This study aimed to contribute to the small evidence-base on the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme. SEAL is a school-based approach to developing children’s social and emotional skills. It was launched by the government in 2005 and has been adopted by schools across the UK. This study focused on the small group aspect of SEAL, which is aimed at children who are targeted for additional practice with their social and emotional skills. The researcher used a non-equivalent control group quasi-experimental design to evaluate the effectiveness of two of the small group SEAL interventions, New Beginnings and Getting On and Falling Out. Pupils, parents and teachers completed questionnaires before and after the interventions and, in the case of New Beginnings, around six weeks after the intervention ended. The level of fidelity to the government guidance was assessed through observations and interviews. No positive results were found for the New Beginnings intervention group in comparison with the control group, but there was some support for the Getting On and Falling Out intervention; with improvements in teacher-rated empathy, total emotional literacy and pro-social behaviour. In common with previous research, no effects were found for parent-ratings or for children who had been selected to take part in the interventions as role models. The results are discussed in terms of implications for practitioner educational psychologists and suggestions are made for further studies in this under-researched area.

This is a thesis about the relationship between gender policy and practice in South Africa, and its effects. Gender is a concept widely used in development policy, but little attention has been paid to precisely how development agents use gender policy in their practice. As a result, we know little about the significance or meanings practitioners attribute to gender policy, or how development actors adapt, transform or manipulate gender policy in their everyday work. Gaps in knowledge about how gender policy is put into practice in specific contexts have led to gaps in knowledge about what effects gender policy has on the politics of gender. This brings about two aims for this study: (1) to map the relationship between gender and development policy and practice in South Africa, and (2) to explore the effects of gender policy on gender politics. Following a multisite approach, this study looks at gender policy as a collection of ‘contested narratives’ (Shore & Wright 1997) about gender. The findings point to a conflict between three different policy frames being drawn on by policy actors as they try to assert their own understanding of gender, define the ‘problem’ that exists and the policies that are needed to solve it. This conflict may diminish the potential for a collective social movement for gender issues in South Africa. However, practitioners are not powerless implementers of policy, but rather use gender policy strategically in their practice by adopting, transforming and manipulating policy frames in a range of different tactical manoeuvres to suit their own objectives. Identifying the tactical manoeuvres being used by development practitioners in South Africa contributes new understandings of the fragmented ways that an alternative gender politics is currently being advanced by practitioners in this context.

This thesis aims to explain why there is a high level of unmet need for contraception in Cambodia - a country where effective methods of birth control are cheaply available and morally acceptable. The research design takes a mixed methods approach, initially using data from the Cambodian Demographic and Health Surveys of 2000 and 2005 to assess trends in contraceptive use. Multivariate logistic regression is used to analyse factors associated with, firstly, unmet need, and secondly, use of traditional contraceptive methods. The likelihood of having an unmet need for contraception increased as education and wealth levels decreased; urban or rural residence had no significant effect. However, the likelihood of using traditional methods, rather than modern methods, increased as education and wealth increased. Taking these findings and the questions they raise as a departure point, 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in one urban and one rural site in Northwest Cambodia between 2008 and 2010. The study looks at women’s and men’s reproductive decision making with a focus on their experiences of and meanings given to contraception, situating these understandings within the broader social context. Fear of side effects, stemming from both contraceptive experiences and notions of health and the body, was found to be the greatest obstacle to use of modern contraceptives. This related more broadly to the pluralistic medical systems operating simultaneously and the varying levels of medicalization and trust in both biomedicine and the Cambodian health system. Behaviour that seemed counter-intuitive at the outset - not wanting to become pregnant but not using contraception, and wealthy educated women choosing traditional over modern methods – becomes understandable in light of the context and meanings highlighted by the ethnographic data. This thesis provides a unique empirical study which contributes to the emerging field of anthropological demography. By bringing approaches and methods from medical anthropology to the typically demographic phenomenon of unmet need, the study provides a new insight for social policies regarding reproductive health as well as contributing to the body of ethnographic literature on Cambodia.

Taking as a starting point the assumption that justice is the first virtue of the family, my main aim in this dissertation is to offer an account of what justice requires of parents. Grappling with this issue, however, sheds some light on related questions that are wider in scope: How should we think about justice in general? What is the distinctive value of the family? What would a society of just families look like? In answering these questions, the following thesis is advanced: Demands of justice are best understood contextually. They arise from the characteristics of the specific relationship in the context within which they are meant to apply. An account of justice in the family should thus appeal to the parent–child relationship itself. This is an intimate fiduciary relationship that normally constitutes the primary site of upbringing. Yet what makes it distinctively valuable is its element of identity, i.e., a sense of interconnectedness and continuity generated through the transmission of beliefs, practices and more idiosyncratic attributes from parent to child. Corresponding to this understanding of the parent–child relationship, justice requires parents to provide their children with the conditions to achieve a set of functionings up to the level that allows them to lead a decent life in terms of the parents’ social and cultural context. As this account of justice in the family is not strictly political, it gives rise to a complex interplay along the axis of citizens–parents–children, displaying formulae of both integration and separation of family and state. A society of perfectly just families might not be perfectly just as a whole. Yet it may be interpreted as particularly liberal; characterized by multiplication and separation of authorities, reflecting rather than resolving the tensions between the individual and society and between different individuals and groups within society.

This thesis sets out to investigate the techniques and strategies used by members of the seduction community to perform masculinity, using as its primary sources material produced by the community ranging from published texts to online commentary. The research is interdisciplinary and incorporates theoretical frameworks drawn from performance studies, semiotics and cultural studies, sociology, literary theory and gender studies. The first chapter explains the origins and operations of the seduction community, positioning it as a force that regulates performances of masculinity and depends upon teamwork and co-operation in order to function. The second chapter discusses the community's dual understanding of masculinity as a construct open to adaptation and change, and also as an innate and natural category. This tension is addressed through an analysis of power relations evident through narcissism and self-display, and a reliance on the suppression of non-masculine elements through homosociality, and performances of leadership based upon embodied expertise. This leads me to conclude that the seduction community may be a heterosexual pretext for building fulfilling homosocial relations. The final chapter addresses how women and femininity are imagined in the community, specifically as inferior and in many ways incomplete without masculine intervention, an attitude which reflects broader social trends. Of particular importance here are the devaluation of female speech and sexuality and the imagining of sex as a commodity. The thesis argues that where women themselves appropriate the language and techniques of the seduction community, this is presented as complicity with conventional gender norms, but also a potential route to individual empowerment through learning to manage relationships more effectively.

This feminist study of younger and older mothers in the UK analyses the way both groups present and practice moral selves in the context of dominant discourses of good motherhood. Qualitative data were generated during a year of fieldwork, involving repeated in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation, with mothers who had their first child when particularly younger or older than average. This methodology allowed me to investigate how the mothers present their moral selves through personal accounts and good mothering practices, as well as how they negotiate discourses of a ‘right’ time for motherhood. The overall contribution of the thesis lies in developing a feminist critique of intensive mothering which also recognizes the significance of mothering as a key site for the construction of gendered and classed moral selves. My thesis demonstrates that the categories of age, social class and gender intersect to powerfully shape mothers’ constructions and performances of their moral maternal selves. For example, I argue that the normalization of the child-focused mother gives the older mothers, all middle-class, greater scope to achieve moral superiority than the younger mothers, almost all working-class. Indeed, throughout the thesis my analysis points to the ways in which mothers engage in practices of ‘othering’ to claim good motherhood. The thesis also develops a multi-dimensional conceptualization of time, which allows me to convey the complex connections between biological, social, biographical and generational times in mothers’ accounts. I conclude by suggesting that the moral script of ‘child’s needs first’ needs to be contested for new alternative meanings of good mothering to emerge which go beyond the autonomy-dependency model.

This thesis is about the meanings that children aged 8-10 years old attribute to family and close relationships. The thesis focuses on how children’s normative expectations about family relate to their lived experiences of family life and relationships. It is based on data from a school-based field study, combining participant observation, interviews, children’s drawings, visits to children’s family homes, and the children’s production of books about their families. The research took place over nineteen months. Its contribution to knowledge lies in a new theoretical framework, combining insights from family and childhood sociology, for the purpose of examining children’s constitution of family. The thesis demonstrates that children conceive of family as a meaningful and highly valued set of relationships, challenging the notion that the concept of ‘family’ has lost its sociological and analytical significance. This thesis illustrates that children consider the family as those people with whom they feel a sense of belonging; a feeling that was achieved across a range of family forms. This conceptualisation of belonging departs from traditional conceptualisations in encompassing face-to-face contact as an important element of belonging to a family. The thesis concludes that an emphasis on children feeling part of a family is more productive than the present policy focus on maintaining nuclear family forms. Particular attention is given to how children identify visible forms of relatedness, through surname, cohabitation and through family members ‘displaying’ family-like relationships and family photographs.

This thesis offers insight into the lives and lived (sporting) experiences of 20 British born Muslim women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. [In the interests of anonymity, pseudonyms have been used throughout this thesis.] They comprise working professionals and students who live in the urban diaspora community of Stratley, UK, and have been playing basketball in their local community since April 2007. Adopting a post-colonial feminist philosophical consciousness, this qualitative ethnographic study centralises the voices of subjects who are both pathologised in media-hyped discourses pertaining to the ‘Islamic peril’, and truncated by the affront of fundamentalist Islam. It does this by addressing four inter-related research questions. The first asks how membership of urban diasporic communities contributes to British Muslim women’s self-identifications and whether living in such spaces shapes the nature and context of women’s (social) lives and their entry to sport. The second question explores the extents to which British Muslim women are able to activate a ‘politics of difference’ to (re)-negotiate their access to sport. The third question centralises the complex identity politics of being ‘British Muslims’ and assesses, in particular, whether my respondents’ sporting ambitions have any impact on their identity work as ‘British born’ Muslim women who are of a migrant heritage. The fourth question also addresses British Muslim women’s sense of self, but investigates, in particular, whether playing basketball has any impact on the ‘self/bodywork’ of single, heterosexual ‘British-born’ Muslim women of a migrant heritage. Drawing upon critical literatures rooted in post-colonial, Asian and Islamic feminism the study contextualises the conditions of post-colonialism for Muslim individuals in Britain, especially Muslim women. It also focuses upon debates pertaining to Muslim women and sport. By privileging marginal epistemologies that have often been silenced or distorted through essentialist, uncritical and simplistic understandings of ‘Muslim women’, findings advance arguments about the lives, lifestyles and identities of subjects whose social, gendered, cultural and religious authenticities beneath the (body) veil evoke both sensitive questions and global concerns (especially in the aftermath of 9/11). The overall discussion brings into sharp focus the collective and subjective struggles of respondents in terms of their identity re/construction. I allude to the agentic capacity which my respondents had to re-constitute and re-negotiate aspects of their day-to-day lives, their engagement with sport, their identities and their bodies. I exemplify the myriad ways and extents to which my participants struggle against multiple material constraints that impose a particular ‘identity’ upon Muslim women and enforce a way of life upon them that restricts their access to sports. The thesis concludes that those frequently depicted as being oppressed and voiceless do indeed have the power to relationally make, unmake and/or remake their selfhoods.

There has been considerable interest and sometimes concern for teenage parents. This interest has developed for two reasons, firstly, it has been viewed that teenage parents are inappropriately young to have children, and secondly, it has popularly been thought that the number of female teenagers becoming pregnant and subsequently giving birth to children has dramatically increased over the last twenty years. Much of this attention has focused on the young mother, because she has been thought to shoulder the major responsibility for looking after the child. This is not untypical of research on parenting which has adopted a mother biased approach, although there has been a more recent interest in the fathers. The object of this study was to examine the experiences of one hundred young fathers, aged seventeen to twenty two, who were regularly involved with their infant. The fathers were interviewed at home and data was collected on all aspects of their family participation. Younger fathers appeared to be an extremely disadvantaged group, many had few or no formal qualifications and during a period of high general unemployment a disproportionate number of the sample were unemployed. The financial responsibilities of fatherhood placed added burdens on this group and restricted many of the opportunities that should have been available to men of this age. Contrary to popular opinion the young fathers interviewed often had long standing relationships with the mother and were highly psychologically involved with their children; although they were not always highly participant in child care activities. As with research on older fathers, younger fathers were shown not to take on the major responsibilities of caring for children, even though some (those who were unemployed) had a greater opportunity to do so. They reported being interested and involved at every stage of the child's life, even during the periods when circumstances made it more difficult for them to be highly participant; the nature of this involvement changed as the needs of the mother and the child altered. However because of their age, and as a consequence their lack of preparation, many young fathers and mothers had to negotiate a turbulent period which was sometimes very stressful. This study suggests that although being young in itself does not necessarily cause younger parents to be qualitatively different from older parents, it does indicate that they face more problems which because of their age they may be more vulnerable to.

This study explores the impact of a Confucian Welfare Regime upon lone mothers in Taiwan, where the family is promoted as the major welfare provider for individuals. Since the 1980s, politicians and welfare scholars --whether New Right or Third-Way-- in the West, particularly in the UK, have been very keen to draw lessons from the Confucian Welfare Model in East Asia. The characteristics of this welfare regime are categorised as "conservative corporatism without Western-style worker participation, solidarity without equality, laissez-faire without libertarianism, far too much social control but too little citizenship, far too little state intervention in welfare provision but too much familial welfare responsibilities"(e. g., Jones 1993). The Confucian Welfare State is in fact much deeply familialised, and the family is "the super-major welfare provider" compared to Western welfare states. This thesis will examine the Confucian Welfare Regime from the point of views of gender, and will argue that its distinctive fractures cannot be understood within existing Western comparative typologies and have not been adequately analysed in East Asian studies. How do lone mothers meet their needs within this deeply familialised welfare regime in comparison with lone fathers? In search of an answer, a qualitative approach, a feminist perspective and an East Asian standpoint were employed to conduct this study in the form of semi-structured interviews in the Taiwanese Confucian social context. The participants included 30 lone mothers and 10 lone fathers with unmarried dependent children undertaking full-time education. The situation of lone parents in combining unpaid care work: and paid work makes them a strong case for understanding the gendering of welfare regimes in the West and in East Asia. Thus the Mother-Worker-Family-Outsider Welfare Regime is created on the basis of women's' status as lifetime family outsiders in the Taiwanese social context. An understanding of this specific Confucian cultural arena is essential if we are to appreciate the situation of lone mothers-and its difference from that of lone fathers-in Taiwan. The main findings of this study confirm that the deeply familialised welfare provision affects women and men differently under the Generation-Age-Gender hierarchy of the Confucian family. The family, as the main welfare provider, is more likely to be effective for lone fathers, who are provided with more accessible childcare, childrearing, housework services, housing, financial investment and resources. They also benefit more from this familial provision to support their continuous employment experience, better career prospects and better entitlement to employment protection. But, in contrast, for the lone mothers in this study, the Confucian family is more likely to be the centre of care responsibilities for young and old, the heart of endless unpaid housework, the battlefield of domestic confrontations and sexual harassment, and the alter of sacrifice of individual well-being. The failure of the family in welfare provision also worsens the situation of lone mothers in- the labour market in terms of interrupted career, -low, wages, lower position in 'occupational hierarchy, more dead-end jobs, and more part-time work, and no or less employment protection. As a consequence of these inequalities the solutions for lone mothers are very different from those for lone fathers in this study. Thus, lone father see the reconstitution of the family via remarriage as their best solution. The retreat from marriage and the family is preferred by most lone mothers, who maintain their current status permanently. And the strategies of improving their human capital via more advanced education, establishing self-employed small business and undertaking extra part-time jobs with full-time work are adopted in order to combine mothering and rice-winning. These disadvantages experienced by lone mothers, seldom by lone fathers, have to be taken seriously into account in response to lone mothers' hopes of being equal and permanent lone parents, fully protected workers and full individual citizens. Therefore, the Mother-Worker-Family-Outsider Welfare Model needs to be transformed into the Parent-Worker-Full-Individual-Citizen Welfare Model based on the notion of "full individual citizens as parents and workers" instead of "family outsiders as selectively protected workers and non-recognised parents", by shifting welfare responsibilities from the family and the market onto the State.