In most police services the only spatial and temporal analysis of crime was conducted until recently by statisticians at the force headquarters, with little or no regard for any short term or localised patterns of crime. In recent years there has been a move towards a more decentralised, proactive style of British policing focused at the police divisional and community level. This has left an intelligence void where force level analysis techniques are neither appropriate nor subtle enough to elicit any meaningful information at a local level from the mass of crime data generated within the police service. This thesis reveals patterns in community level crime which have not been recognised previously using traditional techniques in spatial and temporal investigation which tend to lack the necessary analytical ability. Current policing considerations are recognised and the thesis concentrates on three aspects of police crime concern: accurate temporal analysis, repeat victimisation, and the identification of hotspots. A number of new techniques are presented which are designed with the needs of a crime analyst at a divisional police station in mind, an individual who has until now lacked the necessary analytical tools to perform the role effectively.

This thesis is concerned with the lived experience of nineteen Zimbabwean migrants I interviewed in the UK who were forced apart from their children for a lengthy period of time by the UK immigration system. It explores the processes through which these migrants were rendered rightless in their country of birth where their government directly threatened their physical lives and how they were forced to migrate to the UK without their children in search of human rights and protection. However, upon arrival in the UK, these migrants' rightlessness was reinforced as the UK immigration and asylum law affords only the most minimal of rights to asylum seekers and other categories of forced migrants. The thesis attempts to uncover the extent to which the Zimbabwean migrants were denied full access to human rights, especially the rights to legally remain, work and to be reunited with their children in the UK. It also seeks to show how, over a period of time, these migrant parents' selves fell apart; they lost total control of their own lives in the UK and witnessed the disintegration of the connections they had to their children, partners, parents, friends and other kin left behind. The thesis argues that to be afforded partial rights, that is, the right to continue to live and breathe (bare life) but not the right to legally belong and/or to exercise personal autonomy is to be condemned to a living death. By exploring the sufferings and dehumanization processes of the Zimbabwean migrants, the thesis seeks to reveal the gap between the UK's rhetorical commitments with regards to promoting and protecting human rights, and the actual practice of its immigration regime.

Willingness to pay is increasingly being used in health technology assessment, although a number of methodological issues remain unresolved. Using data collected from four studies, this thesis presents the findings from a direct comparison between alternative format designs to elicit willingness to pay for two alternative colorectal cancer screening tests; faecal occult blood (FOB) testing and flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS) testing. Along with the willingness to pay values estimated using the open-ended, payment scale, closed-ended and iterative bidding formats, information is collected on household income, attitudes toward health promotion and personal risk perceptions to determine the nature and value of responses. In comparison with the alternative formats, the closed-ended question design produced significantly higher WTP valuations and different justifications for those valuations. It is hypothesised that the yea-saying effect may explain this difference. The payment scale format achieved a higher completion rate compared to the open-ended design and both formats produced broadly similar valuations. Although a subsequent study suggested evidence of range bias within the payment scale design. The iterative bidding format produced higher valuations than the open-ended and payment scale but lower than the closed-ended, it is hypothesised that valuations obtained using different initial bids demonstrate the existence of starting point bias. Across all studies, respondents who have a high health motivation, are well educated, have a high household income and who are particularly worried about the disease have a positive effect on the willingness to pay for colorectal cancer screening.

The aim of this research was to explore staff and student experiences of the barriers print disabled students face and the adjustments made to overcome these. Universities are obliged by the Special Education Needs and Disability Act 2001 and the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005 to make 'reasonable' adjustments, but receive only limited guidance as to how far they have to go to do this. No literature, research-based or otherwise, has so far dealt with the full range of issues relating to the implementation of adjustments for print disabled higher education students and until now few questions have been asked about why difficulties arise. Some studies have dealt with general issues relating to disabled higher education students (e. g. Riddell, Tinklin and Wilson, 2004; Fuller et al., 2006; Healey, Fuller, Bradley and Hall, 2006) but their conclusions are not fully applicable to print disabled students. Other literature has looked at issues relating to the accessibility of documents (e. g. RNIB, 2003, 2004, 2006; JISC TechDis, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b) but does not consider how these issues affect higher education students. A small amount of literature focuses on general issues affecting print disabled students, but so far this has only focused on the underlying impairments that lead to it in isolation (e. g. visual impairment - Roy, 2003; or dyslexia - Riddick, 2001). Several sources have produced guidelines for making reasonable adjustments for students with dyslexia (e. g. The University of Nottingham 2006a) and visual impairments (e. g. West Virginia University, 2005b), but no comparisons appear to have been made been the similarity of the two. This study expands on previous research to explore the experiences of print disabled students, both from the perspective of print disabled students themselves but also from the perspective of the staff who support them. It explores the impact of the medical and social models of disability, as well as the mediatory model of disability displayed by the disability legislation. Its findings suggest that whilst universities have made considerable progress in reducing discrimination and promoting equality, print disabled students still experience significant problems. It concludes that whilst SENDA 2001 has contributed to the progress that has been made, legislation alone may not be capable of producing the cultural change that is needed.

This thesis provides a timely retrospective of New Labour's public politics of global and domestic poverty through examination of their speeches and policy documents and secondary literature on the post-war politics of poverty and development, New Labour and public attitudes to poverty. It adopts a 'public politics' approach, in understanding these speeches and policy documents as public political discourse and understanding politics in broad cultural terms as the discursive struggle to embed a particular vision of the social world in the public imagination, and provides a rare example of a crossdomain study of New Labour, seeking to connect analysis of global and domestic policy. As such it contributes to what Colin Hay has called the 'new political science of British politics'. Both global and domestic poverty received a greater public political profile under New Labour than could have been envisaged in 1997. By the end of their first term they had made high-profile, time-specific commitments in both domains. Global poverty in particular gained unprecedented public attention in the build-up to the G8 Summit in 2005 and New Labour was centre stage in the political spectacle of Make Poverty History. This followed a period of neo-liberal dominance in which poverty was absent from the domestic political lexicon and subsumed by structural adjustment imperatives in the global domain. This comparative study of the public politics of poverty asks: whether New Labour made explicit connections between their global and domestic poverty discourses and commitments, and if so, what the nature of these connections were; what the 'narratives' employed to justify government action to tackle poverty were, and the similarities and differences between the two poverty domains; whether the general public shared these 'narratives' and, if not, how they differed; how New Labour's 'public politics of poverty' evolved over time in both global and domestic domains; and what the key characteristics of New Labour's public politics of poverty were, how could have differed, and what impact they appeared to have had on public opinion.

This thesis examines two research questions: firstly, how does community punishment impact upon the lives of those subjected to it; and secondly, to what extent is that impact affected by the relationship between the offender and her Probation Service supervisor? It considers these questions in both conceptual and empirical terms by outlining, and then deploying, the analytical framework of penal impact, an approach to penal severity that uses pain as a metric by which to judge the suitability of punitive interventions. By evaluating sentence severity in terms of penal impact, one can examine both the types of pain that follow from a particular sentence, as well as their relative magnitude, building up a qualitative comparison of different impositions of community punishment. However, because pain is an inherently subjective concept, the evaluation of penal impact requires empirical data. This study therefore explores the findings of interviews with nine offenders and 11 supervision officers within a single Probation Trust. The data drawn from these interviews indicate a broad range of pains that vary considerably in their intensity and incidence from offender to offender. The study explores the question of the extent to which these pains can be associated with the formal process of punishment, the extent to which they can be considered punitive in a retributive sense, and the means by which such pains can be compared between subjective experiences. It concludes that the penal impact of community punishment in England and Wales is considerable, and goes substantially beyond the relatively ‘soft’ image suggested by a narrow, liberty-based conception of sentence severity. The process of supervision has a substantial effect upon the pains felt – and therefore, upon the sentence’s overall impact. The implications of these conclusions for sentencing policy in England and Wales are discussed, and avenues of further research are identified.

The sale of ancient objects on eBay is presented to buyers as legitimate and ethical. However the antiquities trade is a grey market, where both licit and illicit objects are sold (Bowman, 2008). An unknown percentage of illicit antiquities have entered the market as a consequence of archaeological looting. However, antiquities are fungible by nature, meaning that it is very difficult for buyers to differentiate the licit from the illicit. This thesis is based on the premise that the antiquities trade causes harm through the destruction of archaeological knowledge, and therefore there is a necessity to reduce the size of the market. Using Sutton’s market reduction approach, the study sets out to collect empirical data on the market from eBay. The thesis considers three main research questions: First, is the current regulatory framework for the sale of antiquities adequate? Second, what is the scale and scope of the market on eBay for antiquities? Third, what are the routine features of the operation of this market?

This study explores the views of the peak level industrial and labour organisations towards government social policy after the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. The reform of state welfare in the 1940s meant that employers and trade unions became more involved in the administration than in the provision of social services. The process entailed a greater role for the Trades Union Congress, the British Employers’ Confederation and the Federation of British Industries in the formulation of state social policy. This is a hitherto neglected aspect of their relations with government. Labour and business historians have paid little attention to trade union and industrial views on social policy after the second world war while historians of the welfare state have neglected the participation of these particular interest groups in the formation of welfare policy. These concepts are herein applied to a range of areas of welfare - social security, pensions, the National Health Service and state education - in which the TUC, BEC and FBI demonstrated a level of interest. While being of some relevance in relation to particular areas of policy and specific points in time, these approaches have a limited function in explaining government consultation of primarily industrial interests on social policy matters. Corporate bias may help to explain why consultation took place but offers little understanding in those instances where it did not. A search for a wider welfare consensus reaching outside the political party arena is similarly flawed as the theory seeks to generalise an impose uniform patterns of policy-making where none existed. If the consenualists continue to adhere to the notion that the involvement of economic interests in policy making was a product of consensus politics, it must now seek to examine the impact of these interests on the policy-making process. In the same vein, corporate theorists might look to other policy areas outwith the industrial and economic sphere in order to explore the wider application of their findings.

Field social workers are in daily working contact with the poor and deprived. In Britain as many as nine out of ten users of social work services are claimants of social security; over half are dependent on means tested social assistance. Most referrals to social workers are for benefit and housing problems. Social work trainers, managers, and agencies expect social workers to have positive attitudes to clients. Professional training is increasingly confronting racist and sexist attitudes amongst student social workers; but very little is known about social workers' attitudes to poor people or how these attitudes affect the nature and delivery of social work services to claimants - the main user group of social services. This study explores the attitudes to poverty of over 450 field social workers. As a group these social workers have relatively "positive" attitudes to the poor and feel very strongly - in a supportive direction - about a number of issues confronting social security claimants. Poverty itself is defined in relative terms, as a lack of opportunities for choice and participation in customs and practices accepted by the non poor population. The poor are viewed very much as victims of injustice and structural inequalities. But most social workers employ individualising methods of work aimed at helping clients adapt to their financial status and circumstances. Less individually focused approaches are generally unpopular. Organisational structures, priorities, and dominant methods of working are powerful constraints on alternative approaches. Current methods reinforce definitions of acceptable practice. The study raises important issues for the operation, practice, management and organisation of social work; in addition there are a number of implications for the research of attitudes to poverty. Social workers' attitudes to poverty and the poor are characterised by contradiction and paradox, as is social work itself. The study of these attitudes requires a number of complementary research methodologies.

Publications and a commentary on them. List of Publications [1] Tischler, V., Cumella, S., Bellerby, T. and Vostanis, P. (2000) A Mental health Service for homeless children and families. Psychiatric Bulletin 24, 339-341 [2] Vostanis, P. Tischler, V., Cumella, S. and Bellerby, T. (2001) Mental health problems and social supports among homeless mothers and children victims of domestic violence. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 47 (4), 30-40 [3] Tischler, V., Vostanis, P., Bellerby, T. and Cumella, S. (2002) Evaluation of a mental health outreach service for homeless families. Archives of Disease in Childhood 86, 158-163 [4] Tischler, V. and Gregory, P. (2002) A resettlement service for homeless and vulnerable parents. Housing, care and support 5 (4), 33-36 [5] Tischler, V., Karim, K., Rastall, S., Gregory, P. and Vostanis, P. (2004) A Family Support Service for homeless children and parents: users'perspectives and characteristics. Health and Social Care in the Community 12 (4), 327-335 [6] Karim, K., Tischler, V., Gregory, P. and Vostanis, P. (2006) Homeless children and parents: short-term mental health outcome. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 52 (5), 447-458 [7] Tischler, V. and Vostanis, P. (2007) Homeless Mothers: Is there a Relationship between Coping Strategies, Mental Health and Goal Achievement? Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 17, 85-102 [8] Tischler, V., Rademeyer, A. and Vostanis, P (2007) Mothers experiencing homelessness: mental health, support and social care needs. Health and Social Care in the Community 15 (3), 246-253 [9] Tischler, V. (in press) Resettlement and Reintegration: Mother's Reflections after Homelessness. Community, Work and Family [10] Tischler, V. (under review) I'm not coping, I'm surviving: Understanding coping in vulnerable populations. Qualitative Research in Psychology