However in comparison to the past, some parents alter and modify their Chinese cultural beliefs which then affect their child-rearing methods, intimacy levels and opportunities for the child's agency. Reasons for this include the parent's own childhood experience, parent's exposure and acceptance of Western practices, as well as empathy for their child's experience of being a British Chinese citizen. External circumstances such as the social setting and surroundings, the actions of the child as well as the parent-child relationship itself also influence household relations and operations. As such, cultural factors alone are not sufficient in explaining and investigating British Chinese families. Instead contemporary British Chinese parenting approaches, parent-child intimacy levels and children's agency should be seen as an interactive and reciprocal process, that are created by and contingent upon practices within and outside of the home. By highlighting the many levels to which British Chinese families play out their lives and how members make sense of their relationships and behaviours, this study expands on the current literature that portrays cultural norms as the main explanatory factor for British Chinese household functioning.

There is a general notion that Islam, as a religion, looks down upon women and encourages discrimination against them. Thus, the status of Arab and Muslim women has become a controversial issue, drawing significant research attention amongst scholars in different fields such as sociology, social development, theology and feminist studies. This thesis aims to explain and understand both the actual status of Muslim Egyptian women and their rights in Muslim societies and also the influential role played by the ulama. The case of Egypt offers a useful focus for this research since the matter can be studied from multiple angles; political, and cultural. The emphasis given to introducing Muslim women's views, especially at the grassroots level on the subject under examination, are based on their current status and personal experiences. Field research was conducted in two main governorates in Egypt; Cairo and Qena. A total of 233 Informants participated in this study, representing different social, economic, educational, geographical, and cultural backgrounds. The findings of the study suggest that women hold a good level of awareness and knowledge of the rights granted to them by Islam, despite the discrepancy in the percentages obtained in both governorates. There is also a strong link between the content of Television drama and raising awareness about current legislations, given that the Media represent the main source of education for women about their rights in both locations. Finally recommendations are made at both macro and micro levels with the aim of creating sustainable improvement in women's rights in Egypt.

This thesis considers feminist consciousness-raising in the 1970s and 1980s in West Yorkshire, England. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the women's movement. My analysis is based on data collected from interviews with 20 women who were involved in women's groups in West Yorkshire during this period. The political dimensions of women's experiences were articulated through the women's movement slogan (first documented by Hanisch, 1970). "the personal is political". This statement is emblematic of how c-r changed women's understandings of themselves and their collective situation. This thesis interrogates some of the dominant stories that have been told about consciousness-raising in literature from and about the women's movement. As well, I demonstrate that transformations occurred within these collective contexts, through the reshaping of women's relationships with ideas, with each other, and with themselves. Through exploring the groups' theorising practices, I demonstrate that women engaged intellectually in ways that shifted their relationship to the realm of ideas. I also argue that friendships formed in these contexts supported subversive ways of being at this time. Opposing the tendency to frame the effects of social movements in terms of benefits to future generations, I argue that women's groups effected personal-political changes in the lives of the women who participated in them. I suggest that, by describing changes in the feminist movement in ways that take account of the life course of participants in the movement. it is possible to avoid overly emphasising the input of future generations. Ultimately, the thesis coiidences the personal-political effects of West Yorkshire women's groups on participants' lives in a way that shows c-r to be compatible with shifts in feminist thought after the influence of poststructuralism.

This thesis provides an integrated theoretical account of gentrification in a context which evokes significant socio-cultural meanings of rurality. With this purpose in mind, three key conceptual standpoints are established to frame the research. First, gentrification is viewed as a dynamic process of change involving distinct and differing phases of transformation. Second, representations of rurality are seen as socio-cultural constructions, which are specific to particular social groups and individuals. Finally, the creation of both rural geographies and geographies of gentrification are the product of interactions between structural conditions and the agency of consumers and producers; a reciprocal relationship of maintenance and/or reproduction in a constant flux in time and space. Following this conceptual framework, the thesis documents the processes of change which both the rural and urban environs of the Hebden Bridge district, West Yorkshire, have undergone since the late 1960s. These processes are termed g[re]entrification (rural gentrification) and involve social, cultural, physical and economic parallels with inner city gentrification. More specifically, two stages of g[re]entrification have predominated. The first stage (DIY greentrification) was initiated by in-migrant households, drawn to the moor tops, moor edges and urban location by idyllic representations of Pennine rurality. Undertaking self-renovation activities, redefined landscapes were produced and consumed by the in-migrant households. As the scale of DIY greentrification gained momentum during the early 1970s, commercial actors gained control of the production activities, renovating and developing ready-made "rural" and "rurban" commodities. As these were consumed by "client greentrifiers", property prices in the Hebden Bridge district escalated in the mid to late 1980s. Subsequently, the local indigenous population have been increasingly marginalised, excluded and displaced from the local housing market. The outcome of the greentrification process has been the production and maintenance of a number of territories associated with a distinct range of greentrifier types, culminating in an internal geography of greentrification within the Hebden Bridge district. Without doubt, the diversity of the Hebden Bridge district offers different qualities to a range of households searching for differing types of location to fulfil specific cultural and economic criteria. It is the capacity of the Hebden Bridge district (i.e. the geography of geentrification) to meet these cultural and economic needs that is central to the dramatic physical, social, economic and culturaltransformations which it has experienced since the late 1960s. The uniqueness of the Hebden Bridge district is tied up with the make-up of its internal geography and its many faces of greentrification.

This thesis develops recent work on transsexual/gender embodiment that has emerged from the field of transgender studies. The empirical study has been influenced by poststructuralist theory and feminist phenomenology and focuses on the constructed personal meanings of embodiment and bodily aesthetics for transpeople. Furthermore the thesis explores how trans embodiment is constructed within the medicolegal system and transgender politics in the United Kingdom. This study reviews the medical and legal work on transsexuality, which forms the basis. of being recognised in law as either (trans) men or (trans) women and how medical theories and legal prescriptions have been adapted through time on the basis of trans bodily aesthetics. Transmen and transwomen's personal bodily aesthetics are discursively and materially constructed and recognised through body images of the "phenomenological, " "sexual" and "social body, " which all provide for understandings surrounding their gender identities. Moreover, the thesis investigates how embodiment and bodily aesthetics are framed in three Transgender Community Organisations (T-COs). The epistemological approach of phenomenology in this thesis allows for detailed descriptions surrounding the diverse bodily practices of the trans participants, and their experiences with the medicolegal system and T-COs. The study employed semi-structured interviews and photograph elicitation methods with fourteen transwomen, eight transmen and one person who had had male to female SRS but had decided to live as "bi-gendered. " The age range of the sample ranged from twenty two to sixty years old, who were at different stages of transition, and who all recognise themselves as being of a different gender to that which was given at birth. The thesis identifies diverse embodied practices by transpeople, which all help constitute a commitment to a specific gender identity. These findings challenge the traditional medical models, which constitutes the "true transsexual" as always requiring a normative bodily aesthetic. I consider the processes of attaining a masculine or feminine body and how different discourses of embodiment are 'utilised or challenged and how imaginatively anticipated bodies are actualised through technology. The thesis argues that transmen and transwomen differ in their engagement with technology and discourses of embodiment of the self, within transgender politics and within the medicolegal system. Furthermore, it suggests that bodily aesthetics are important aspects of lived experience in relation to transpeople's phenomenological, sexual and social selves.

This thesis explores the role of social and cultural capital in the music festival experience. It does so by gathering observations and post-festival accounts from attendees at three separate music festivals located in England. The data were analysed using Fairclough's approach to critical discourse analysis, resulting in the identification of styles and orders of discourse. Little research, particularly of a qualitative nature, has investigated the roles of cultural taste and social inter-relationships in the music festival experience. Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital and the inter-linked theory of social capital, developed with slightly different emphases by Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam, were selected as providing an appropriate theoretical framework. Cultural capital, particularly its component of habitus, was a useful lens for focusing on the ways in which participants' cultural tastes related to their festival experience. Social capital was useful for its orientation towards the role of social inter-relationships in the development of cultural taste and festival experience. This thesis found that the youth years, particularly through peer influence, were a rich period for initiation into a taste for a particular genre of music. Initiation could also occur later in life. This contrasts with cultural capital theory's emphasis on early socialisation through family and school. A sense of being a member of the festival music genre's cognoscenti was also found to play a role in the festival experience. Participants discovered complexity in all genres of festival music, challenging the hierarchies underpinning cultural capital. Festivals were found to be sites where connections with already known associates were intensified (bonding social capital), rather than sites where enduring new connections were made (bridging social capital). This thesis critically develops approaches to social and cultural capital and suggests drivers for cultural policy.

This thesis explores the emergence of an urban middle class in Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific. The field research for the thesis took place over a total of 14 months in the Solomon Islands between 1996 and 1998, focusing on the minutiae of quotidian life among members of the middle class. 1990s Honiara was a rapidly growing urban centre, which had drawn its residents from the 60 language groups of the Solomon Islands. The thesis examines how affluent Honiarans were identifying themselves as a discrete group of urbanites with both ethnic and cosmopolitan identities: a middle class. In particular, they constructed nuclear households based on inter-ethnic marriages and friendships, and attempted to distance themselves from their rural and less affluent relatives by their quotidian practices both within and outside households. By focusing on different spheres of everyday life, I explain urbanities' constructions of "home" versus "town", <I>kastom </I> ("custom"), ethnicity, appropriate sociability and morality. Their constructions intersected one another in ways that provoked both discord and harmony. These urbanities were ambivalent about their self-made middle class identities, which they summed up in the <I>Pijin</I> phrase "<I>fil fri</I>" ("to feel free" <I>or</I> "feeling free"). They used this to refer to their relative freedom in town while acknowledging that such freedom was often constrained by the demands, obligations and values of ethnicity, kinship, <I>kastom</I> and life at "home", which they balanced with their aspirations to secure cosmopolitan "town" life-styles.

This study is an attempt to see the ways in which employed, ethnic minority women discursively construct their identities and the pragmatic functions the respective identities serve for them. The empirical framework within which the above study has been undertaken derives from a combination of conversation analysis and discourse analysis. The women who participated in the study came from four ethnic minority groups: African, Indian, Pakistani and Chinese. The thesis addresses three main themes. First, the thesis begins by critically reviewing theoretical frameworks such as social identity theory, acculturation and assimilation approaches, and black identity formation theory. These tend to understand minority identity in terms of its relationship to the dominant (white) community. It is argued that this fails to account for the way in which ethnic minorities themselves give meaning to their identities. The present study, by seeing identities as discursively constructed, addresses the above issue and gives subjective voice to the women who contributed as participants. Second, the thesis moves on to discuss whether the women see belonging to a minority group and aspects of minority culture as indicators of ethnic identity. Empirical analyses of the women's accounts are used to show that the women resist being limited by the categorisations imposed on them by minority group membership and minority group culture. Instead, the women can be seen to discursively construct what it is to belong to a minority group and to be involved in a minority culture. In the process, the women create particular identities and resist ascription of other identities. In doing so, the issue of agency is brought out. Third, the thesis moves beyond ethnicity to consider other aspects of the women's lives such as employment. Traditionally, research in the area of employment which focuses on career development has claimed that employment choice is related to type of person. Recent research has tended to place more emphasis on showing the effects of race, class and gender. In the present study, when women talked of work and identity, they can be seen to reject the notion that work is always associated with being a particular type of person. In formulating these rejections, the women can be seen to draw on a number of personal circumstances.

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