Self-help groups in the United Kingdom continue to grow in number and address virtually every conceivable health condition, but they remain the subject of very little theoretical analysis. The literature to date has predominantly focused on their therapeutic effects on individual members. And yet they are widely presumed to fulfil a broader civic role and to encourage democratic citizenship. The thesis uses qualitative data derived from individual and group interviews with 33 groups in order to provide an outline of the ethos, aims, activities and structural arrangements of a broad range of self-help groups in Nottinghamshire, UK. It then uses these findings as the foundation on which to construct a model of self-help groups’ democratising effects in the public sphere and as a means of differentiating them from other types of ‘health citizenship’ organisation such as new social movements. In order to do this it broadly follows the work of Jurgen Habermas, making use of his concepts of communicative action; system-lifeworld integration; lifeworld autonomy and collective identity as an appropriate framework against which to account for these groups in civic terms. It was found that in their pursuit of personal and collective identities the groups were augmenting individual autonomy through increasing mutual recognition and understanding in the lifeworld. Although at first sight the groups appeared to be structured hierarchically, leaders tended to use their influence to foster a type of communicative equality that sustained the democratic negotiation of these identities. In addition, through their two-way communicative links with the system the groups were adding to the complexity and quality of discourse in the public sphere and increasing the possibility of attaining social consensus. Unlike new social movements who are believed to operate at the protest end of civil society, the self-help groups were oriented to its enabling sector.

In spite of the fact that services for deaf people have been provided since Victorian times, there is no "philosophy of deafness" and services are based upon the subjective observation of deaf people by "hearing" people. This study seeks to formulate such a philosophy, for those unable to hear spoken communication from birth or early childhood, based upon acceptance of the social limitations of being unable to hear in a society where the ready use of that sense is taken for granted. In order to base this philosophy upon the objective assessment of deaf people's needs, deaf respondents were interviewed and observed and their referrals to specialist agencies for deaf people and the work of a group of social workers with deaf people were examined. The study re-defines deaf "community" and deaf "culture" as the deaf social group and the deaf way of life, arguing that the former concepts marginalise deaf people and stressing that although deaf people need to make sub-cultural adaptations in order primarily to satisfy their social-psychological needs and for fellowship, the deaf sub-culture is an extension of "hearing" culture and deaf people would benefit by becoming effectually bi-cultural. It is suggested that "deafness" rather than membership of the deaf "community" is ascribed to deaf people. The study sees the uniqueness of the deaf sub-culture in the means of inter-personal communication, Sign Language, and in its members' self-identification as "deaf". The idea of individual autonomy is developed and it is used as a framework within which to formulate a philosophy of deafness which recognises the need for sub-cultural adaptations by deaf people, because of the inevitability of impediments to fluent inter-personal communication between deaf and "hearing" people. The philosophy also recognises the need for "hearing" people to accommodate to deafness in order to reduce deaf people's marginal status in society, principally through the use of Sign Language, either directly, or through interpreters. Finally, implications for policies of service provision are considered, in particular the need for deaf people to be involved with planning and provision of services for deaf people based upon a social rather than a social work/pathological model.

Addressing criticisms of the routine-driven, task-oriented, depersonalising nature of conventional services, and reflecting a broader trend across health and social care, person-centred care has become the watchword for quality in long-term care for older people in recent years. Person-centred care requires recognising the unique personhood of each individual regardless of their physical or mental capacity. Efforts to realise this approach depend largely on the non-professional nursing staff who deliver the majority of direct care in this context. However, little is known about how new knowledge, including ideas and evidence about person-centred care, translates into the daily practices of this cadre of staff, who have little formal training, low job status, and limited access to traditional forms of research dissemination and knowledge exchange. Building on the existing knowledge-translation literature, therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the mechanisms of knowledge translation about person-centred care among care assistants in long-term care. The objectives were to examine how these staff develop their understanding of person-centred care; identify the personal and contextual factors involved; and explore what can be learned about person-centred care from their current practices. The study used ethnographic methods, including 500 hours of participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, to conduct case studies of two private nursing homes located in the East Midlands and the north-eastern United States. Without claiming to demonstrate causality, extending the research across two policy settings did facilitate the identification of pertinent issues within and beyond each individual facility. Data analysis was informed by practice theory, which provided an alternative to the individualist assumptions which characterise popular representations of long-term care, on the one hand, and, on the other, structural explanations that renounce individual agency altogether. From this theoretical perspective, drawing in particular on Bourdieu‘s theory of practical logic and the neo-institutional concept of institutional logics, this study identified how the interconnection of particular practices within each setting produced different situated understandings and implementation of person-centred care. A key finding was that care assistants' individualised knowledge about each resident, obtained through their direct daily care, represented an important form of symbolic capital in this field. Their willingness or reluctance to share such knowledge, consequently, corresponded to the extent to which other practices, including communication and teamwork, supported or threatened this limited source of power. The second, related finding was that care assistants derived from this individualised knowledge a certain amount of autonomy, or discretion, over the organisation and delivery of daily care. This discretion, together with the agency that care assistants exercised in navigating different institutional logics in this context of care – which was the third main finding – signified a potential nexus of practice change. Conversely, new knowledge or ideas that undermined this limited discretion and agency tended to engender denial or resistance. As the population ages, demand for long-term care for older people is increasing exponentially, prompting concerns about the capacity and sustainability of this sector. One significant area of concern is workforce recruitment, retention, and competence. This study, located at the intersection of research on long-term care and knowledge translation, contributes to efforts to address these concerns by identifying opportunities for intervention in education, training, and support, in order to build a workforce that is equipped to provide high-quality, evidence-based, person-centred care for older people throughout the years ahead.

This action research study reports on the development of a process for dialogic learning underpinned by Person Centred Thinking and the use of Person Centred Planning Tools (PCPTs). This learning occurred in three separate but associated teams delivering family support services to children and their families. The aim of this study was to explore and attain an understanding of how the use of these tools and processes would affect the process of organisational learning in the three settings. It is believed to be the first time PCPTs have been used in this context. Facilitated action learning supported the use of Person Centred Thinking to attend to and decipher the challenges of the daily working practices and collaborative relationships of the three teams. This appreciative and inclusive methodology supported the development of a ‘common language’, which, where successful, helped to embed a system of whole service dialogic learning. This model of change management distinguishes the process used in this study from other interventions. Where successful, leadership was central to successful implementation of dialogic learning in the teams and their ambition to become learning organisations. The importance of the individual actions taken by the leaders and their use of power was influential to the outcome of the study. The synergy created by the synthesis of Person Centred Thinking and dialogue in the teams with good leadership, suggests that the dialogic learning emanating from it has perceptible and noteworthy connections for, and to, organisational learning. The original contribution to knowledge from this study is the development of a theoretical understanding of how person centred practices when embedded into teams can transform and positively augment ways of working. Specifically it posits how dialogic learning practices provide the culture and context to facilitate individual and team growth and understanding through organisational learning.

Violence is a considerable burden on society; the costs incurred through treating victims and apprehending the perpetrators combine with economic costs, the emotional victim costs and costs to the community through increased fear of crime to suggest the costs of violence are significant. A growing number of studies seek to quantify the economic and social impact of crime by assessing the aggregate social costs incurred by criminal offending or by examining the consequences of crime at the individual level, focusing on its effect on the general welfare. Regardless of the approach, tangible and intangible costs are always identified, with the first referring to those directly observable and the latter to the unobservable costs that refer to the physical and emotional impact on crime victims. Despite the importance of both, the available estimates of the intangible costs of violence are very limited, especially in the UK context. This research set out to investigate this gap and provide a new insight into violence costs with a special focus to the intangible losses incurred by pain and suffering. Stated preferences techniques were developed and applied for this purpose, aiming to determine the monetary values of risk reduction of assault-related injuries as assigned by a UK sample to victimisation risks, contingent on the injury severity and psychological outcome. Novel epidemiological research carried out with British Crime Survey and Accident and Emergency data assisted this application, as the drawn evidence formed the basis for constructing plausible scenarios with a representative description of violent victimisation outcomes. The analyses identified that socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, ethnicity), quality of life indicators (self-rated health, income, marital status, educational qualifications) and offence-specific characteristics (use of force/violence, sustained injuries, injury severity, severity of the emotional effect, alcohol consumption prior to the incident) were not only linked to victimisation risks but also predicted severe emotional responding. Altogether, results suggested a two-dimensional structure underlying victims’ emotional reaction and a similar two-dimensional severity-based structure underpinning the physical aftermath of a violent assault. This research concluded with an array of comparable values that denote public's perception of victimisation risks in monetary terms while it highlighted the issues emerging from such an application. The estimation exercise showed that WTP varied extensively across respondents: women were willing to pay more to reduce victimisation related risks and WTP increased with education, age, income and fear of crime. Previous victimisation and difficulty in answering the valuation questions were negative influences on WTP. The numerical findings reflect the importance of victims' costs and provide metrics useful in assessing the cost-effectiveness of crime interventions. Although the contingent valuation method was effective for analysing intangible victim costs providing support for continuing this line of research, further work is required to substantiate its application and strengthen its methodology within the crime context.

Situation awareness is a key requirement in managing civil contingencies, since major incidents, accidents and natural disasters are by their very nature highly unpredictable and confusing situations. It is important that those responsible for dealing with them have the best available information. The mash-up approach brings together information from multiple public and specialist sources to form a synoptic view, but the controller is still faced with multiple, partial and possibly conflicting reports from untrusted sources. The aim of this research is to investigate how the varying provenance of the data can be tracked and exploited to prioritise the information presented to a busy incident controller, and to synthesise a model or models of the situation that the evidence pertains to. The approach in this research is to develop a system involving novel approach and techniques to allow incident controllers and similar decision makers to augment official information input streams with information contributed by the wider public (either explicitly submitted to them or harvested from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter), and to be able to handle inconsistencies and uncertainty arising from the unreliability of such sources in a flexible way. The system takes in situational data in a structured format, such as the Tactical Situation Object (TSO) proposed by OASIS, a project funded by the European Framework Programme 6 (FP6) and performs an automated logical consistency checking in order to isolate inconsistent and absurd messages, identify the inconsistency between messages and cluster the consistent messages together. Each cluster of consistent messages that gives a possible view of a situation that the evidence pertains to is referred to as a `World View'. The logical consistency checking is performed using Alloy and Alloy Analyzer (sic). Finally, the system presents a set of possible world views, each internally consistent, which are ranked based upon an initial information provenance and quality metric (configured by the user) which is used to score the individual data items. The provenance and quality metric includes those factors that influence trust in information such as identity and location of informant, reputation, corroboration, freshness of information, etc. The result is a set of world views prioritised according to the provenance, trust and information quality metric. This thesis also presents some experimental results as proof of the concept. The experimentation has been carried out with a very small set of data to make the automation (automatic experimentation) feasible. However, a theoretical proof is offered to demonstrate the viability of the concept. Future work includes testing the system in real-life cases, in order to understand the utility of the system.

This thesis enacts a discursive approach to surveillance in the UK, revealing implications for surveillance theory, governmentality theory, and for political and social identity theories. It demonstrates the importance of a discursive approach to surveillance, as an expansion of assemblage models of surveillance. It finds convergence between government, governance, finance and media discourses, sufficient to conceive of these as forming a shared governmental discourse of surveillance. Governmental, financial and media discourses tend to privilege the assumption that surveillance systems are effective and accurate. This ideological function elides the contingent nature of surveillant practices, presenting them as non-political technological functions. Governmentality accounts of surveillance are supplemented by an expanded understanding of identity as a contested concept, or floating signifier, articulated in particular ways in governmental discourses. The discourse theory informed analysis in this thesis points to a distinct articulation of identity – the governmental surveillant identity – a political attempt to fix the meaning of identity, and construct a surveillance-permeable form that draws upon the privileging of technological truth over human truth. Identity is articulated across many of the five discourses studied as socially vulnerable. The core articulation of the problem of governance is that identity is problematised; unreliable for the proper functioning of governance in society. Because identity is vulnerable and because identity’s ontological nature makes it possible, identity must be checked and secured.

This study explores children and mothers' perceptions of children's experiences of divorce in Botswana. To illuminate this complex topic, the study draws on two main overlapping theoretical perspectives. These are the social constructionist approach and the sociology of childhood approach. The concept of resilience as well as some concepts of feminist theory, social network theory and family stress theory were also used in the study. A few children believed their experiences had long-term effects on them. These were mainly children who experienced multiple stressors. For example, they perceived: their relations with mothers (who were their custodial parents) as negative, their relations with fathers were not close, they believed they experienced severe economic declines, they changed neighbourhoods and schools many times, witnessed and / or were victims of parental violence either for many years prior to the separation or continued to be exposed to violence even after the legal divorce. This study has explored an issue that remains largely unexplored in developing countries. Some of its findings are similar in broad terms to those of studies that have been conducted in developed countries, but they manifest themselves differently. For example, women in this study stayed in unhappy marriages for many years partly because of lack of services for them, customary laws that make divorce more difficult for women than for men, cultural expectations that require women to persevere in order to preserve their marriages and fear of stigma as well as economic hardships. Therefore when violence occurred, its impact on their children can be much more severe compared to their counterparts in developed countries. Findings of this study are also manifested differently from those of studies from developed countries in relation to children's experiences of economic hardship during the post-divorce period. Studies from both developing and developed countries attest to the low family income in maternal custody families following divorce. However, children in developing countries such as Botswana experience more severe economic hardships than their counterparts in developed countries because welfare programmes in the countries are less generous and the criteria used to determine eligibility exclude able-bodied unemployed mothers. The major policy implications arising from this study that need close attention therefore are: the need to improve the economic circumstances of children, the need to reduce if not eliminate children's exposure to parental violence, as well as the need to educate parents about how they can help their children to cope with the divorce process.

Through a re-examination of the issue of moral panics, with particular reference to sociological work around ideas of ‘risk’ and a ‘culture of fear’, this thesis attempts to examine the emergence of the social problem of ‘antisocial behaviour’. Situated in part within the changing political terrain of the 1990s, the emergence of the politics of behaviour is related to the diminution of the human subject and the development of a therapeutic culture - both trends helping to lay the basis for an engagement by the political elite with the ‘vulnerable public’. These developments are traced through the 1980s and 1990s to illustrate the construction of the problem of ‘antisocial behaviour’, with particular reference made to the shift in left-wing thought from radical to ‘real’. Using the example of the Hamilton curfew in the west of Scotland, empirical research with adults and young people, and media coverage of this safety initiative, are examined to explore the idea of a ‘culture of fear’. The legitimation of the curfew justified by various claimsmakers is examined to indicate the emergence of the new ‘amoral’ absolute of safety. The experience of the curfew for the local people is also analysed and the contradictions between local concerns and those of the authority are contrasted. Finally, through exploring the changing meaning of the term ‘antisocial behaviour’ and its growing politicisation, the emergence of this social problem is related to the deterministic and managerial form of politics that emerged at the end of the 20th century.

Previous analyses of homelessness have been accused of lacking theoretical and conceptual clarity. This study aimed to rectify this through an analysis of data collected using a qualitative longitudinal research methodology on the transitions through homelessness made by twenty-eight people in a Scottish city. Three key factors were found to influence the transitions the participants made – the access to different forms of capital (the resources) they had; their social networks and relationships; and experiences of ‘edgework’ (experiences of traumatic risk situations, such as domestic violence; or of voluntary risk taking such as drug use; that encapsulate the need to negotiate risk on both emotional and physical levels). These factors may affect anyone’s lives, but only when their resources are depleted to the point they have to rely on the state in this way do they become ‘homeless’ and enter the material and emotional ‘reality ‘ of homelessness. This is the new theory on homelessness, causation and individual actions, developed here – the ‘stressed’ theory. By the end of the research the majority of the participants (nineteen) were living in their own tenancies. It may have appeared that those who had their own tenancy had made integrative transitional passages out of homelessness, however the majority of the participants were actually found to be ‘flip-flopping’ on the edge of society, whether still homeless or not. When the fundamental structural reality they operated in had not changed, their risk of homelessness and the motivation for actions that appeared to have led to their homelessness, remained. Actions they engaged in to assert their agency were also actions that were motivated by, and then recreated, the structural reality they operated within – a reality of marginality and a poverty of resources. This was also what provided the rationale for actions that may appear irrational, such as drug use, in the face of making a transition out of homelessness. A key aspect of these transitions however was that desp