The thesis considers economic models of family decision-making, and their application to intergenerational justice. The predictions of several previous "cooperative" models of family decision-making depend crucially on the outcome of failure of spouses to cooperate. The first part of the thesis develops a model which predicts behaviour of caring spouses who fail to cooperate. The model has three distinctive features. First, caring between spouses is modelled using sympathy preferences. Second, transfers between spouses are made in income. Third, the interdependence between family members is resolved in two ways; first, assuming that family members have Cournot-Nash conjectures, that is, they maximize their own well-being taking the other family member's behaviour as given and, second, assuming that family members have rational conjectures. The model predicts how the division of income between spouses influences the outcome of family decision-making. When each spouse has enough income to pay for his or her personal expenditures, expenditures are determined by the interaction of both spouses' preferences. When one spouse is poor enough that she receives an income transfer from the other spouse, expenditures reflect the preferences of the wealthier spouse. The second part of the thesis uses the model to analyze the tax treatment of the family. When spouses' incomes are comparatively equal, or when one spouse is dependent on the other, small government imposed transfers are irrelevant. However, if one spouse earns just enough to pay for her private consumption, income transfers between spouses have effects on social welfare. The final part of the thesis considers intergenerational altruism in the "original position" described in Rawls' Theory of Justice. Intergenerational altruism is crucial to Rawls' account of justice between generations. It is argued that, given the nature of the choice problem, and concern for descendants strong enough to generate positive bequests, Rawls' intuition that intergenerational altruism guarantees intergenerational justice is correct. However, if each child has two concerned parents, and the conditions for intergenerational justice to hold are satisfied, small redistributions of income are irrelevant. This result leads to a re-examination of the intergenerational justice conditions and the background institutions for distributive justice.

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While so many studies relating to Vietnamese female spouses in Taiwan have tapped into crucial issues facilitating understanding of this particular social group, none of them deals with face-to-face interaction between Vietnamese female spouses and their Taiwanese family members. This thesis thus tries to bridge the research gap by studying real-life face-to-face interaction in such transnational families with special attention to identifying the interactional relevance and consequentiality of membership categories invoked by the family members and how Taiwanese and Mandarin are used as interactional resources in familial discourse. This study engaged 3 Vietnamese wives in Taiwan along with 14 Taiwanese family members whose mealtime talks were audio-/video‐recorded. Conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorisation analysis (MCA) were adopted to analyse the 7 hours of data collected. It was found (from the corpus of recordings) that a Vietnamese spouse’s deployment of the membership categories ‘Taiwanese’ and ‘Vietnamese’ relates to her use of first-person plural pronouns to form the (literally translated) ‘we + country’ compound. The compound is found to be a distinctive identity-related device used by the Vietnamese participants to engage in self-categorisation. Moreover, it is also an epistemics-related device used by the Vietanamese spouses to ascribe authority or expertise to themselves or their Taiwanese family members in the enactment of 'Vietnamese' or 'Taiwanese'. On the other hand, it was found that the Vietnamese participants orient to Taiwanese and Mandarin as salient resources in admonishment sequences. Specifically, the two languages serve as contextualisation cues and framing devices in 3 different types of admonishment sequences. It is identified that familyhood can be achieved in an admonishment context, in which language varieties are used by adult family members to facilitate their alignment with each other in educating the youngest generation. The research findings suggest that the Vietnamese female spouses can fabricate interactional resources into devices to actively engage in familial communicative events and fulfil their responsibilities as a family member and as a mother. From the discursive construction of national and household identity categories, the Vietnamese spouses have demonstrated how they manage identity work and position themselves in the family; on the other hand, the way that participants negotiate national identities in family discourse have made salient the transnationality pertaining to the families. The study therefore contributes to enriching the understanding of Vietnamese female spouses in Taiwan from a conversation and membership categorisation analytic perspective, and the research findings serve as a reference point for research on cross-border marriage, cross-border couples and interactional patterns in transnational families.

The aim of this thesis is to explore how roles, identities and hierarchies of age and gender are reproduced or transformed through power relations, within the space of the family car. This study encompasses a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of power within family car space. The theoretical approach is informed by relational conceptualisations of power, space and age, and by post-structuralist concepts of the performative nature of gender. The central argument is that social categories of gender and age are produced and re-created relationally through the particular discursive practices of power which are reiteratively performed within family car space. In some cases, these practices are enabled through the appropriation of the resources of in-car technology, which allows adults to control the aural and physical spaces of the family car.

Chapter 1 examines the new family policy introduced in the mid-1930's as perceived in Western and in contemporary Soviet literature. The second chapter is concerned with background information on questions of fertility control and motherhood up to the introduction of the 1936 Decree. Chapter 3 provides background information on marriage, divorce and child maintenance up to the mid-1930's while Chapter 4 considers the provision of child care facilities and the implementation of "protective" labour legislation in the same period. Chapter 5 examines the reasons for the restriction of abortion in 1936 and the extent to which it was implemented successfully in the years up to 1941 and provides an assessment of its possible results, while Chapter 6 attempts to explain changes in the divorce laws and examines the implications of the new policy in practice. The seventh Chapter is concerned with-the reasons for the Government's commitment to expand rapidly child care facilities after 1936, and investigates how thoroughly these promises were carried out, as well as considering how successfully mothers were 0protected' at work by special legislation. The thesis concludes by setting out to determine how much success the new family policy enjoyed overall between 1936 and 1941, establishing the probable reasons for its introduction and establishing its likely effects on the position of women within Soviet society.

Increased awareness of children and young people's emotional wellbeing in recent times has led to raised expectation for schools to promote such development, through dedicating time within the curriculum to deliver activities and interventions. The potential negative impact of family change - in this study, specifically divorce, separation and breakdown of co-habiting relationships - upon children and young people and wider society has received much media attention. Family change issues often arise in my role as an Educational Psychologist (EP), and also resonate with my own experience. These factors led to family change emerging as a research interest. This study's exploration of family change seeks to illuminate a group of children's subjective accounts and perspectives through a detailed analysis of focus group interview data, with the aim of using their experiences to inform school and Educational Psychologists' practices, and to further support other children and young people experiencing family change. The study incorporates the analysis of two semi-structured focus group interviews involving seven Year 5/6 girls from one school in the North of England. Following transcription of the focus group interviews Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is used to present an idiographic analysis of participants' family change experience. IPA as a method acknowledges that the analysis reflects my interpretation of the participants' verbatim contributions, and that it will be influenced by researcher prior knowledge and experience: which is made transparent to the reader. The themes that emerged from the IPA analysis include: psychological impact of family change; relationships with parents; being heard; new family dynamics. Following discussion of these themes consideration is given to the possible implications of findings in relation to children and young people, families, schools and EPs.

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To date there has been little research on family changes caused by having a child of 0 to 7 years old with autism in the family. This thesis examines the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the context of the family and compared families' experiences in Ireland and Romania. This research took a family system perspective, exploring how families with children on the autism spectrum function during the particularly stressful period of the diagnosis process and thereafter. This Ph.D. thesis contains the results of a comparative study of Irish and Romanian families of children with ASD. The analysis of the similarities and differences of how families who are raising a child with autism function during the diagnostic process is expected to provide a better understanding of the overall experience of families and to improve sensitivity during the diagnostic process. Fifty-four families and their children were recruited from two institutions: 24 families from Ireland (Dublin, Cherry Orchard Hospital) and 30 families from Romania (Timisoara, Cas a Faenza). The children were aged between 2 and 7 years. During the process of data collection, a relatively large number of Irish families refused to participate in this research, or accepted the invitation initially and then later refused it or stated that they are very 'busy'. A total number of 77 Irish families were contacted by the researcher and asked to participate in this study. Only 24 families agreed to participate and 53 refused to participate. In contrast, all of the 30 Romanian families who were contacted and asked to participate in this research accepted. This comparative research study is unique as no previous studies have focused on the impact of ASD diagnostic on family systems across two cultures in Europe. The results showed that families of a child with ASD in Ireland had different experiences during the diagnostic process of their child, compared to the Romanian families. Differences were also found between the two groups with regard to the role of mother and father in raising a child with ASD, parents' worries when received the diagnosis, parents' awareness/knowledge about ASD, and parents' level of involvement. A semi-structured interview was used to analyse similarities and differences between the two groups. The duration of the diagnostic process was significantly different between the two countries. Aspects of family functioning were tested using the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scale IV (FACES IV) (Olson et aI., 2010). The results showed similarities and differences between the two groups in terms of mean scores for family cohesion, flexibility, communication and satisfaction. Present findings should be used by policymakers in improving parent's accessibility to ASD services for their children (diagnostic and post-diagnostic) in both countries. There is a crucial need to develop specialized services for children with ASD. The findings indicate that both instruments used (semi structured interview and FACES IV) provided valuable information about family functioning and family experience during the diagnostic process. The limitations of the study were discussed.

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