Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) are part of the life course of some individuals and as such there are significant implications in relation to matters of identity and the need to ensure educational and professional practices are considered from an ethical perspective as related to self and identity. However, despite the wide ranging literature in the area of autism, there is very little research that examines identity in relation to young people with ASCs. Furthermore, where identity is noted as an important consideration, the concept is often inadequately theorised and explained with reference to psychological frameworks of identity. This study draws on narrative psychology and the concept of narrative identity (McAdams, 2011) to explore what insider perspectives, gained through life story accounts of lived experience, can tell us about processes related to sense-making, self and identity in young people with a diagnosis of a ASC. The findings revealed that the participants were actively engaged in sense-making of their experiences and in the production of narrative identities. A rich and complex picture of identities emerged that went beyond the label of autism. The narrative accounts demonstrated the heterogeneity amongst participants and the need for understandings at the individual level in order to promote a person-centred approach to practice, education, interventions and ethics.

This thesis examines the social psychological significance of 'community', as it is experienced and talked about in Brixton, a culturally diverse area in South London. There are two points of entry into the social psychology of a community: (1) the negotiation of social representations of the community and (2) the co-construction of community identities. The theoretical perspective that I have developed through this research is grounded in the theory of social representations (Moscovici, 1984, 1988; Farr, 1987) and draws on other theories of representation (Hall, 1997a), community (Cohen, 995), identity and self-consciousness (Hall, 1991a; Tajfel, 1982; Mead, 1934), stigma (Goffman, 1968) and the media (Thompson, 1995). It is an ethnographic study which combines ongoing participant-observation, 7 focus groups with 44 adolescents aged between 12 and 16, 5 in-depth interviews with deputy-heads of Brixton's schools, a media analysis of a documentary set in Brixton, and follow-up discussions. These accounts are woven together to answer the principal research question: how is `community' lived in Brixton? This study shows that communities emerge as sites of struggle in the negotiation of self-identity, belonging and difference. Community identities are constructed through and against social representations of the community, particularly those in the media. Two competing representations of Brixton - 'Brixton as Diverse' and 'Brixton as Bad' — were found in the same representational field. The data illustrate the different ways in which people affirm, manipulate and contest these ambivalent social representations in order to defend their perspective on Brixton, and so either claim or reject community membership. I examine how these representations both reflect and construct the social reality of Brixton. This reveals the potential of social representations to construct, delimit and empower the living of community. The systematic analysis of social representations of community and community identities demonstrates the pressing need for a social psychology of community.

This study utilises a biographical approach in order to understand the reported individual health and wellbeing outcomes of the Personal Best Volunteering Training Programme for a group of six people. Only candidates, who were not in education or training or were economically inactive, were eligible for the programme. All students on the Personal Best Volunteering Training Programme have experienced social exclusion either through drug and or alcohol addiction or mental illness. Their spoken biographies were collected in the spring of 2012; some six to twelve months after the participants had completed the course. The participant biographies set the research within a social and chronological context. Work by Marmot (2006) maintains that health outcomes are unequally distributed throughout the population and are influenced by personal autonomy and social participation, while the most vulnerable groups in society are recognised as the hardest to reach in terms of health promotion. This research links the factors which influence health with the recognised benefits of volunteering; which includes enhanced interpersonal skills, increased social networks and the development of personal characteristics (Musick and Wilson 2005). Volunteering research to date has centred on people who already possess extensive personal, social and economic resources. This research demonstrates that socially excluded individuals experience similar benefits. The findings indicate that the participants reported wide-ranging health and wellbeing benefits, enhanced communication and team working skills, the development of employability skills, improved and extended social networks. However the most significant and pervasive benefit of volunteering for this group of individuals was the development of positive self-concept and enhanced self-esteem. A key recommendation of this study is that socially excluded people should not merely be the recipients of volunteer services but have the opportunity to be prepared and actively involved in the delivery of such services. This work suggests that the PBVTP was a success largely because it was specifically designed to meet the needs of people not in education, training or employment and it recommends that volunteering courses should continue to be offered to socially excluded individuals, however to ensure further success, this study endorses the development and provision of a bespoke course explicitly design for these individuals.

The research reported in this thesis examines the social construction of ethnic and gender identities by British-Muslim pupils, from a critical, feminist, discursive position. The research draws upon critical, feminist conceptualisations of identity which challenge positivistic Social Psychological theories of ethnic identity for constructing British-Muslim young people in racist and sexist ways. The aims of this study were to (i) identify ways in which young people conceptualise their identities with regard to 'race', gender and religion and (ii) consider young people's constructions of racism and sexism, particularly within the context of school. Analyses suggest that the young men constructed 'Muslim' identities, through which they positioned themselves as 'not western', and asserted hegemonic masculinities. These constructions are contrasted with previous literature, in which second generation Asians are conceptualised as choosing between 'British' and 'Asian' identities. The young men used discourses of 'culture' to position themselves both as 'not proper Muslims' (in comparison to Muslims in Bangladesh) and as 'authentic' Muslims (in comparison to Muslim women in Britain). These constructions are discussed in terms of the young men's talk about the duties of 'being a man'. Analyses of the female discussion group data suggest that the young women reproduced and resisted stereotypical discourses of themselves as oppressed, 'passive victims'. In particular, young women conceptualised arranged marriages in terms of 'choice', positioning forced marriages as 'not marriage'. The theme of choice is also reproduced in discussions around the wearing of dbuttah and educational careers, in which the young women emphasised their own agency. In comparison to the young men, the women constructed 'British Muslim' identities. The differences in the young people's identity constructions are discussed in terms of their resistance to racist discourses and the negotiation of masculinities and femininities. Similarities in the young people's use of 'race' discourses are also highlighted, through their construction 'Black' and 'Asian' identities.

Some of the psychological problems associated with epilepsy have their origins in the ability of people with epilepsy (PWE) to engage in meaningful and appropriate social interactions. PWE often report difficulties in social settings, yet there is a paucity of research investigating the socio-cognitive skills of this group. This thesis aimed to investigate these skills and relate them to the patient's perceived impact of epilepsy on their social competence. An additional objective was to see whether studying social cognition in focal epilepsy might provide some insight into the organic basis of social cognitive abilities in the normal population. The thesis consists of four separate studies which aimed to investigate social cognition and social functioning in patients with focal epilepsy. With this in mind, a test battery assessing a range of skills linked to social cognition was administered to a cross section of experimental groups (N=95). These included patients with seizure foci in the right frontal lobe (RF), left frontal lobe (LF), right temporal lobe (RT), left temporal lobe (LT) and a group with idiopathic generalised epilepsy (IGE). A normal control group (NC) and a frontal head injured (FHI) group with no epilepsy were also recruited for the study. In Studies 1 and 2 theory of mind (ToM) deficits were apparent in people with RF and LT epilepsy. These groups demonstrated impairment in the appreciation of false belief and deception at first and second order levels of intentionality. They also exhibited deficits in the appreciation of pragmatic language when attempting to infer the meaning underlying hints given by story characters. These impairments were in part attributable to deficits in narrative memory in the LT group. In Study 3 embedding problems within a social context significantly facilitated conditional reasoning in the NC, LT and RF groups but not in the other experimental groups. This finding was unexpected and suggests a double dissociation between ToM and social conditional reasoning. Study 4 investigated the extent to which socio-cognitive impairment was associated with the perceived impact of epilepsy on everyday social functioning. No statistically significant relationship between these variables was found, although a significant negative correlation between education level and impact of epilepsy was observed. Taken together the findings suggest that impairment in ToM may be a particular feature of right frontal lobe pathology and that social conditional reasoning and ToM may be functionally dissociated. PWE do not appear to have insight into their social functioning difficulties, which may well reflect underlying pathology. In light of this, future research should obtain objective measures of social competence from `significant others'. This is the only series of studies to date to assess social cognition in people with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) within the same design. It is also the first time that social conditional reasoning in epilepsy has been systematically assessed and represents one of the largest lesion studies within the field of social cognition. It is hoped that some of the test material used in the thesis, may prove to be a useful and inexpensive clinical resource to help identify PWE who are at risk of reduced social competence, and in localising the site of seizure foci in patients during clinical audit, particularly where anterior foci are suspected.

Traditionally, medicine and psychology have characterised mental handicap as an objectively diagnosable condition of the individual, in no way affected by society. Sociologists have reacted against this dominant paradigm by developing labelling theory accounts of how individuals and state agencies can create and maintain the category of handicap by stigniatization and differential denial of social resources, and there have been attempts to see the category as a functional one for industrial societies. However, these ahistorical accounts do not add up to an adequate sociology of retardation. Tracing the history of the condition, as the core of this thesis does, we find that it was not identified as a distinct 'social problem' in the West until the development of industrial capitalism. The key event appears to be the introduction of compulsory education, which presented to a state committed to universal education a group of children. The reactions to this discovery, however, must be construed as part of a whole culture and ideology, and the thesis traces the parallel development of scientific conceptualistions, popular attitudes and treatment provisions in the light of economic relations. (The historical analysis necessarily confounds industrialisation with the growth of capitalism, but limited cross-cultural material suggests the latter as the crucial variable.) The main aim of the thesis is to illustrate the importance of history for sociological theory. The thesis also considers the necessary role of microsociology and psychology in building a social theory of mental handicap which accounts for the experience of individuals aswell as the structures of society, and Chapter 7 describes three studies illustrative of what could be done. However, microsociology cannot provide a sociological understanding without a historically informed macro-sociology within which to locate it.

This thesis comprises of three papers. The first is a literature review that focuses on the positive impact on parents caring for a child with an intellectual disability. Fourteen themes pertaining to positive impact are derived from papers and the two main measures used to assess positive impact are The Kansas Inventory of Positive Perceptions and The Positive and Negative Assessment Scale. The relationship between positive impact of caring and parental wellbeing is explored. Wellbeing is raised when there are positive perception of caring. The empirical paper explores the relationship between parental stress, challenging behaviour and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder. When people with autism spectrum disorder show challenging behaviours, characteristics of adaptive functioning, pleasure and interest, and reciprocal social interaction are lower and impulsivity is heightened in comparison to people showing no challenging behaviours. Age also differs between groups. Negative correlations between adaptive functioning, pleasure and interest and social reciprocal interaction and parental stress are found. There is a positive correlation between impulsivity and parental stress. Impulsivity is the only predictor of stress. The third paper is a public domain briefing document, which gives an overview of the literature review and empirical paper for dissemination to the general population.

This study introduces a theoretical and empirical exploration of the issue of participation within the field of adolescent sexual health promotion. It contributes to, and engages in, two kinds of debates: policy and practice discussions on how to involve adolescents in promoting their sexual health, and academic debates on the relevant theory that informs policy and practice. The thesis critically reviews literature on participatory adolescent sexual health promotion arguing that the field is located at the intersection of three central conceptual vectors: adolescence, which is constructed as inevitably transiting towards adulthood from the moment childhood ends; adolescent sexual health, which is primarily dictated by the languages of biomedicine and psychology; and adolescent participation, which appears understood as a process of adult transmission of knowledge onto the participating adolescent. Challenging these coordinates, and by drawing on the works of Jürgen Habermas and Paulo Freire, a framework for understanding participatory processes is elaborated. Participation here is conceptualised as a social process of creation via which those taking part in it concurrently shape and maintain knowledge, mould and stabilise social relations, and care for themselves. A participatory adolescent sexual health promotion initiative implemented in rural and urban-marginal communities of the Andean, Coastal and Jungle regions of Peru, acts as the observational field for the empirical investigation of the conceptualisation of participation advanced in the thesis. Documentaries and dramas produced in video format by the adolescents taking part in the initiative, together with audio-visual recordings of group discussions in which the adolescents presented and problematised these videos constitute the qualitative data gathered in this study. The data was analysed to explore adolescents’ collective elaborations of sexuality in general and of sexual health in particular, and to reconstruct, from these instances of collective creation, the workings of the participation processes that underpin them.

It is commonly observed that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make fewer attempts to have social contact. A recent theory suggests that reduced motivation to have social interactions might be the root for social difficulties in ASD (Chevallier, Kohls, Troiani, Brodkin, & Schultz, 2012). There are currently few simple behavioural ways to test these claims. The aim of this research was 1) to develop a measure of social seeking component of social motivation that is simple enough to be used with a large population of people with ASD; and 2) to test if there is evidence of reduced social seeking in people with ASD. As the first part of this research, I developed and tested a simple behavioural paradigm “Choose-A-Movie” (CAM) that evaluates the effort participants make to view social vs non-social stimuli hence estimating the reward value of the stimuli. It was found that typical adults prefer to watch social stimuli more but they trade-off their stimuli preference for effort. In experiment 2 I used the same paradigm with adults with and without ASD and found that unlike typical adults people with ASD prefer non-social stimuli but they too trade-off their stimuli preference for effort. Having established the efficacy of the CAM paradigm in adults with and without ASD, in experiment 3 I explored CAM’s efficacy for younger participants. A comparison between adolescents with and without ASD on CAM showed that both groups prefer choice requiring less effort, and participants with ASD prefer non-social stimuli to social. However unlike typical adults, typical adolescents did not show a preference for social stimuli. Though these experiments supported the reduced social motivation theory of ASD, they raised questions about the development of social seeking in typical people. Therefore, in experiment 4 I tested participants between ages 4-20 years on CAM. The results showed that typical individuals undergo a decline in their social seeking tendencies during pre-adolescence. This highlights the need for developmental evaluation of social seeking in both ASD and non-ASD populations. Finally, in experiment 5 the CAM paradigm was compared with an Approach-avoidance (AA) task, a frequently used measure of social seeking (Aharon et al., 2001). The findings suggested that social preference could be elicited more strongly in typical adults using CAM paradigm. Furthermore the autistic traits of participants were a reliable predictor of social seeking on CAM but not on AA task. These results raise the question of whether different tools claiming to measure social seeking target the same behaviour. Overall, this research shows that social motivation can be quantified using a simple behavioural paradigm – CAM that targets social seeking component of it, and also that social motivation is reduced in people with ASD. At the same time this research raises important questions about 1) developmental changes in social seeking in typical people, and 2) if different tools of social seeking, measure the same underlying construct. It is important to explore these questions to have a better understanding of social seeking in people with ASD.