This study explored the views of patients, carers and staff within one UK hospice on talking about preferred place of death (PPD). The UK Government's End of Life Care Strategy (EOLC, 2008) states that patients' PPD should be identified, documented and reviewed; yet the hospice in this study did not systematically record such information. It was, therefore, important to ask questions about patient, carer and staff views on PPD as this had not yet been explored. Hence the aims of this exploratory study were to: • Explore key considerations about PPD from the perspectives of hospice patients, carers and staff • Generate theory about the participants’ experience of PPD The methodology of constructivist grounded theory enabled a substantive theory to be generated which offered an interpretative explanation of the participants’ concerns regarding PPD. Data collection methods of focus groups amongst hospice staff, and semi-structured interviews with hospice patients and carers, captured the views of a cross-section of people within the hospice context. The grounded theory demonstrated that recording the patient’s PPD is a means of ‘Enabling the Patient Voice to be Heard’. The ways in which the grounded theory impacts the end of life care landscape were explored including questions around contemporary societal discourses on death; current end of life planning; communication issues at the end of life; health service provision and the roles of healthcare professionals, patients and carers. A reflexive account of the research process and the limitations of the study are also presented. The unique contribution of the study is stated and recommendations for further work are suggested.

This dissertation seeks to discern the impact of social housing on public health in the cities of Glasgow, Scotland and Baltimore, Maryland in the twentieth century. Additionally, this dissertation seeks to compare the impact of social housing policy implementation in both cities, to determine the efficacy of social housing as a tool of public health betterment. This is accomplished through the exposition and evaluation of the housing and health trends of both cities over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the cities of Glasgow and Baltimore had long struggled with both overcrowded slum districts and relatively unhealthy populations. Early commentators had noticed the connection between insanitary housing and poor health, and sought a solution to both of these problems. Beginning in the 1940s, housing reform advocates (self-dubbed ‘housers') pressed for the development of social housing, or municipally-controlled housing for low-income persons, to alleviate the problems of overcrowded slum dwellings in both cities. The impetus for social housing was twofold: to provide affordable housing to low-income persons and to provide housing that would facilitate healthy lives for tenants. Whether social housing achieved these goals is the crux of this dissertation. In the immediate years following the Second World War, social housing was built en masse in both cities. Social housing provided a reprieve from slum housing for both working-class Glaswegians and Baltimoreans. In Baltimore specifically, social housing provided accommodation for the city’s Black residents, who found it difficult to occupy housing in White neighbourhoods. As the years progressed, social housing developments in both cities faced unexpected problems. In Glasgow, stable tenant flight (including both middle class and skilled artisan workers)+ resulted in a concentration of poverty in the city’s housing schemes, and in Baltimore, a flight of White tenants of all income levels created a new kind of state subsidized segregated housing stock. The implementation of high-rise tower blocks in both cities, once heralded as a symbol of housing modernity, also faced increased scrutiny in the 1960s and 1970s. During the period of 1940-1980, before policy makers in the United States began to eschew social housing for subsidized private housing vouchers and community based housing associations had truly taken off in Britain, public health professionals conducted academic studies of the impact of social housing tenancy on health. Their findings provide the evidence used to assess the second objective of social housing provision, as outlined above. Put simply, while social housing units were undoubtedly better equipped than slum dwellings in both cities, the public health investigations into the impact of rehousing slum dwellers into social housing revealed that social housing was not a panacea for each city’s social and public health problems.

Multidimensional deprivation and persistent poverty are important research areas within the poverty measurement literature. Still, both encompass measurement issues for which methodological solutions are yet to be analysed. The thesis that I present here analyses three specific measurement issues, identified as relevant within these research areas, and proposes methodological approaches to tackle each of them. First, it evaluates the effect of different demographic population structures on societal multidimensional deprivation incidence comparisons. The results of this evaluation demonstrate that societal multidimensional comparisons reflect not only differences in relative deprivation but also differences in the demographic composition of the societies to be compared. These differences in the demographic structure of the population, thus, confound societal multidimensional deprivation comparisons. To tackle this comparability problem, the application of direct and indirect standardisation methods is proposed and analysed in this context. Second, it studies the effect of differences in need, exhibited across individuals from different demographic population subgroups or households of different sizes and compositions, on multidimensional deprivation incidence profiles. To address differences in needs and enhance individual or household comparability, I propose a family of multidimensional deprivation indices that describes how much deprivation two demographically heterogeneous units with different needs must exhibit to be catalogued as equivalently deprived. The obtained empirical results demonstrate that neglecting differences in needs yields biased multidimensional deprivation incidence profiles. The results also shed light on the ability of my proposed family of measures to capture these differences in need effectively. Third, this thesis analyses the reliability of persistent poverty measures in the presence of survey non-response. The obtained empirical results indicate that persistent poverty measures based on balanced panel estimates that do not account for the relationship between survey non-response and the socioeconomic status of the household provide a significantly biased picture of the intertemporal phenomenon. The methodologies that I present in this thesis are meant foremost to be easy to implement and understand by policymakers. As such, they are proposed as methodological tools to improve the measurement and analysis of poverty in the policy context.

The following three chapters aim to explore the process of individual transition from prison to the community. In the United States of America (U.S) the transition from prison to the community is called re-entry. The term describes the process of leaving prison and returning to the community. Re-entry is not a form of supervision or legal status and all prisoners, other than those who never leave prison, experience re-entry. The body of research addressing offender re-entry in the U.S has been steadily increasing over the last ten years (Arditti & Parkman, 2011; Petersilia & Travis, 2001; Visher & Travis, 2003). Much of the early literature focused on recidivism in adults (Langan & Levin, 2002; Tracy & Kempf-Leonard, 1996) but there has been an increase in attention on longitudinal studies that aim to understand the processes involved in reintegration. This research addresses individual change in relation to desistance in the U.S (Bushway et al., 2001; Laub & Sampson, 2001). There is less research on adult re-entry in the United Kingdom (U.K) possibly due to lower rates of imprisonment compared to the U.S. Differences between the U.S and U.K justice systems mean it is difficult to generalise research findings relating to individual experience across continents. Only a handful of studies focus on young people’s re-entry in the U.K (Meek, 2007; Barry, 2010; Champion & Clare, 2006) and there is none that tries to understand the experience of transition from juvenile custodial services to community youth justice services for young people. The following three chapters aim to contribute to this area of research. Each of the chapters is presented as a standalone component that adds to this shared area of research. The three components summarised below are as follows: firstly a systematic review of all the current published research aims to understand the experience of re-entry for all age-groups; secondly a qualitative empirical paper explores the meaning and impact of transition for young people; finally a concluding discussion extends the dialogue about the empirical research findings. It also provides a lay summary of the empirical study for young people and presents a future research proposal which would extend the empirical research. Chapter 1 presents a systematic review addressing the question: what is the experience of transition from custody to community for young people? Due to the limited research exploring young people’s re-entry, literature addressing the adult re-entry experience was included in this review. After initial scoping of several research databases, three were searched following PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews) statement guidelines (Moher et al., 2009). A total of 835 studies were initially retrieved, of which 10 articles met the inclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis of their findings is presented. The literature suggests several common themes that are important in understanding the meaning and impact of transition from custody to the community. These include social components, such as accommodation and interpersonal relationships and psychological components, such as identity and coping skills. The literature acknowledges that there are differences between adults and young people experiencing re-entry, possibly related to developmental stages (Abrams, 2007; Arditti & Parkman, 2011). This may have implications for services offering support for young people and requires further research. This systematic review has been written in accordance with submission guidelines for publication in the journal of ‘Psychology, Crime and Law’. Chapter 2 extends the research discussed in the systematic review and contributes to the literature concerning young people’s experience of re-entry. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to explore how young people made sense of their individual transition experience from custody to the community. Findings demonstrate five superordinate themes that are important in the transition. These are: ‘A beginning and ending to prison’, ‘Family and friendship systems of offending’, ‘A new ‘me’ in the community’, ‘Life on the out’ and ‘Justice system supporting and enforcing change’. Findings are consistent with and extend the current literature on young people’s experience of transition from custody to the community. Clinical implications tentatively indicate that the continuity in care provision, family and peer relationships and Licence conditions of release all impact on the transition experience for young people. These dimensions may be useful in considering service development. This empirical paper has been written in accordance with submission guidelines for publication in the journal of ‘Legal and Criminological Psychology’. Chapter 3 provides an extended concluding discussion, providing a detailed discussion of the empirical findings and how they are relevant to theory, research and practice. A short lay summary of the empirical paper is also presented. This is for the benefit of young people making the transition from custody to community. Given that previous research indicates that this group of people is often marginalised (Barry, 2010); it was considered ethically responsible to develop a summary that was accessible and validating of young people’s experience. Therefore, a version is also presented in a short leaflet and a podcast recording of the summary aims to improve accessibility of the information for people with a range of literacy abilities. The podcast recording will not be published on-line until the empirical research has been published. The end of this chapter presents a proposal for future research, based on the empirical paper’s extended discussion and conclusions. In contributing to the research on young people’s experience of re-entry in the U.K, it is hoped that the meaning and impact of transition for this often marginalised group of people will be acknowledged.

This study explores the securitising move attempted by the government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri through the promulgation of Interim Laws 1/2002 and 2/2002 on Terrorism Crime Eradication and their stipulation as statutes in 2003 are examined in this study. This study also examines the discussion of the meaning of and appropriate responses to terrorism in Indonesia’s mainstream print media before (1998-2002) and after (2003-2010) with reference to the securitisation process. The goal of this thesis is to illustrate the continuing influence of the political meaning of terrorism on the articulated speech act of the government and the responses of the audiences. This study shows that the political interpretation of terrorism continually influences its treatment as a public issue, politicised issue and securitised issue. Before its securitisation, terrorism was interpreted as politically motivated violence intended to create disorder and communal conflicts, destabilise the executive power and thwart attempts to put former President Suharto on trial. Terrorism was also seen as an attempt to discredit Indonesian Islam as the perpetrators were described as belonging to an Islamic group. In the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombings, these political interpretations were overcome by the securitisation of terrorism as an extra-ordinary crime. The choice of language (repertoire) of the government’s securitising move indicated an absence of the presentation of an existential threat to state survival. Instead, it emphasised the lack of legal instruments available to respond to terrorism as an extra-ordinary crime. The securitising move also eliminated the political meaning of the concept of terrorism. Interim Law 1/2002 on Terrorism Eradication Law adopted the exclusion of terrorism crime from political violence. The inherently political meaning of terrorism in Indonesia means that its securitisation rhetoric must choose a language of exceptionalism without invoking identities and political antagonisms. The presentation of terrorism as an extra-ordinary crime which needed immediate legal handling facilitated its approval in the parliament. On the other hand, the explicitly non-political interpretation of terrorism by-passed the differences between interpretations of terrorism and security concepts in the securitisation’s wider audiences. The success of the securitisation process, indicated by the approval of the stipulation of the Interim Laws as statutes, changed the way terrorism is discussed publicly: as a continuing danger which manifested in acts of terrorism, as part of global (Islamic) terrorism problem, as a religious radicalism problem, and as a problem of professional capacity of the security apparatuses. Nevertheless, it did not put the public’s political interpretation of terrorism to an end. Two notable frames, the connection between acts of terrorism and local and national elections and their interpretation as a means to discredit Indonesian Islam continued to appear in the media coverage. This study provides a compelling explanation of how the government adjusted its speech acts to frame terrorism as exceptional and one requiring different responses depending upon the prevailing narrative of the time. The adoption of an extraordinary measure in the aftermath of the Bali bombing was accomplished without the presentation of an existential threat as that would have been counter-productive. This study thus provides an excellent account of Indonesian policy and adds to our understanding of how issues can be securitised.

No description available.

A group of American and European films in the forties and fifties are characterised by a dark atmosphere and morbid fascination with crime and violent death. Normally populated by rootless characters who live as though suspended in an existential limbo, their narratives are pervaded by a sense of loss and displacement. Though these films were made mostly during the world war and its aftermath, they have left a permanent visual and cultural legacy, both in western and global cinema, related as they were to the transitory nature of metropolitan experience. Moreover, by breaking with previous national traditions of public representation of crime and sexual desire, they established cinema as a privileged locus for cultural criticism and debate about some of the moral and psychological consequences of modernity. Taking this as my point of departure, I analyse the relationship between Europe and America through the films’ construction of an intercultural visual dialogue, making the case that this gathers and condenses contradictions and ambivalences in the modern human development project. In particular I focus on two aspects of this dialogue: on the one hand - since almost every country struggles with America’s economic and cultural supremacy - the ambivalent image that America has in twentieth-century European debate about popular culture. On the other hand, I consider the importance of (visual) language in the relationship between enquiry, in films, into historical transformation, and the wider processes of social and cultural change. Finally, I claim that the lesson learned from this analysis should be used in contemporary sociological debate about the renewal of conceptual tools used to investigate the role of crime in our society.

In the long history of Cyprus, the ‘persona’, contributions, underpinning ideologies, role and historical trajectory of the voluntary sector, have not, unlike in other countries, been the subject of any substantial empirical and theoretical exploration, remaining under-researched questions. The main purpose of the research is to understand the rich past of the Cypriot voluntary sector and trace its trajectory to the present. How and why did the voluntary sector develop? Which factors lie behind its development? Using the framework of non-profit regimes, the main research tool for exploring voluntary sector development and its attached social origins theory, the research moves beyond the dominant state-society approach to study the Cypriot voluntary sector trajectory. Using qualitative rather than a quantitative methodology, and moving between the micro, meso and macro levels of analysis, the research explores welfare actors, institutions, structures, cultural and non-cultural elements, including any aspect which provides insight into how and why the voluntary sector in Cyprus developed the way that it has. It asks separately about the relationships between the voluntary sector and a) the state/regime, b) the Church/religion and c) society, exploring explanations for the distinctive features of Cyprus’ voluntary sector. The thesis furthermore makes use of the tools of historical institutionalism, specifically critical junctures and path dependency. Evidence not only challenges the narrow view in the literature, both theoretically and methodologically, for the study of voluntary sector development, but also the restricted experiences of non-profit regime typologies and their assumptions about regimes, welfare negotiations and power relationships. Hence, the research argues for a refined approach to investigate voluntary sector trajectories and suggests new dimensions, beyond the ‘traditional’ origins factors of non-profit regime theory. The thesis’ main arguments, mostly underexplored or missed in non-profit regime research, are that the voluntary sector not only derived from the Cypriot regime and its distinct evolutionary process, influenced by the dynamic historic and socio-political context and path dependency forces, but was also a source for the welfare state’s development. Religion, both as institutional structure and cultural and political force, shaped associational life; it also had a profound impact in shaping the voluntary sector’s major transformation points. The thesis also reflects how societal synergies, families, communities, and gender can contribute to our understanding of voluntary sector trajectories. Underlying forces emerge as authoritarianism, a weak welfare regime growing under the shadow of political turbulence, social, national/ethnic identity issues and empowerment.

This thesis presents the findings of an in-depth realistic evaluation of the Integrated Offender Management (IOM) approach in one English county. IOM is a multi-agency approach, promoted by government, to managing prolific offenders, with the aim of moving them towards desistance from crime. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative methods the findings demonstrate that IOM can be effective in supporting desistance, and is associated with reductions in the level and severity of reoffending and improvements in the circumstances and risk level of offenders. Using the realistic evaluation approach, three generative mechanisms were identified to explain these findings: the intense and structured approach to supervision; close multi-agency working; and caring and trusting relationships between practitioners and offenders. The findings also underscore the importance of offender readiness for change. This research confirms previous findings regarding the influence of interventions such as IOM on desistance and also identifies ways in which the operation and effect of IOM can be undermined. The confounding issues identified concern both the internal operation of IOM and the ways in which it fits into the wider criminal justice system, both locally and nationally. This research makes three contributions. Firstly, it adds to the literature and theory of IOM and assisted desistance within a multi-agency setting, through the development of a realist conception of the approach. Secondly it contributes to the literature on the use of realistic evaluation, an approach not employed in previous IOM evaluations. This research develops a method of presenting findings from realistic evaluation which reflect both generative mechanisms and ways they are confounded. Finally, it contributes to the policy and practice of IOM, and similar approaches, by outlining both its possibilities and limitations regarding offender rehabilitation and desistance. These findings are therefore of use to practitioners and policy makers in this constantly evolving field.

Since Becker’s seminal work (1968), economists have investigated the determinants of crime using of a cost-benefit analysis. But, while extensive research has focused on incentives related to sanctions, deterrence and legal labor market opportunities, the effects of Black Markets (i.e. markets in which goods and services are illegally traded) on crime have been generally overlooked. Two main obstacles have hindered such an analysis. First, black markets are by definition clandestine. Hence, these are very hard to measure. Secondly, these markets are not randomly assigned to geographic locations, but rather endogenously located, following existing economic trends or cross-sectional area characteristics. This PhD thesis aims to partially fill this gap. I investigate the effects on criminal activity of 1) markets for stolen goods and 2) markets for illegal drugs.