This study explores the experiences of young people who have been 'looked after' during the transitional period in which they leave 'care', moving on to live independently. The emphasis is on making visible the way in which young people are active in their lives; interacting with, rather than submitting to the social environment they operate within. Drawing upon life course theory (Elder,1997) taking an interactional biographical approach (Runyan, 1982); historical time and place are considered, particularly in relation to the social timing of life events. Of paramount importance is the notion of 'linked lives' where developmental pathways and life course trajectories are seen to be located within past transitions. Drawing upon feminist empiricist and feminist postmodernist thinking, a multi-methods approach to data collection is used. Initially, aggregate data for the 150 young people, eligible to receive leaving care services within the Local Authority, was made available for analysis. Structured interviews with 38 young people were completed. Fourteen young people, aged 16-18 when the research commenced, were included in the biographical phase of the research. In this phase, in-depth information about their unique life experiences was documented over a period of 12-18 months. It was found, in line with previous research, that care leavers experienced a much earlier transition to independent living, continual accommodation moves and high levels of unemployment (60-70%). The Leaving Care Scheme's risk assessment showed the largest proportion of young people categorised as 'high risk (44%). However, leaving care provision was not accessed by 35% of those young people eligible to receive services. The 'stories' told in depth reveal the way in which past experiences and past transitions can be seen to shape and direct life course trajectories; progressing the view that outcome evaluation is limited in utility when not viewed as part of an integrated whole. An ideological account of independence had consequentiality in terms of 'social timing' also operating as a barrier which distanced young people from leaving care services. There is considerable evidence in the research of young people as active agents. Such 'agency was always located within personal and situational contexts where differing levels of personaVinterpersonal action and compliance can be observed. The findings suggest that outcome evaluations are of limited use, and a focus on studies which accommodate life as a continuum, a series of 'linked states' where beginnings and endings are not so clearly defined would offer more informative representations of young people's 'post-care' lives. Leaving care policy makers and practitioners should reflect upon the consequentiality of the ideology with which they engage; aiming to foster more comprehensively a favourable social environment but one where young people are not seen exclusively as submitting to social conditions.

This thesis details an empirical exploration of disabled peoples’ lived experiences of sexual and intimate life. Disabled people are predominantly desexualised and degendered and within ableist cultures; they are also, as Brown (1994: 125) states, assigned paradoxical social categories of ‘asexual, oversexed, innocents, or perverts’. Thus, this thesis begins from the position that disabled peoples’ access to and experiences of sexual life occur in the context of these dominant ableist constructions of disabled sexualities, and that the reclamation or formation of a sexual self requires resistance to, or strategic management and negotiation of such constructions. The research methodology worked to the central tenets of consultation, accessibility, empowerment and relevance. A Research Advisory Group made up of local disabled people was established, the purpose of which was to guide the research process, offer expert knowledge, and ensure that the research was accessible, engaging and empowering for the individuals who took part. Through a thematic analysis of the sexual stories told by twenty-five disabled people (and one non-disabled partner), in their own words and on their own terms, this thesis details the complex and variegated relationships between disability, impairment, sexuality, and gender. Findings show that heteronormative discourse had very complicated and contradictory implications for disabled men and women, but also empowered disabled men relative to disabled women. Moreover, analysis has illustrated the ‘complex invisible “work” performed by disabled people’ (Church et al 2007: 1) through participants regularly taking on the roles of teacher, negotiator, manager, mediator, performer, educator, and resistor within a variety of spaces in their sexual and intimate lives. While this work was evidence of sexual agency, the majority of participants’ labours were rooted in the oppressive and inherent inequalities of ableist culture. Furthermore, the majority of participants experienced extensive psycho-emotional disablism – ‘the socially engendered undermining of psychoemotional wellbeing’ (Thomas, 1999: 60) – as routine within their sexual and intimate lives.

Voluntary childlessness (VC) is a growing phenomenon in the 21st Century in western societies with the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in 2013 showing that one-fifth of women are childless at the age of 45. Sociological literature highlights how VC is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and is often difficult to define. However, since its inception, psychoanalysis has made an inextricable link between femininity and motherhood thus psychoanalytic theory views motherhood as normative and it is often seen as a developmental stage. This thesis explores how psychoanalytic practitioners understand, conceptualise and respond to VC in the clinical setting. Four psychoanalytical practitioners were interviewed and three main themes arose as a result of the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of the data collected. The first finding highlighted the biopsychosocial pressures that the participants felt their patients experienced. Some participants spoke of the professional pressure they experienced from within the psychoanalytic field as a result of the theory that links motherhood and femininity. The second finding highlighted the ethical dilemmas faced by some patients with regards to whether to become a mother, such as a VC choice might be the result of difficult childhoods, immaturity, or because their mental health issues precluded them from motherhood or they feared motherhood might induce mental illness. The final finding highlighted that working with childless patients was both complex and conflictual. The practitioners discussed both their personal professional responses to childlessness in general. This research is important for highlighting how psychoanalytical practitioners are influenced by the competing discourses in society surrounding motherhood. Finally, the thesis critically evaluates the research, makes suggestions for future enquiries and reflects on the clinical implications of the findings.

The social scientific debate over consumption is of increasing concern to commentators addressing the cultural implications of socio-economic change. All too often, however, the individual meanings that consumers have for the goods they consume have been neglected by these commentators, notably in favour of abstract discussions of the role of consumption in the emergence of a 'postmodern' culture. Arguing that consumption provides the sociologist with an invaluable means of addressing questions concerning the relationship between structure and agency, this thesis attempts to move beyond the limited conception of a fragmented self, picking and choosing his or her identity from the menu of life, to begin to establish an empirical grounding for the relationship between consumption and identity amongst young people. Data were collected from a triangulated three-stage research process, in the form of a series of focus group interviews, informed by Personal Construct Psychology, a participant observation study in a sports shop, and a Consumer Meanings Questionnaire. Arguing that young people's identities are largely constructed in peer group settings, the evidence presented suggests that consumption provides an everyday cultural framework, within which young consumers negotiate some semblance of everyday stability in a 'risk' society. In this sense, young people appear to pursue a dual task. First, they are intent upon forming group-based identities. Second, they attempt to construct a sense of individuality in this context. Hence, it is argued that whilst young people choose consumer goods according to peer group meanings, they tend to see their own choices as 'individual' and those of their peers as being determined by media and marketing-created desires. As such, whilst it would be misleading to see young people as dupes of the capitalist system, neither are they free agents. Teenagers construct their identities partially through the framework that consumption provides, but not with products of their own choosing. Far from being whimsical consumers in this context, I argue that essentially, young people are modernists, adapting to the rational constraints upon their everyday lives and changing the character of their consumption patterns accordingly. The situated realities of so-called postmodern forms of consumption can therefore only be understood, it is argued, through innovative triangulated research methods which address consumer meanings in routine everyday settings and which, in turn, consider the theoretical implications of such meanings, for both an understanding of the ideological impact of consumerism and it's relationship to debates concerning structure and agency.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1990. / Also available in print.

Countries around the world provide various forms of legal recognition for same-sex relationships. In the UK, legal recognition for same-sex relationships first became available in 2005 with the introduction of civil partnership (CP) which remained the only option until 2014 when same-sex civil marriage legislation was passed in England, Wales and Scotland. In a context of heated debate and speculation, this thesis contributes to emerging literature on individual’s experiences of legal forms of same-sex relationship recognition by exploring how CP is experienced, given meaning, and situated biographically. The thesis draws on personal narratives elicited through qualitative life story interviews with 28 men from across the UK. Interviews covered the life course, but were thematically focused around CP to provide insight into: motivations for entering CPs; experiences of planning, constructing, and participating in CP ceremonies and celebrations; and meanings and impacts of becoming and being civilly partnered. The resulting co-constructed narratives were systematically analysed using narrative methods. Minority stress theory, along with other relevant theories and concepts, were employed to further illuminate, analyse, and interpret participants’ narratives. Two generational core-narratives were identified in participants’ biographical accounts. Older participants told stories of struggle and resilience, and younger participants told new narratives of normality. Despite some generational differences, all participants reported experiences consistent with minority stress, including coping and resilience mechanisms, arising from their gay social identities which remain subject to residual stigma. Participants’ accounts of CP revealed that becoming and being civilly partnered was largely, but not wholly, a positive experience which can be understood in terms of the overarching, and overlapping themes of citizenship, normativity and well-being. With regard to citizenship, participants welcomed the legal rights and recognition of CP which was seen to offer varying forms and degrees of equality. In terms of normativity, some participants reported that CP confirmed their perceived normality while others thought it was a normalizing process granting them normative identities. Furthermore, while some engaged in, or were compelled to engage in, arguably normative marital practices, others felt they were resisting these. Regarding well-being, becoming and being civilly partnered seemed to mitigate minority stress and contribute to well-being. Overall, the knowledge generated from the personal narratives presented in this thesis enriches debates, contributes broadly to the social sciences literature, and provides new perspectives on, and representations of, gay men’s identities, lives, and relationships.

This thesis interrogates what a whole family approach is in Welsh policy and practice utilising an Integrated Family Support Team (IFST) as the case study. The study examines the construction of ‘family’ in policy, practice and by parents themselves and the impact of gender on practitioner and parental normative constructions of mothering and fathering as care practices. Both the UK and Welsh governments locate their use of a whole family approach within a social exclusion framework that views strong familial bonds as the source of sustainable social capital. Documentary analysis is used to examine the policy construction of a whole family approach and of the target families themselves, as this has implications for the application of a whole family approach in practice and the type and nature of family engagement. To date there has been very limited articulation of the therapeutic process entailed in a whole family approach. Through the use of practitioner interviews this thesis addresses that gap in research. It is imperative to gain an understanding of how practitioners conceptualise and engage with families within a whole family approach as this determines which individuals are included and excluded. This is a particularly pertinent issue given the well-rehearsed arguments regarding mother-blaming and lack of father inclusion within child protection practice. Parental perspectives on the construction of ‘family’, and aspirations for both family life and their own mothering and fathering practices, are explored via analysis of parental accounts and values card-sort statements as recorded (and thereby mediated) by IFST practitioners. The findings from this analysis are that there is a considerable degree of constructive conceptual alignment between policy, practice and parental perspectives on the construction of family, and the gendering of parenting as care practices.

‘Honour’-based violence (HBV) is defined as a form of crime, predominantly against women, committed by the agnates of the victim, often in collaboration, which are justified by the victims’ perceived violation of social norms, particularly those around sexuality and gender roles. While HBV is often considered as a cultural phenomenon, I argue that the cross-cultural distribution of crimes fitting this definition prohibits a purely cultural explanation. I advance an alternate explanation for HBV through a deployment of the cultural materialist strategy and the anthropological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss (as interpreted by Gayle Rubin) and Eric Wolf. I argue that HBV is an epiphenomenon of the ‘exchange of women’ model of marriage transactions occurring within the patrilinear kinship structures typical of Central Eurasia, and that this is particularly marked amongst peoples with a history of agrarian and pastoral modes of production, in which kinship underwrites relations of resource and labour sharing. Within these scenarios, marriage is an aspect of the political economy of the group, since it extends or consolidates kinship networks. In post-agrarian neopatrimonial states, kinship relations remain salient to social status through nepotism and the intensification of subgroup identification. I argue that women’s embodiment of the standards of marriageability — their ‘honour’ — within their communities is a form of symbolic capital which inflects the status of their families, and their ability to participate in strategic marital exchanges. This theory is investigated through an extensive and historicised survey of kinship and marriage in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and through original survey data on marriage forms and attitudes and experiences of HBV in the region, suggesting that HBV and understandings of gender, marriage and kinship are intrinsically linked. Thus, this thesis argues that while HBV may appear to be enculturated, its aetiology may be material in nature. Efforts to reduce HBV in the Middle East should encompass reform of personal status laws which posit the patrilinear, patricentric family as the ideal model, and that campaigns to reduce forced and child marriage should be considered as part of the process to reduce HBV.

The 1960's and the 1970's were decades of extraordinarily rapid change in South Korea. The military coup that took place in May, 1961 presaged eighteen years of increasingly harsh and oppressive authoritarian rule under the leadership of Park Chung-hee, during which time South Korea shed its centuries old dependency upon rural agrarianism and emerged as one of the world's premier industrial economies. At the forefront of this advance was the textile and garment industry; a manufacturing complex characterised by a myriad of sweat-shop factories in which the overwhelming majority of employees were girls and young women. Working conditions in these establishments were of a universally low standard, and all notions of workers' rights and dignities were sacrificed for the government-sponsored imperative to maximise exports and minimise costs. To facilitate this circumstance, the Park Chung-hee regime constructed a nation-wide trade union organisation that was, in effect, nothing more than an agent of the state: unrepresentative of, and unresponsive to, the interests of workers in all industries. With little, or no, support from male co-workers, and despite their political naivety and the traditionally subordinate status of Korean females, the women textile and garment workers confronted the state, the employers, and their 'official' trade union representatives, and succeeded in forming the nucleus of a fully democratic labour organisation. The enterprise-level democratic trade unions thus formed were not isolated or transient phenomena but included educational and vocational 'outreach' programmes of mutual support, the purposes of which were to enhance individual awareness and extend the concepts of solidarity and collectivity throughout the industrial sector. One of the purposes of this dissertation is to make visible the hidden history of these women. Writers and commentators on South Korean industrial relations share a common disregard for the achievements of the women activists of the 1970's and, instead, locate elsewhere the birth of democratic trade unionism. This study takes advantage of unique access to the life histories and personal records of many individuals, both male and female, who were actively involved in the events of the period. It presents a narrative of the lives and the attainments of women workers whose struggles have gone largely unrecorded, and whose outstanding accomplishments have, until now, remained uncelebrated.