This study seeks to make a contribution to the field of population studies by throwing some light on the explanation of fertility change in developing countries. It hopes to do this by investigating the role of the family and its structure in explaining fertility attitudes and behaviour in Jordan. Some of the causes - at the level of intermediate variables - of regional variations in fertility levels and fertility preferences in Jordan are examined. The study tries to analyse several aspects of change in the family system in Jordan: social, economic kin-relationships and wealth flow directions within the family. Also, fertility attitudes are examined in relation to contrasting social contexts. It is assumed that fertility decline will be the result of certain changes in the family's internal and external social and economic structure. In order to test this assumption it is necessary to examine the nature of internal and external family relationships in terms of the following five dimensions: a) the scale and character of mutual economic obligations (or feelings of financial responsibility) which exist within the families under study b) the nature of the family budget (to what extent it is a common budget or one divided into separate units related to individual wage earners) c) relations between the father and his children in terms of obedience and societal and family norms (even when the family is geographically separated as a result of migration) d) the coherence and structure of the family system (is it a closed or open nuclear family or does it still have elements of the extended family?), and women's roles and status within the family e) wealth flow direction and its relation to power structure within the family. Results suggest that changes in the family's internal and external social and economic structure have a significant influence on fertility attitudes which, in turn, tell that fertility decline is an outcome of family change.

Project Thesis (D. Min.)--Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-179).

In rapidly urbanising Sub-Saharan African contexts, not much is known about the economic vulnerability of elderly people and its consequences. Dominant international institutions have indicated that the economic situation of elderly people in developing countries is precarious, especially where high levels of poverty and minimal social safety nets are the norm. As a consequence, the impact of economic vulnerability can be quite punishing on disadvantaged households with an ageing elderly person. Yet, the case of urban elderly Nigerians has thus far remained largely unresearched. This thesis represents a quantitative investigation of economic vulnerability amongst urban elderly Nigerians and its health-related consequences, examined through a consumption allocation welfare measure. It draws on economic, gerontological, and sociological perspectives to undertake this task. The key drivers of economic vulnerability and resulting consequences are likely to be complex and varied. Urban Elderly Nigerians may be economically vulnerable because they possess certain pre-disposing characteristics. This study is concerned with investigating these associated determinants of economic vulnerability amongst urban elderly Nigerians using a recent nationally representative household survey—the Nigerian General Household Panel Survey (NGHPS), which was collected by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2010. The first part of the study examines the determinants of economic vulnerability, through the use of a consumption allocation model. The findings of this study reveal that the age of the household head, household size, household structure, and regional location, are key determinants of economic vulnerability amongst urban elderly households in Nigeria. As a consequence, does economic vulnerability (represented by consumption allocation) influence health status and spending amongst elderly Nigerian households? I extracted useful data from the NGHPS to address this pertinent question. This is the second part of the study. The findings suggest that economic vulnerability is strongly related to health status and health spending. This thesis highlights key methodological challenges in using a secondary data source to study economic vulnerability amongst elderly people in a developing country context. The study also offers some policy options to tackle economic vulnerability among elderly households in urban Nigeria, and its health-related consequences.

This is an interdisciplinary PhD research project, spanning the ESRC Centre for Population Change and the Centre for Research on Ageing. Using British Household Panel Survey data, the thesis aims to prove that undertaking a residential move changes the supportive capacity of one’s social network in later life. The study first investigates the determinants of moving home in later life. It then conceptualises and constructs the social networks of older people in the UK, considering key attributes such as network size, frequency, proximity and functions and examines the effects of moving home on these measures. The analysis finds that the incidence of residential mobility is associated with, amongst other things, becoming widowed and experiencing a negative change in health or financial circumstance. Furthermore older people are likely to experience disruption to the supportive capacity of their companionship and community networks following a move. This research has important implications for policy as any damaging effects on an older person’s informal support network may have consequences for their health outcomes and in turn lead to an increased dependence on formal health and social care services at the places to which they move.

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This research explores the perceptions young Saudi women in Jeddah have of their lives. It seeks to uncover the role and different degrees that obedience and rebellion feature in the everyday lives of the young Saudi women in Jeddah. The subjects of the research were young Saudi women aged 16-21, all living in Jeddah at the time of the study and studying at either high school or university. The study employed a qualitative methodology to identify the extent of obedience and rebellion and their manifestations in the young women’s daily lives. The research relied on in-depth semi-structured interviews as the principal data collection method. By analysing the data derived from this process, I sought to explore the range, subtleties and continuum of rebellion and obedience in terms of three major themes: Hijab, gender relations, and young women’s private spaces. The study found that the participants associated Hijab with high social and religious values and had great respect for it. The conceptualization and practice of wearing Hijab, was associated with freedom and access to ‘the public sphere’ for many participants. In contrast, the study found that Qiwama (Guardianship), a religious Islamic concept that regulates family life, was much less respected by the participants, at least in its traditionalist incarnation that prevails in Saudi Arabia. The traditional Qiwama, per the findings, is a patriarchal structure that results in the reproduction of the social reality that marginalizes women, relegating them to follower status. The female participants rejected this as an incorrect interpretation of religious text. A majority of participants also pointed out that the definition of rebellion differs from one generation to the next. In fact, the participants noted that the actions of young Saudi women that are often classified as rebellious are actually demands for personal rights and an attempt to remove some of the restrictions they face in a subtle way that does not directly clash with family, religion and state policy. This study is important because it represents the unique contribution of giving a voice to young Saudi women to narrate their experiences and explore their ways of subtly negotiating with or conforming to social realities and by so doing enables the examination of the connections between obedience, rebellion, or subtle negotiation.

This thesis investigates how relationality is imagined, managed and performed by twenty-seven UK-based couples during their wedding and civil partnership rituals. The methodology involves a case study approach with eleven of the couples, who were followed through the planning of their ritual, retrospective interviews with sixteen couples and a photograph project with eight of these couples. Diversity in the sample in terms of age, gender and class allows these factors to be explored along with differences of sexuality between the couples. Commitment rituals put relationality into sharp focus as they demand practices of inclusion and exclusion. Each chapter of analysis (The Decision to Marry, Wedding Work and The Big Day) highlights how tradition and relationality are particularly significant to an understanding of the fateful moments that commitment rituals represent. The perceived expectations of family members and friends are implicated in the performance of traditional symbols, while these symbols also provide a recognised form for these relationships to take. The Discussion chapter builds upon these ideas in drawing the key themes, of imagining, managing and performing that run through each chapter, together in outlining a typology of strategies. This typology challenges a central idea of the reflexive modernisation thesis, as asserted particularly by Giddens (1991, 1992, 1994, 2002), that reflexivity involves the disembedding of individuals from their relational networks. In this way the research builds upon theorisations of relationality and embeddedness, particularly those developed by Smart (2007a) and Bottero (2010). The intersubjective nature of reflexivity is emphasised with the introduction of the terms ‘reflexive coupledom’ and ‘relational reflexivity’ alongside ‘individual reflexivity’. ‘Strategies of tradition’ is also included in the typology to emphasise how meaningconstitutive tradition continues to shape ritual action. These concepts aim to be of use in future exploration of these rituals as well as in relation to other areas of personal life.

This thesis reports on the findings of a heuristic study on participants’ communicative means of co-constructing (inter)subjective remembering in interactions with an Alzheimer’s patient. The case study presented in this thesis reflects a typical German ‘migrant-in-the-family’ home care arrangement, consisting of a number of family carers and nursing service employees alongside the frail elderly and a migrant live-in. Oral data were collected through ethnographic fieldwork. Over a period of six months, for approximately four days a week, three hours a day, interactions were audio recorded that involve one Alzheimer’s patient (‘Wilma’), three Polish live-ins, three of Wilma’s five children, and seven employees of the local nursing service. In the existing literature on the ‘migrant- in-the-family’ model, the scholarly focus in sociology is on the devaluation of domestic work. In particular, Arlie Hochschild’s framework for the analysis of ‘emotion management’ is used to outline the strategies individuals use to create ‘appropriate’ feeling displays, as well as the emotional costs of doing so. Categorising feeling displays either as surface acting (feigning emotion) or deep acting (authentic emotion), this approach treats ‘emotion management’ as a subjective and cognitive process. Taking on board an interactional perspective, this thesis approaches ‘emotion management’ as situated and distributed social practice and not only as cognitive achievement. In the spirit of Sacks’s ‘any-direction’ approach to analysis, this thesis’s data analysis draws on research in cognitive and social psychology, as well as neuroscience to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes. The general framework for analysis are Sacks’s lectures on story-telling in conversations. Findings show that participants’ schema-consistent actions can achieve affective coherence regarding the individual’s goals. However, this can, as a side effect, provoke a relationship mismatch. Consequently, it is argued that schema-related feeling displays of internal emotion management simultaneously affect negotiations of positions within the relationship. This way, participants’ conflicting frames concerning the home care situation potentially explain dysfunctional communication in terms of overall aims and the setup of Wilma’s care. Yet, my analysis shows that frames and schemata are subject to an on-going adaptive learning process as emotion management is distributed within the participation framework.

This thesis examines the philanthropic organisations and projects with which elite Jewish women in Chicago were concerned during the years 1890–1900. It concentrates on the National Council of Jewish Women, which was founded by a group of Chicago women in 1893 after the Jewish Women’s Congress at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The NCJW was this community’s highest-profile philanthropic organisation, bringing them local, national and international attention. The 1890s were a turbulent decade—politically, socially and economically. Against this backdrop, Chicago’s philanthropists were pioneers of the Progressive Movement. The NCJW showed early interest in Progressivism, but came from a Jewish community with set notions of appropriate roles for women. The NCJW's leaders encouraged philanthropic innovation, but presented themselves themselves very traditionally, as ‘model’ American women. Previous scholarship has emphasised the conservative character of the NCJW, suggesting that it was only different from contemporaries by having a Jewish membership. This thesis will show that this was not the case. Beginning with an introduction to Chicago and Chicago’s Jewish community, this thesis contextualises these women’s philanthropic work. It then moves on to examine—in greater detail than can be found in existing scholarship—the foundation and early years of the NCJW. Its final two chapters address the other philanthropic organisations and projects with which elite Jewish women were associated, within and outside of the Jewish community, showing that they were intimately involved in Progressive philanthropy. The philanthropic activities of this group show them to have been far more radically-minded than has generally been thought. Their work with the NCJW brought them influence and acclaim which has been forgotten. This thesis seeks to provide a deeper understanding of this group and their work, placing them within the context of the time and place in which they lived.

Impairments in the use of varied, spontaneous, symbolic or imaginative play or the absence of developmentally appropriate social imitative play is of diagnostic significance in autism (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, 4th edition [DSM IV] 1994). Many studies have found a poverty in play generally and particularly in spontaneous symbolic play amongst children with autism. It is then remarkable that some research studies have found that in structured settings such children are able to understand pretence and produce acts of pretence. Study 1 was a small scale study of 6 children with autism in a school setting and found that some were able to learn to play symbolically following a 4-month intervention. Structure and affective engagement emerged as 2 factors possibly mediating this improvement. Study 2 contrasted Structure and Affect each in combination with Repetition in a quasi-experimental design with 12 (different) children. Study 3, using a similar method to Study 2, additionally considered two further variables: interest in the materials and the identity of the researcher. The study showed that symbolic play acts could be elicited in the participants using high structure and high affect conditions. The use of high interest toys was less likely to elicit symbolic acts in these participants. The number of symbolic acts used by the participants were not unduly influenced by the replication of the conditions by a second researcher. A factor that possibly mediated the effects seen in Study 3 was the social-communicative responses of the participants and so Study 4 studied children with learning difficulties, four who had autism and 4 who did not, matched on verbal comprehension and examined the level of social communication responses in relation to symbolic play during three conditions of high affect, high structure and low intervention. Implications for education and further research are discussed. Results of all studies were not definitive. This represents a preliminary study to identify factors that may be effective in the teaching of symbolic play to children with autism. Some initial success with individual children indicates structure and affective engagement as factors that need to be investigated in future research.