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This thesis examines the impact of government action on the professional organisation of New Zealand counselling. In the late 1980s the government opened up opportunities for counsellors to gain funding for a new client group: people who had experienced sexual abuse. This opportunity to expand the coverage of clients for some counsellors encouraged counsellors to use the rhetoric of professionalisation as a strategy to improve their status and credibility in the eyes of the public and government. The same rhetoric provided justification for government to endorse the counsellors' professionalisation project. The thesis provides an account of the ways in which both government and diverse groups of counsellors used the rhetoric of professionalisation as a strategy to enforce and negotiate claims over occupational jurisdiction. Despite well documented sociological criticisms of linear or trait theories of professionalisation, their face validity is still widely accepted within professions. The thesis demonstrates how counsellors used a version of trait theories to guide their policies and actions. It shows how they combined this strategy with the active involvement of government in their professionalisation project. The combined strategy involved simultaneous competition and co-operation between and among counsellors and government personnel. The thesis suggests that counselling's professionalisation project in New Zealand would be better understood as a complex set of shifting arrangements between government and aspirant diverse professional groups. My work is based on the analysis of documents from, and interviews with personnel in, the New Zealand Association of Counsellors, university-based counsellor education programmes and the government agency that provides funding for specific types of counselling (the Accident Rehabilitation and Compensation Insurance Company).

Criminality takes many forms; a homicide may be defined as criminal activity, as would identity theft--both acts are criminal, yet the responses garnered are quite different. What makes the response for these two acts different? Perhaps societal reaction and tolerance towards these behaviours. Why is it that popular socio-legal discourse takes the position that societal reaction is the result of the information it receives? The focus of my research was to determine whether language affects perception and whether this impacts police and judicial practice. The focus was on the discourse of legal and popular language used to describe motor vehicle incidents that encompass a criminal component of injury and or fatality. I examined the impact of terminology on public and legal perception, as well as societal reactions and tolerance, which were the underlying issues of examination. However, in order to understand reaction and tolerance, I found it important to study the factors that contributed towards public and legal perception. The method of analysis was to examine the terminology used to depict and deliver the news of such incidents. For the purposes of this investigation vehicular negligence is defined as any act or behaviour that contravenes the British Columbia Motor Vehicle Act or is a Criminal Code of Canada offence related to the operation of a motor vehicle. Under the law, a negligent act does not require mens rea, which literally means to have a guilty mind. Therefore, in order to be considered guilty, a person does not necessarily need to have the mental culpability of forecasting or have the intention of inflicting harm. I restricted my area of focus to the region of British Columbia for two primary reasons. First, British Columbia has a higher than average injury and fatality rate resulting from motor vehicle incidents when compared to other provinces in Canada. Second, the area of focus was limited to this province as the result of my direct personal experiences in this provincial context. The parameters of my case study, as indicated above, included only those incidents of vehicular negligence that resulted in bodily injury and or fatality. The form of negligence assessed was not restricted to a specific type of act; rather it included any act that would be considered negligent behaviour on the roads, including but not limited to, driving in excess of the posted speed limit, impaired driving, carelessness, hit and runs, and so forth. My interest was to examine the ways in which these acts are perceived and addressed in public (media) and legal (court) discourse. Focusing on five randomly selected cases involving vehicular negligence, thematic analysis of face-to-face interviews, discourse analysis, and autoethnography were the primary methodologies used for the investigation. At present, there is no shortage of literature examining the cause and effect of specific behaviours in relation to motor vehicle incidents. The shortcoming, however, is that the focus of the literature is primarily centred on the consequences of drunk driving as it relates to the mismanagement of vehicles and the subsequent legal and civil litigations. Some of the literature also addresses social and health costs related to the severity of vehicle negligent incidents. However, there is a dearth of research examining the role of public and legal perceptions as they pertain to vehicular negligence and the impacts on the way in which vehicular negligent incidents are addressed within the courts. The results of this research indicated that terminology does in fact have an impact on perception, and thus negligent incidents on the roads should be referred using terms that are accurate descriptions. Terms such as accidents construe an incorrect understanding of the implications from these types of acts that are a leading health and safety epidemic globally.

We want to be able to use information about the traffic flows at road junctions and covariates describing those junctions to predict the number of accidents occurring there. We develop here a Bayesian predictive approach. Initially we considered three simpler but related problems to assess the efficiency of some approximation techniques, namely: (I) Given a treatment with an effect that can be described mathematically as of a multiplicative form, we record Poisson countings before and after the treatment is applied. Then, given a new individual with a known counting before the treatment is used, we want to predict the outcome on that individual after the treatment is applied. (II) After observing the value on an individual before any treatment is applied, we decide, based on that value, which of two treatments to apply, and then register the post- treatment outcome. Given a new individual, with an observed value before he receives any treatment, we aim to derive the predictive distribution for the outcome after one of the treatments is used. (This problem is also considered when several possible treatments are available). (III) We compare the effects of two treatments, through a two-period crossover design. We assume that both the treatment effect and the period effect are of multiplicative forms. Estimative and approximation methods are developed for each of these problems. We use the Gibbs sampling approach, normal asymptotic approximations for the posterior distributions and the Laplace approximations. Examples are presented to compare the efficiency and performance of the different methods. We find that the Laplace method performs well, and has computational advantages over the other methods. Using the knowledge obtained solving these simpler problems we develop solutions for the traffic accidents problem and analyse a real data set. Stepwise procedures for the incorporation of the covariates through the use of Kullback-Leibler measure of divergence are developed. We also consider the three simpler problems assuming that the observations are exponentially and binomially distributed.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Univ., 2005. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2006. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, Discipline of Philosophy, 2007. / "Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in April 2006" Bibliography: p. 219-233. Also available in print form.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität zu Göttingen.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Göttingen, 1968. / Includes bibliographical references (viii-xxvi).

Thesis (doctoral)--Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität zu Bonn.