This dissertation provides an occupational study of police constables in the three provincial English cities of Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool from 1900 to 1939. As a study of police life, it challenges the social control and police historians who support the thesis that policemen lose their class identity on joining the force. My findings indicate that policemen were able to adopt those parts of the police image that were helpful or attractive, such as their role as upholders of justice, without losing their cultural identity. Police constables remained members of the working class and interpreted the duties of policemen within a working-class context. As a study of the working class, this work expands on the theory that working-class members not only had their own culture but also were able to adapt and preserve that culture from interference from the establishment. While Robert Storch put forward this idea for the working class generally, but excluding policemen, I have extended it to include policemen as part of my thesis that policemen need to be recognized as members of the working class. This ability to resist interference from above is apparent in their practice of giving priority to duties that assisted the working class over those that hindered working-class activities and in their continuing working-class marriage patterns in spite of constant attention from their superior officers. The dissertation also confirms the conclusions of Elizabeth Roberts, John Gillis and other historians of the working class on working-class family life, neighborhood life, and sexuality. Having access to written police records rather than the primarily oral evidence of these historians, however, my evidence modifies their conclusions in areas such as premarital sexuality and adultery where oral evidence can be less reliable. Finally, as a history of the everyday lives of police constables, the dissertation allows a group that is usually historically silent to speak for themselves about their lives.

Although the father-centered family was a powerful instrument of social control in the Victorian period, and the father/child bond was presumed to be the natural prototype of all brands of civil interaction, I suggest that the gap between fathers and uncles, daughters and nieces is potentially wide enough to displace an entire system of cultural signification. My dissertation argues that a model of the extended family--especially and most significantly a model of the avunculate--was often implemented by Victorian writers to highlight the inadequacies of paternalistic and affective family paradigms. By examining the way that the paternal metaphor was used to neutralize the economic anxieties inherent in debates over domestic economy, social paternalism, penny-postage reform, and the usury laws, and by tracing these debates through works by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Margaret Oliphant, my project argues that "the shape of uncles" becomes a means of subverting this widespread privatization of the social world: a way of dislocating the affective family values that had been imposed upon the economic face of nineteenth-century culture. As questions about family structure are endemic to several different disciplinary arenas, my dissertation intervenes in both historical debates about the genesis of the nuclear family, and in feminist debates over the efficacy of father-centered literary criticism. Historical work on family development has begun to reassess the importance of extended kin in the formation and empowerment of the British middle class; likewise, feminist theorists are currently questioning the hegemony of oedipal thinking, and are beginning to problematize feminist reliance on the psychoanalytic model of family. Borrowing an anthropological model of the avunculate from Claude Levi-Strauss, I insist upon a difference between fathers and uncles that psychoanalytic and feminist criticism normatively denies: if fathers are the benchmark of affective family models, uncles are a familial trope fundamental to narratives of social and economic exchange. Moreover, my dissertation concludes that extended kinship ties under industrial capitalism are not traces of what Lawrence Stone has termed "obsolete" family models, but emergent middle-class ideologies of work, production, and reproduction.

This joint biography of Elizabeth Gamble Wirt (1784-1857) and William Wirt (1772-1834) tells the story of a middle-class couple in the upper South from 1802 to 1834. The Wirts were members of the emerging urban professional class in the nineteenth-century United States. William Wirt was U.S. Attorney General from 1817 to 1829 and a literary figure who contributed to the legend of the Old South. Elizabeth Wirt was the first American to author a book on the "language of flowers." Although both Elizabeth and William Wirt wrote for publication, their most prolific writings were personal and family correspondence. William Wirt's law practice in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland separated the couple for many months each year. While apart, the Wirts wrote letters that covered every aspect of their lives: their desire for companionship in their marriage and family; their experiments in modern childrearing; their respective roles in their domestic economy; their supervision of slaves and servants in household production; and their gender roles as husband and wife, father and mother, and master and mistress. When Elizabeth and William Wirt married in 1802, they hoped to achieve equality and reciprocity in their marriage. As partners in both love and finances, they planned to make their union the nucleus of a family defined by affection, not by social prescriptions of masculinity and femininity. While the Wirts embraced the ideals of domesticity, they resisted the division of men's lives and women's lives into the separate spheres of home and work. This study documents the Wirts' repeated redefinition of gender roles throughout their marriage. Elizabeth and William Wirt never achieved the high standards they set for themselves, but their lives and letters deepen our understanding of men, women, and the family in nineteenth-century America. Using interdisciplinary insights from scholarship on religion, architecture, and literature as well as United States social history, women, and families, this study contributes to the fields of women's history, gender studies, the history of childhood education, nineteenth-century America, and the U.S. South.

Most contemporary theories of justice pertain primarily to the world of adults, and so provide only implicit or vague suggestions as to how various ideals and norms of justice might apply to children. In this dissertation I attempt to remedy this gap or imbalance. To do so, I focus upon the norm of autonomy, and consider how social institutions might be arranged and resources might be distributed so as to allow for due respect---but also, at a prior stage, allow for the proper cultivation---of persons' autonomy. In other words, I systematically argue that it is misguided to be concerned with respecting the (already formed) autonomy of adults, if social arrangements have prevented many adults from developing their autonomy in the fast place, when they were children. Toward this end, I defend a conception of autonomy, in the first chapter, as the complex ability to effectively govern one's life according to one's own capacities and non-adapted preferences. I point out that this ability is one of degrees, whose development depends in large part upon the enjoyment of certain childhood conditions and resources. In the second chapter, I marshall evidence from the most recent empirical research (in burgeoning areas such as Population Health and Life Course Studies, psychoneurobiology, primate ethology, and Social Cognition Theory), to reveal what specific conditions seem to lead, in point of fact, to a greater or lesser development of autonomy. In the third chapter, I argue that children who have been deprived of these various pre-conditions of autonomy have been seriously and wrongfully harmed; and I defend the state as being morally justified, perhaps even obligated, to intervene to redress such harm. The final two chapters are devoted to the ethical evaluation of practical interventions that would feasibly protect children from such "arrested development harm," within their home and school environments, respectively. Accordingly, in chapter four, I provide a model of parental licensing (which includes an analysis of the merits but also risks of compulsory short-term contraception, for cases of extreme parental incompetence or abuse). In the fifth and final chapter, I advocate an Educational Sufficiency Standard that would mandate a certain set of minimally adequate grade school conditions, where these conditions, in turn, would support children's assimilation of essential building blocks (in the form of certain cognitive and self-efficacy skills) of autonomy. In these ways, I argue that any just society will insure that its children are provided with whatever is necessary for their development of at least minimal autonomy.

Over the past half century the name Planned Parenthood has become a household term. As its leadership has struggled to create and maintain its identity and to keep it financially afloat, the organization has evolved. This is the story of one local affiliate: Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas. Planned Parenthood of Houston had its origins in the philanthropy of Houston's "white-gloved elite," and in the poverty of the Great Depression. It also found support in the courts, which by the 1930s were beginning to re-define the law of obscenity (to exclude contraceptives) and by the 1960s to define the right of privacy as broad enough to encompass the right of marital privacy. These judicial decisions would be crucial precedents to the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, which legalized the right of abortion. Neither Planned Parenthood of Houston nor its parent organization, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, evolved in a social or legal vacuum. The purpose of this study is to illuminate the history of one affiliate as it grew from a tiny clinic for the poor to a large, powerful urban organization with an eclectic clientele and a number of satellite clinics, an organization in the vanguard of reproductive rights and technology. It also attempts to place Planned Parenthood's legal, institutional, and social history in the context of state and national public policies, and to illuminate ways that the innate federalism of the Planned Parenthood organization, individual's rights to privacy, and government policies intersected and sometimes clashed.

Grounded theory was used to collect and analyze data from a literature review and the lived experience with First Nations participants, a non-First Nations caseworker, and an Indigenous scholar in order to answer questions related to permanency for Aboriginal children-in-care. Assumptions underlying this study were the difference in child-rearing philosophies between First Nations and Western society – specifically as to what practice each culture considers to be in the best interests of the child. Also, negotiating “best interest of the child” lengthens the time it takes for children-in-care to find permanent homes, which may prevent them from achieving the self-confidence that comes from healthy identity formation. Research resulted in identifying effective practices, along with questions for further study. Some effective practices include ensuring the focus of care is on the child, reinforcing the importance of parenting; developing cross-culturally enhanced social work practices; cultural planning; open and custom open adoption; facilitating cross-cultural connections; and the importance of language in cross-cultural understanding.

<p> Technology has, without a doubt, altered the social fabric of society. Mediated forms of communication have paved the way for more efficient production, and the vast amount of information available online has given people the opportunity to be more informed than ever. However, the rise of mediated communication has also presented a number of new threats. The current study focused on one of these threats, cyberbullying, and was interested in looking at how parents talk about and understand their child's cyberbullying behavior.</p><p> This study had the goal of uncovering if parents talk to their child about cyberbullying, and how they approach these conversations. The intent of this study was grounded in the idea that parent-child communication is a valuable tool for developing belief systems, as well as making sustainable, positive and effective changes to behavior and perceptions.</p><p> Ultimately, parents do not avoid conversations about cyberbullying with their children. Parents structure these conversations with the intention of positively changing their child's behavior and beliefs. Specifically, parents talk about cyberbullying with their children as an effort to decrease the perceived risk their child faces if he or she participates in cyberbullying. However, these conversations are limited because they are grounded in misrepresented media coverage of cyberbullying which intensifies cyberbullying behaviors. As such, media producers must work toward presenting more all encompassing and wide spread coverage of cyberbullying as an effort to educate parents about the variety of behaviors which relate to cyberbullying.</p>

<p>Shame and guilt have been distinguished as two separate self-conscious emotions; the former depicts a global negative self-evaluation, whereas the latter describes the recognition of a specific problematic behavior. Current approaches to shame and guilt have linked proneness to shame and guilt with people's experiences of the parenting characteristics of their caregivers. Additionally, accumulating evidence has linked shame and guilt to identity development in the adolescent years. This study compared the relationship of perceived parenting behaviors to individuals' tendencies to experience shame and guilt. Partial correlations were used to separate the influence of shame and guilt, and results showed a consistent, positive relationship between positive parenting behaviors and levels of guilt-proneness. Similarly, a positive correlation emerged between shame-proneness and negative parenting behaviors, but a consistent relationship between shame-proneness and positive parenting behaviors did not emerge. Correlations also were conducted to examine whether participants' levels of shame&mdash; and guilt-proneness were predicted by their levels of individuation. Correlations between guilt-proneness and individuation were not consistent, but when significant correlations emerged, they were in the predicted direction of more guilt-proneness being linked to greater individuation. Shame-proneness negatively correlated with indivuation, and most strongly amongst older emerging adults. Finally, the relationship between parenting behaviors and guilt-proneness, but not shame-proneness, was moderated by individuation. These results emphasize the importance of separating shame and guilt in assessments of these two constructs. Additionally, they deepen an understanding of the role of socialization and developmental factors in shaping the experiences of shame and guilt. </p>

Suicide is a serious problem in our society with a high emotional, as well as financial, burden. Research has identified a number of risk factors for suicidal behaviour, including the presence of psychiatric diagnosis, and the comorbidity of psychiatric diagnosis. In particular, high lifetime aggression and impulsiveness have repeatedly been implicated as risk factors for suicidal behaviour, and have also been observed to cluster in families. This study investigates the phenotype of suicide completion through exploration of comorbid patterns of psychopathology and seasonality in order to gain a better understanding of possible subgroups of suicide completers, particularly with respect to impulsive-aggressive behaviours and their psychopathological correlates. This study also explores the familiality of suicidal behaviour, and its relationship to impulsive-aggressive behaviours and their psychopathological correlates. Our findings show that suicide cases can be clustered into three different groups according comorbidity: a low-comorbidity group, a substance-dependent group, and a group exhibiting childhood onset of psychopathology. We also find that seasonal variation in suicide varies according to psychopathology. Finally, we confirm that suicide has a familial component independent of psychopathology, and find evidence to suggest that this may be mediated by severity of suicidal ideation, and aggressive behaviour.

Family members have been observed to cope with the losses inherent in terminal illness by grieving. Little is known, however, about the factors which influence their grieving before the death of a significant other. This paper describes an exploratory, cross-sectional, correlational study designed to examine the relationships among general coping style, hope, and anticipatory grief in a convenience sample of 61 family members of individuals with terminal cancer. The organizing framework for this study was based on grief theory, Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) theory of stress and coping, and Davies, Reimer, and Martens' (1990) transition framework. Data were collected by a four-part questionnaire comprising the Jalowiec Coping Scale (Jalowiec, 1987), the Herth Hope Index (Herth, 1991), the Non-Death Version of the Grief Experience Inventory (Sanders, Mauger, & Strong, 1985), and a background information sheet developed by the researcher. Findings revealed that family members experienced individual anticipatory grief patterns. Women experienced more despair and anger/hostility than men. Adult children, more highly educated family members, individuals not living with the ill person, and non-primary caregivers expressed more anger/hostility. Multiple regression results showed that emotive coping and hope accounted for significant proportions of the variance in despair, somatization, and loss of control. Emotive coping contributed significant variation in anger/hostility, whereas lack of hope accounted for a significant amount of the variation in social isolation. Neither the general coping styles nor hope significantly predicted death anxiety. Suggestions for research and nursing were indicated.