This study investigates the ways in which the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme is being implemented and maintained within the context of a first school identified as an example of good practice using a Realistic Evaluation approach. The findings are used to inform the development of a Programme Specification relating to SEAL implementation. Methods employed to gather this information included interviewing school staff and parents, a focus group with pupils, observations, and analysis of SEAL documents and artefacts. The findings have emphasised the importance of a supportive school ethos, a high level of interaction across the school context including promotion of ‘social time’ for pupils and staff, integration of SEAL across all school activities, and a high level of consistency in approach to behaviour and teaching of social and emotional skills across all staff. Specific aspects of the role of the SEAL Coordinator, and specific characteristics of members of staff delivering SEAL have also been highlighted as important in order to allow the mechanisms to function effectively. Through using a Realistic Evaluation framework for the research, it is hoped that the theory (or Programme Specification) developed will be of relevance and applicability to other settings, in order that understanding and knowledge about SEAL implementation can be further developed through future research studies.

For over a century, several minority caste groups have suffered discrimination in eastern Nigeria. They include former slaves and servant groups known as osu or ohu as well as other names and are generally referred to as caste groups. Forbidden to associate freely with the freeborn, these groups still maintain their stigma. The origins of the caste groups lie in the past. However, after 1900, they started to struggle for emancipation. Since then, discrimination against them has been abolished many times. Yet the practice remains persistent. At the same time, the discrimination against the caste groups continues to exercise the public and private imagination and it is depicted and discussed in various ways in the media, from newspapers to films and even in internet forums. Using oral sources and commentaries in the media, this thesis argues that Igbo socio-political life has continued to sustain this practice even as it pretends to reject it. The general attitude to discrimination against the caste groups has been that it is barbaric. Yet, the freeborn still find it difficult to embrace them. Reasons for this include a range of fears, but most importantly fear of social ostracism. The thesis argues that the media has engaged in the struggle to change the situation by providing a platform for debate about the practice. However, this has had little impact because of the nature of Igbo socio-political life.

This study examines how backpacking, an activity originating from Western societies, is perceived and practised by the post-1980s generation in China. By locating backpackers’ travel experiences within the context of the circumstances of their life and relating it to wider society, this study not only illustrates the changes and diversity of backpacker culture by providing empirical evidence from China, but also shows how the younger generation living through substantial social transformation reflect on themselves and wider society. This research employs qualitative methods, exploring Chinese backpackers’ characters and life choices, as well as the emergence of backpacking within China. There are two key questions for this study: firstly, how is backpacking perceived and practised by young Chinese people? Secondly, are there any differences among young backpackers regarding travel motivations and life attitudes? Yunnan Province is the primary fieldwork site, and two field trips were conducted there in 2014 and 2015. Thirty semi-structured in-depth interviews with backpackers were conducted in order to examine young backpackers’ travel experiences, as well as their personal life attitudes. Participant observation was also employed as a way to investigate backpackers’ interaction and travel behaviours. Six focus groups, made up of non-backpackers, offer comparative perspectives regarding backpacking from young people who share similar social circumstances and cultural context with travellers. This study reveals that the popularity of backpacking can be understood as primarily due to how the activity represents ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ within the context of China. Backpacking is not merely a consumption-led mobility, but also widely employed as a process of reflexive awareness by young Chinese people. Four types of backpackers, namely the amateur, the dreamer, the escaper and the alternative seeker, are identified by this study, indicating the diversity of backpacking in China. The amateur and the dreamer acknowledge the vital role of home and consistent and stable employment in their lives; as a result, backpacking is adopted as a way to escape from the daily routine and find self-fulfilment through a meaningful activity. However, the escaper and the alternative seeker tend to question mainstream values and the traditional expectations and conventions; accordingly, their journeys seek to examine the self and help find a personal way to measure success and happiness in lives. Particularly, alternative seekers find life on the road more interesting than a stable life in a city. Accordingly, they extend backpacking to a way of living and develop their own individual routines. Backpacking becomes a debate amongst young people regarding the norms and values of a worthwhile life, and reflects the profound cultural and social change taking place within contemporary China. Traditional expectations and conventions, namely stages within one’s life, such as getting a job, settling down in a city, getting married and having children, are questioned and challenged. Most participants in this study are understood to possess respect for backpackers who pursue freedom and their dreams, as ‘freedom’ is perceived to represent strong individual capabilities and critical thinking. However, they also realise that anxiety consistently accompanies this freedom, particularly within an individualised society such as China’s. In general, the conflict between individual interests/desires and the family/social obligations is highlighted by participants. As a result, the term ‘staged individualism’ is coined by this study, demonstrating how the Chinese path of individualism may force the young generation to separate their lives into different stages, defining different purposes for each stage, as a way to balance individual interests/desires and family/social obligations.

This thesis presents a comprehensive institutional analysis of China’s urban tap water provision system from a ‘source to sip’ holistic research perspective. With the examination of each agent’s function in the system, this thesis coins the concepts of semi-potable tap water and Hybrid Institutional Architecture to illustrate the essence of China’s urban water provision system as a ‘source to consumer’ semi-potable tap water provision system. Based on this argument, the concept of Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix is established with analyses of its seven facilitating factors to explain Chinese tap water consumers’ involvement in the potable water production. Their activities have established a ‘consumer to sip’ potable water production process, functioning as a compensation to ‘source to consumer’ urban semi-potable tap water provision system. The combination of these two systems is a ‘source to sip’ urban potable tap water provision system. This thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the three institutional inconsistencies in this system, arguing that they have filled the Hybrid Institutional Architecture with internal inconsistencies, which makes semi-potable tap water an inevitable outcome of Hybrid Institutional Architecture. Meanwhile, this thesis illustrates the concept of Consumer’s Normalisation to semi-potable tap water, the Hybrid Institutional Architecture and Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix, arguing that such normalisation has disguises and justified not only the existence of the aforementioned concepts, but also the existence of the latent social injustice and consumer’s powerlessness. All of these analyses contribute to the form of consumer’s institutional distrust in semi-potable tap water. With this institutionalised distrust, an imbalanced dialectical relationship between the Hybrid Institutional Architecture, the Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix and water crises will turn consumer into the trigger of sociogenic water sustainability crises. A detailed case study of Harbin is presented to demonstrate the two sociogenic water sustainability crises occurred in Harbin with archival data and the establishments of contingent combination model, and the Hybrid Institutional Architecture of Harbin’s urban tap water provision system with examining interview materials from four senior officials of key departments.

This thesis addresses the question of how structural and perceived privilege impact on political participation in the United Kingdom. In doing so it adopts the causal propositions of the Civic Voluntarism Model as its starting point and adds Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social, and cultural capital, which are argued to encompass structural privilege. Perception of privilege is posited to be constituted by self-perceived status, explanations for that status, and explanations for status differences in society. Subsequent politically relevant components are perceptions of the difference and privilege of politically active people. Thus, the thesis proposes a model running from background characteristics through capital profiles to perception of privilege and thence political engagement and participation. An original survey covering these areas was designed and fielded online to a representative sample of 1,480 British adults. The resultant data is analysed using structural equation modelling, which allows for the simultaneous estimation of underlying tendencies and the structural relationship between them. The results of that model generally support the causal hypotheses of the research, as well as providing evidence of the impact of the three forms of capital and perception of privilege. In particular, a strong positive effect of legitimate cultural capital is observed and found to be more important in influencing political participation than the previously observed effects of social and economic capital. In addition, perception of privilege is found to promote participation and to channel people towards individualised political activities, especially where they subscribe to the fundamental attribution error. These effects are as hypothesised and confirm the role of both structural and perceived privilege in influencing political participation in the United Kingdom.

Migration is a political issue that has received more attention in recent years. Many questions remain as to how Western societies can successfully absorb migrants- economic arguments have largely been in favour of migration, but the social impact of diversity in previously homogeneous societies has been subject to ongoing debates in social science. Migrant societies are complex social systems with many interacting moving parts. How do rapid migration-changes in society affect the hosts? How do norms of tolerance towards minorities hold up when intergroup con icts emerge? Can segregating behaviour of different population groups be reduced by encouraging different settlement locations for new migrants? The questions address both the physical aspect of migrants entering an already populated space, and the social dimension in which the hosts are adapting their attitudes. I develop a Schelling model using Agent-based modelling to address these questions. I introduce the concept of external migration into an existing society and test how, by varying the kind of migration, introducing diversity affects local tolerance. In the second chapter, I show that large-scale migration results in short-term shocks to the populace, but that these effects are heavily dependent on the population density and how large the native majority is. In Chapter 3 I implement a version of the `contact hypothesis' which stipulates that contact with out-group members increases tolerance and I show that the adaptability increases the importance of native majorities further. In the fourth chapter, I move on to the social norms of tolerance, introducing an ABM in which agents can deceive others by signalling false information about their true attitudes. I show that the emergent pattern of these behaviours can lead to a false consensus effect in which the perceived majority public opinion is unstable. The thesis is able to generate societies that bear many similarities with the Western countries of today and can suggest explanations for the mechanisms that lead to changes in public opinion more negative towards migration, as well as reasons for growing separation of different population groups.

This thesis examines the issue of police response to domestic violence. It advances theory on this topic by applying the concept of coercive control to better understand the risk profile of domestic violence that comes to the attention of the police, and police officers’ use of discretion when identifying, recording and responding to domestic violence incidents. The research questions for the thesis are:(1) Can cases of coercive control be identified in national population surveys, and, if so, to what extent is coercive control gendered and more harmful than other forms of domestic violence?, (2) Is coercive control the most common form of domestic violence reported to the police?, (3) What degree of discretion do officers exercise when responding to cases of domestic violence?, and (4) What factors influence police officers’ responses at the scene of incidents of domestic violence? The thesis is structured around four published journal papers. Paper 1 uses national population survey data to show that coercive control is experienced primarily by women, and is more harmful than other forms of domestic violence. Paper 2 uses data from risk assessments to show that coercive control is the most common form of domestic violence that comes to the attention of the police. Using data from force systems, Paper 3 suggests frontline officers retain considerable discretion in relation to identifying and recording cases of domestic violence. Paper 4 uses in-depth interviews with officers alongside case-files to suggest that while officers are now more aware of policies such as presumptive arrest they are prepared to ignore such policies when they believe an incident is not serious; officers’ conceptions of what is serious were primarily incidents that involved physical violence and injury. I conclude that legislation to criminalise coercive control presents an opportunity to change officers’ conceptions of domestic violence and what constitutes threat and risk. I call for a reconceptualisation of the research agenda on domestic violence to focus initially on observational study in order to understand better the factors that influence police response.

The present thesis has focused on helping behaviour towards disadvantaged outgroups. Research was done at an intergroup level, and obtained its theoretical foundation from the Social Identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), self-categorization theory (Turner, 1985; Turner et al., 1987) and the empathy-altruism model (Batson, 1987, 1991; Batson et al., 1989; Batson & Shaw, 1991) and focused on the influence of identity content and ingroup norms in investigating outgroup helping. Experiments were carried out concerning different instances that could affect outgroup helping and were centred around social identity and identity content, accountability, intragroup power and empathy towards the outgroup. The first two studies focused on the role of particular identities in terms of the Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). In experiment 1 it was found that people regulate their empathy towards beggars by their non-salient religious identity when they are together with others. The presence of others such as friends and partner, who are aware of the participant‘s religious identity, could possibly evoke accountability concerns, which are then reflected in empathy and prosocial behaviour towards a disadvantaged group. In experiment 2 a salient political identity only led to pro-social behavioural preferences and empathy towards beggars for those with left-wing identities; as opposed to those with a right wing preference. Concluding, the content of ideologically-defined identities (religious, political) served to regulate empathy and prosocial behaviour, but the salience of these identities could play a crucial mediating role in certain contexts. The plausible effect of accountability was further investigated in experiments 3 and 3a. Unfortunately no conclusive results were found. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the role of intragroup power on outgroup helping. Results showed that people with high intragroup power either affect the prosocial behaviour of people that are less certain of their political preference compared to people who are certain of their political preference, possibly due to processes in accordance with the social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) and intragroup differentiation (experiment 4), or were found to be less prosocial towards an outgroup (experiment 5) than people with lower intragroup power. Finally in experiment 6 and 7, research was directed towards intergroup awareness and empathy. Experiment 6 demonstrated that an outgroup will be perceived with more empathy and prosocial behaviour when awareness of the outgroup is high than when awareness of the outgroup is low. In experiment 7, people high in empathy towards a disadvantaged outgroup were more willing to allocate money to the outgroup than people lower in empathy. Overall, the results of the experiments in the subsequent chapters led to believe that ingroup identity and content, and ingroup norms are feasible with regard to helping a certain disadvantaged outgroup. These findings fit with the theories of social identity and self categorization, given that feeling and behaving according to ingroup norms is the objective, and suggesting that people each have a variety of different identities, which become activated in different social contexts. Furthermore inducing empathy towards an outgroup seemed to be an useful tool to promote helping behaviour towards an outgroup.

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Ten experiments examined the way that automatic processing of the visual perspectives and eye gaze of others affects adults‘ perception and encoding of the social world. I investigated the amount of flexibility that automatic visual perspective computation accommodates. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 demonstrate that automatic visual perspective-computation shows some flexibility for enumerating and representing perspective contents. Experiments 4 and 5 further indicate that automatic visual perspective-taking allows selection of relevant perspective information. I also examined whether observing others‘ eye gaze affects adults‘ visual working memory encoding. Experiments 6, 7, and 8 indicate that agents‘ object-oriented gaze does not lead to more efficient encoding of agent and object information. Experiments 9 and 10 demonstrate that observing others‘ participant-oriented gaze disrupts visual working memory encoding. I argue that although adults have minimal conscious control over the activation of visual perspective-computation and processing of participantoriented gaze, the efficient mindreading system shows some flexibility.