The UK governments in recent history have built a strong paternalistic argument describing paid work as an essential route to improve lone parents’ mental and physical well-being. This thesis therefore sets out to explore the question of How does the transition from social assistance benefits into paid work affect the overall subjective well-being of lone mothers and their quality of life? On the impacts of the transitions to work on the well-being of lone parents, some less-researched areas are found when adopting an analytical framework of the Personal Well-being Index (PWI), and they are: quality of relationships, future security, community-connectedness, safety, and leisure. This thesis adopted a qualitative method to fill the gap. In-depth interviews were conducted with some 20 lone mothers with at least one child aged six or under and who had recently returned from social assistance benefits to paid work. Overall, the evidence shows that lone mothers may not be ‘better off’ in work either financially, emotionally, socially or physically. What is clear however, is that they are ‘better-off’ being free from the stigma associated with claiming social assistance benefits. This raises two policy implications. One, the social stigma is being generated and effectively delivered by political tactics to get people off benefits, and it damages the well-being of lone mothers not only during the period of being on benefits, but also for long after their transition. Two, while low out-of-work benefits and sanction regimes are considered as the right measures to encourage claimants to accept a ‘reasonable’ job because it would ultimately benefit their own well-being, it is clear that taking ‘any work’ is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Moving to any type of work in fact carries a great risk that threatens the well-being of the lone mothers, as it can equally be stigmatising, isolating, insecure, and unsafe, and not a route to becoming independent. However, rather it provides good and legitimate reasons for: reducing quality time with children, being unavailable to family and friends, and having leisure time that is informal, irregular, and fragmented, and also for not prioritising their own physical health.

This thesis examines the relationship between family and empire, taking as a case study, the Hillier family, who lived and worked in China and South-East Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that family operated as a key mechanism in the British world, both on a public and private level, in that it had an agency going beyond that of the individual members, which both stimulated and consolidated the expansion of that world. The process was mutually constitutive in that family both shaped and was shaped by empire. However, the strains and dislocations of those experiences could fundamentally alter and re-configure the notion of family, which lay at the heart of Victorian society. Spanning four generations, spread across a range of occupations and empire locales, the study takes as its primary focus three Hillier brothers, who made their lives and careers in China in the last half of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century, working in the Consular and Diplomatic service, the Chinese Maritime Customs and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Evolving a specific empire identity, they developed a series of networks which were key to establishing significant relationships with British and Chinese officialdom. By knitting together a number of strands of current historiography, relating to family, on the one hand, and the expanding British world, on the other, the study makes an important contribution to understanding the way in which this world was given coherence through the mechanism of family but the price which this exacted, in terms of its individual members and its structure, more generally. It also provides a model for exploring the role of family in other empire settings.

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This thesis is concerned with the influence of industry upon the -traditional rural family system and society as a whole in the Turkish town of Elmadag, which has recently undergone a series of changes. The intention is to explore some of the changes that rural traditional families undergo, by the introduction of a modern industrial structure. The data of this study were collected through formal and informal interviews of the 72 male members of the families who work in the BA$TA$ cement factory and the M. K. E. factory. The joint extended family-household has long been assumed to be both the ideal and generally, the actual form of traditional Turkish family structure. This study, however, suggests that not the joint extended family, but as a result of the transitional period of the society, the family type which is classified here as a "traditional nuclear" one may be the predominant form. The important key relationship within this family structure is between the father and the son. Industry directly affects the father-son relationship. The typical nucleation process of the families emerges as a result of the changing relationship between father and son. The other changing relationships within the household members are affected indirectly through the latter.

Embryo donation is the process whereby surplus embryos resulting from IVF procedures are donated to infertile couples. Children conceived using donated embryos are thus raised by two parents with whom they share no genetic relationship, as are adopted children. However, embryo donation families differ from adoptive families in that the parents experience the mother’s pregnancy and the birth of the child, and the children themselves are not relinquished by their birth parents. The aim of the current study was to assess the quality of family relationships, and the psychological development of children, in families with a child conceived by embryo donation. This is the first study worldwide of families created as a result of this process. A sample of 21 families with a child conceived by embryo donation was compared with 28 families with a child adopted in infancy and 30 families with a child conceived through IVF using the parents’ own gametes. This second comparison group of IVF families was included to control for the experience of infertility and high-tech reproductive procedures. All parents were seen when the child was aged between 2 and 5 years. Standardized interviews and questionnaires were administered to mothers and fathers to assess parent-child relationships and the child’s socioemotional development. In addition, data were obtained on parents’ experiences of the assisted reproduction or adoption procedure, and their attitudes towards disclosure of the child’s origins. No group differences were found for the quality of parenting variables, including parental warmth, sensitivity, and control. Embryo donation mothers and fathers obtained significantly higher scores on measures of emotional over-involvement and defensive responding than did the adoptive or IVF parents. Furthermore, embryo donation parents were less likely to disclose the method of family creation than adoptive or IVF parents. With respect to the children, no group differences were found for socioemotional functioning. The results indicate that embryo donation parents’ experience of the pregnancy and the birth of the child does not appear to result in more positive parenting as compared to adoptive parents. Neither does the lack of genetic links lead to less positive parenting as compared to IVF parents. The greater secrecy of embryo donation parents does not seem to have adversely affected the children at this age, with no evidence of raised levels of emotional or behavioural problems. The findings are discussed in terms of the implications for understanding the role of genetic and gestational links between parents and children.

Single motherhood has become increasingly common and yet very little research examines how women themselves experience the transition into single motherhood, thus their life stories remain largely unchronicled. This study explores the lived experience of transition from motherhood within a married or co-habiting couple to single motherhood for professional working mothers. The study is idiographic and qualitative and it is grounded in the detailed accounts of individual women going through the transition, prioritising their own view of the experience. Six professional women took part in semi structured interviews, and interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to analyse the material. Three superordinate themes were identified; the first highlighted the emotional turmoil the women experienced , in the initial phase of transition, in relation to personal, familial and social consequences that divorce might have on them and their children. The second theme detailed the women's actual experiences of these consequences and their effects following divorce, with the most notable finding being that the women concurrently held ambivalent or conflicting feelings about their experience. The third superordinate theme pertained to the social stigma and stereotyping that the women encountered throughout the transitional process. Existing literature on life transitions, motherhood and single motherhood was used in order to discuss the findings. The findings revealed that after a great deal of emotional struggle women satisfactorily negotiated and adapted to their new single mother status. The outcome of this study has implementations for clinical work with professional women as it highlights the benefits of allowing them to become aware of and examine the possible transitions that might arise from ambivalent feelings as they make the transition from married to single motherhood.

My thesis comprises three papers on individuals' preferences over family composition and the degree to which these are culturally determined, or learnt. Prices, Norms and Preferences: The Influence of Cultural Values on Fertility This paper investigates the influence of cultural values on fertility. High country of origin fertility is associated with high fertility in the UK, in line with previous results. This is consistent with fertility preferences being a transmissible (learnable) cultural value. However, I find that high fertility in the country of origin is also associated with earlier childbearing. If timing is not accounted for, this phenomenon could lead to an upward bias when estimating the importance of cultural values. Son Preference and Culture I measure the sex preferences of immigrant women in the United Kingdom by estimating the effect of family composition on birth hazard rates. International comparisons of son preference are constructed, the first known to the author. A theoretical model suggests that costs (e.g., dowries) are unlikely to explain the variation in outcomes between groups. Finally, women arriving in the UK at a young age appear to have less distinct tastes, also consistent with a primarily cultural, rather than economic, explanation for parental sex preferences. Son Preference and Sex Ratios: How many 'Missing Women' are Missing. When parents prefer sons, heterogeneity in the probability of having sons can lead to excess girls. I argue that this may lead to under-counting the number of 'missing women'. Parents show significant differences in son preference between countries. I exploit these differences to simulate sex ratios in the presence of measured heterogeneity. Parents' son preferences account for 1.5% of differences between sex ratios worldwide (significant at 10%). The presence of this effect may imply that sex ratios are more biased than previously estimated, since previous comparisons use benchmarks that already contain too few girls. Therefore there may be more women missing due to discrimination than we thought.

This thesis is about the meanings that children aged 8-10 years old attribute to family and close relationships. The thesis focuses on how children’s normative expectations about family relate to their lived experiences of family life and relationships. It is based on data from a school-based field study, combining participant observation, interviews, children’s drawings, visits to children’s family homes, and the children’s production of books about their families. The research took place over nineteen months. Its contribution to knowledge lies in a new theoretical framework, combining insights from family and childhood sociology, for the purpose of examining children’s constitution of family. The thesis demonstrates that children conceive of family as a meaningful and highly valued set of relationships, challenging the notion that the concept of ‘family’ has lost its sociological and analytical significance. This thesis illustrates that children consider the family as those people with whom they feel a sense of belonging; a feeling that was achieved across a range of family forms. This conceptualisation of belonging departs from traditional conceptualisations in encompassing face-to-face contact as an important element of belonging to a family. The thesis concludes that an emphasis on children feeling part of a family is more productive than the present policy focus on maintaining nuclear family forms. Particular attention is given to how children identify visible forms of relatedness, through surname, cohabitation and through family members ‘displaying’ family-like relationships and family photographs.

Asking people about their state of emotional well-being or their self-evaluations of life satisfaction represents a resource which can be used to contribute to knowledge concerning overall well-being and social progress, helping to avoid a narrow focus on purely economic indicators. Whilst concerns over measurement and validity have been raised, such measures have been used to research individual well-being across a vast range of topics, particularly in the field of economics. There has been much less attention from a more sociological perspective. This thesis aims to bring together the topics of well-being and sociology, via a focus on the family. The family is a long established area within sociological study, and contains a number of sub-areas that may lend themselves well to being connected to the topic of well-being. A focus on its inherent interrelations and dynamics may help to ascertain whether the ‘individual’ topic of well-being can be understood alongside the more ‘social’ topic of the family. This thesis utilises data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a large scale survey which tracks the same people over 18 years. The BHPS was later incorporated into Understanding Society, and this data source is used for the third chapter. It is found that associations exist between a range of family related roles and experiences, and well-being. The importance of family bonds and relationships to well-being were suggested, between partners and also between parents and children. However also of note were the gendered differences that exist within these associations, and those between different dyads of family members. The impact of changes in family roles and responsibilities was also supported, and how these may impact upon well-being.