By the time children in the UK start school there is already an achievement gap between those from low income households and their better‐off classmates. One explanation for this is differences in parenting. This has increasingly been the focus of policy interventions under successive governments, where the emphasis has shifted towards parenting rather than poverty as explaining poorer children’s worse outcomes. In this context this thesis examines how the two factors, poverty and parenting are related and what mechanisms explain these relationships, specifically testing the Family Stress Model. Using the Millennium Cohort Study a range of different experiences of economic hardship are analysed in relation to different parenting behaviours when children are aged five. The findings show that it is not straightforwardly the case that low income parents parent worse, and there are some positive (as well as negative) differences in parenting between mothers with low and median incomes. For some of the negative differences in parenting these are part of a broader income‐parenting gradient that extends all the way up the distribution. When other experiences of hardship are examined (such as debt, deprivation and feeling poor) they are more strongly and negatively related to parenting behaviours, compared to income. It is found that mothers’ mental health and relationship quality are mechanisms for most parenting behaviours and are particularly important for how close the mother feels to the child, play activities and discipline. Experiencing a worsening of material deprivation is associated with a worsening of a number of parenting behaviours and changes in experiences of hardship are also related to changes in mothers’ mental health and life satisfaction. These findings highlight the importance of financial resources for parenting and suggest that any policies aimed at improving parenting in order to improve the outcomes of poor children need to address families’ economic situation, as well as mothers’ mental health and relationship quality.

The informal economy represents two-thirds of worldwide employment (OECD 2009) and contributes more than 40% of global GDP (Schneider et al. 2010). It is an especially significant feature of urban labour markets in the Global South, having been a persistent phenomenon in all regions, and expanding in the wake of economic growth in Latin America and Asia in recent decades (OECD 2009). Governmental policies toward the informal economy have taken various forms based on several theoretical approaches (Chen et al. 2001, WIEGO 2014). These range from repressive policies that perceive informal entrepreneurship as a drag on economic growth and poverty reduction, to those promoting their legalisation to foster economic development and others encouraging informal workers’ organisation to resist capitalist forms of exploitation. More recently, strongly supportive municipal initiatives have been put in place to increase informal productivity. This study aims to understand the rationality behind, and the impact and limitations of this emerging supportive policy approach aimed at improving the livelihoods of informal entrepreneurs. It analyses these practices using a mixed-methods approach (ethnography complemented with statistical analysis), on the basis of primary data drawn from 97 face-to-face interviews and focus group discussions, together with a randomised questionnaire survey of 906 workers conducted with the collaboration of a team of field assistants across three informal subsectors in Santiago de Chile: waste-pickers, street vendors and home-based enterprises. In light of the evidence, I argue that granting informal entrepreneurs the right to succeed through municipal support effectively promotes the social and economic inclusion of vulnerable populations. Municipal policy support, in the form of training, capitalisation, access to markets and organisation, can be key to speeding up the growth of enterprises otherwise condemned to stagnation or limited expansion. As part and parcel of this argument, I contend that supporting informal entrepreneurs is vital in a situation in which informal entrepreneurship typically becomes a ‘one way street’ in the absence of decent employment alternatives in the lower tiers of the formal economy. My thesis also suggests that understanding formal-informal linkages can benefit from a selective amalgamation of divergent theoretical approaches, as these two markets operate both in integration (as per structuralist and legalist perspectives), a structure commonly described as exploitative, and separately in a parallel network of informal enterprises (as per dualist perspectives), described as a fairer alternative for informal enterprises to trade products. In light of my findings, I offer concrete suggestions for further improving the nature of municipal policies and the necessity for higher-level supportive approaches to fully unlock the informal economy’s potential.

I present a new methodological approach to measuring news bias, aiming to settle the disagreement on how to define and measure bias in media and communication studies in this thesis. Unlike earlier research on TV news or newspapers, I choose international news agencies’ coverage of the Ukraine crisis in this study as a case to highlight the strength of the new approach. Utilizing newly-developed geographical news classification and sentiment analysis techniques, I analyse news coverage of the Ukraine crisis by Russia’s official news agency, ITAR-TASS, along with the independent news agency, Interfax, over two years to estimate partisan news bias resulting from stateownership. In this longitudinal content analysis, I focus on the change in sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news coverage of Ukraine relative to Interfax’s coverage during periods following six key events in the crisis. The analysis shows that the sentiment of ITAR-TASS’s news on Ukraine’s democracy and sovereignty changed significantly after key events, reflecting the desirability of these events to the Russian government. ITAR-TASS’s news coverage became the most negative when the new Ukraine government launched military operations against pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine, claiming that the revolution was instigated by Ukrainian fascists, who threatened the safety of ethnic Russians. This result indicates that the Russian government utilized the news agency for international propaganda to justify its actions. Further, an additional content analysis including western news agencies revealed that Reuters’s news coverage of the Ukraine crisis during this period was strongly correlated with ITAR-TASS, being influenced by the Russian government’s false statements on Ukraine. Reuters news stories were circulated internationally, and published in the most popular news sites in the United States without context. I argue that the publication of the Russian government’s false narratives by American online news sites through Reuters indicates the vulnerability of today’s international news gathering and distribution system, and the rapidly changing relationship between states and corporations in the global news industry. This suggests that western news agencies’ use of temporary correspondents in covering rapidly developing international crises increases the risk of spreading false information globally. In this case, western news agencies are, in effect, supporting international propaganda by non-western states.

This research brings to light the Polish context of a post-socialist, post-transformation society of peasant roots and high religiosity which greatly contributes to the comparative criminological scholarship. The purpose of this doctoral research is to explore how a small number of Polish people understand punishment and justice, and how their narratives inform the viability of restorative approaches to justice. In so doing, this research recognises the value of lay opinion in the discussion of punishment and justice, and approaches punishment and justice as social activities, which echoes the argument that stories about crime and punishment are entangled with people’s daily routines, and as a result are lodged in their cultural imagination (see Garland & Sparks, 2000). The socialist past, hasty transition from socialism to democracy and from a centrally-planned to free market economy has influenced participants’ perceptions of the justice administration and the institutions involved in these processes. Lay Polish people shall be seen as Homo post-Sovieticus, whose perceptions of punishment and justice need to be analysed along with the legacy of the previous socialist system as well as post-1989 changes. Participants’ perceptions of the Polish criminal justice system, the Polish police and unpaid work assist to understand a number of factors that might influence the development of restorative justice in the Polish context. The findings of this study also encourage broadening the scope of the restorative justice discussion and examining its preconditions against wider sociological and criminological discourses on punishment and justice. Although the relationship might be defined as ‘uneasy’, restorative justice, since its conception, is interwoven with the two. One of restorative justice’s central hopes was to establish an alternative system of crime resolution that would eliminate the infliction of pain. However, the trajectory of restorative practices and demonstrates that the functioning of a majority of them is dependent on the criminal justice agencies and that there is a need to address better the notion of punishment in restorative encounters.

The thesis looks at three conflicts related to the 2014 World Cup preparation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In each of the cases, affected groups – informal workers, informal residents and middle-class citizens – engage with the state to claim rights over space. It examines how the entanglements between social class and legal/institutional developments engendered through “peripheral urbanisation” shape the capacities of those groups to affect formal/informal boundaries and have their demands legitimated. This research draws on the findings from a fieldwork in Belo Horizonte, which lasted eight months in total between 2014 and 2016 and involved archival research, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors. Three cases are considered, which include: the Mineirão stadium redevelopment that displaced a group of informal workers while creating a conflict in a middle-class neighbourhood; the demolition of an informal settlement to make way for a transport infrastructure project; the construction of a hotel in a middle-class area against the will of local residents. The thesis presents three key findings. Firstly, the urban space production is affected by citizens’ capacity to engage with the state. While the state-society boundaries are blurry, citizens are unevenly empowered to have their demands validated and avoid displacement, i.e. the loss of place. Secondly, while informal residents have their rights partially recognised thanks to the “insurgent citizenship” struggles of the past, informal workers are not entitled to compensation because of the disassociation of work informality debates from spatial considerations. Finally, middle-class politics matter, as middle-class residents are better equipped to validate their claims and protect their place in the city. The research contributes to recent postcolonial debates on urban space production and informality. I show that both informal working and housing practices are interconnected through the place-making strategies of the urban poor as well as of the urban middle-class, all of which generate important implications for the reproduction of socio-spatial segregation and thinking of the Brazilian urban future.

This thesis examines the lives of a group of young middle-class Egyptian men who experience a mismatch between their aspirations and their chances of realising them. It analyses the historical emergence of an under-recognised ‘falling’ middle-class in contemporary Egypt, by comparing their relative fall with another middle-class population which has experienced a dramatic rise in wealth and status in the aftermath of neoliberal economic change. I contribute to literature examining the rise of the middle-classes across the Global South in recent years. First, I reveal the importance of historically-owned rural land, cultural privilege, the legal and political remnants of state socialism, and international migration in the socio-economic rise of an Egyptian middle-class. Second, I move away from a predominant focus on consumption, and instead highlight how educational markers, and ‘character’ differences enable the exercise of a new form of ‘open-minded’ middle-class distinction. But finally, I challenge existing literature by uncovering the emergence of an alternative, less-celebratory middle-class in the late-20th and early-21st century, one which has experienced relative decline as the public sector jobs, education, and subsidies they relied on to forge their middle-class lives have been stripped away. The rest of the thesis uses eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork stretched over two years to delve into the lives of a group of young men in this falling middle-class category as they attempt to make the transition from education to ‘aspired to’ employment. It first establishes the existence of a rupture in the Bourdieu-like congruence between their aspirations for a globalised middle-class life, and their ability to reach it. The three main empirical chapters analyse the consequences of this ‘mismatch.’ By applying affect theory to the study of class immobility, I recast existing understandings of how people navigate conditions of ‘waithood,’ in particular through reintroducing a focus on stability and power. I argue that these young men survive their classed and aged immobility through forming a ‘cruel attachment’ to a discursive and material terrain of Egyptianised meritocracy that affects them with hope for the future. This terrain was continuously extended by certain labour market industries and institutions, such as training centres, recruitment agencies, and an entrepreneurship ‘scene,’ that constituted part of Cairo’s ‘hopeful city.’ The thesis therefore demonstrates how Egypt’s capitalistauthoritarian regime also survives, securing the compliance of young middle-class men, despite denying them access to respectable middle-class living, by continually regurgitating a hopeful promise of future fulfilment.

Health Technology Assessment (HTA) relies on evidence-based medicine to inform drug coverage recommendations about the most efficient use of resources. Despite appraising the same evidence based on similar methodological approaches, HTA recommendations for the same drug differ across countries. This thesis aimed to understand the reasons for these differences, and based on cross-national comparisons, whether they are a consequence of methodological challenges in HTA. A mixed methods research design was used to develop a methodological framework that allows to breakdown these complex processes in a comparable and understandable manner, by considering: (a) the evidence appraised, (b) its interpretation, and (c) how this influenced the final decision. Ten orphan drug-indication pairs appraised in four countries (England, Scotland, Sweden and France (N=35)) were systematically analysed and compared on this basis. Results present the criteria accounted for at each stage of the process in the decisions, the reasons for differences across countries, and how HTA bodies are dealing with issues relating to orphan drugs. Quantitative analysis of these provided information about agency-specific risk and value preferences, and measured agreement in interpreting the same evidence. There was heterogeneity within and across countries in the criteria accounted for and reasons for cross-country differences. Interviews to competent authorities provided insights about these differences and implications for HTA. Although agreement was seen in the evidentiary requirements or preferences, there were subtle differences in the circumstances where uncertain evidence may be considered acceptable, partly explaining diverging HTA recommendations. The three main contributions of this thesis are: (1) the development of a methodological framework to understand what criteria feed into HTAs, which can be applied to other drugs and countries; (2) through its application, the identification of a full taxonomy of criteria considered in decisionmaking; and (3) the ability to understand the differences in HTA recommendations across countries. A better understanding of HTA in different settings may help advance these processes, and, ultimately, improve access to treatments.

The thesis explores the interrelationship between career guidance, mental health, and well-being: an area neglected by the career guidance community in the UK. This topic is explored against a background of growing interest in the connections between work, worklessness and health. As a result of the global economic downturn the need to identify effective interventions to ameliorate the effects of unemployment is now pressing. Multiple theoretical perspectives were applied to generate possible causal mechanisms by which career guidance interventions might impact on mental health. The empirical literature was explored for evidence linking career guidance to well-being. It emerges there is a shortage of evidence that directly addresses the issue, but a plethora of evidence is available if the search is widened to include the relations between well-being and work (or substitute activities such as education or volunteering), variables related to well-being, and also to include other vocational interventions, such as training and rehabilitation. New data were generated using a mixed-method approach, underpinned by a critical realist philosophy. The sample population was unemployed adults recovering from mental health conditions, the service users of a specialist employment support agency in Scotland. This group throws the themes of the thesis into sharp focus, as they are on the cusp between work and worklessness, health and illness. Quantitative evidence from pre, post and follow up measures suggested that participants' well-being improved in the period during which they were engaged with the service. Levels of anxiety and depression followed the same pattern of improvement. Causality cannot be determined as there was no control group and attrition was high. Qualitative data from research interviews generated confirmatory evidence that well-being had improved while engaged with the service. Participants clearly attributed causality to the guidance service. Partial deterioration when interventions were completed was also evident. Three key themes emerge from the analysis: 1. Career guidance may have a direct impact on well-being via mechanisms analogous to therapeutic counselling. 2. Career guidance may impact indirectly on well-being by promoting engagement in work or learning. 3. If these effects can scale up to a population level, then the potential exists for career guidance to be a social intervention with public health implications.

Background: The available research on economic migration suggested that immigrants may be less happy than the indigenous populations. It was found that relatively stable dispositional factors such as optimism, and cognitive-behavioural factors such as income did not play an important role. Although useful, these studies did not examine a comprehensive range of predictors and most were not theoretically based. Furthermore all were based on quantitative designs and thus were unable to explain the relationship between these factors and well-being. Indeed, no qualitative studies have been conducted in the area of research. Aims: The aims of this study were to identify the level and determinants of well-being among Polish economic migrants living in Scotland, using a comprehensive range of predictors; to establish the extent to which the findings are supported by theory - the Sustainable Happiness Model (SHM) - and to provide greater insight into how factors have affected immigrants' well-being. Research Design & Methods: A sequential mixed-methods design was used in which the qualitative phase explains quantitative results in more detail. in the first phase, 188 participants selected by a combination of snowball sampling and advertising, completed questionnaires which were analysed by means of univariate and multivariate statistics. The second phase included semi-structured interviews with a subsample of 17 participants. The interviewees were selected using purposive sampling in the form of extreme case sampling, on the basis of the high/low scores on the predictors identified in the quantitative analysis. Transcripts of interviews were analysed by a thematic analysis. Results: Participants reported high levels of well-being. An earlier age at migration, good health and a proficient level of English predicted high well-being levels. The greater use of emotion-focussed coping, problem-focussed coping, higher social support, religiousness and tendency to make downward social comparisons, all predicted higher well-being levels. Emotion-focussed coping was the strongest predictor of all examined factors. Cognitive-behavioural and circumstantial factors accounted for more variance in well-being than personality, which contradicts the SHM that personality accounts for most variance in well-being. The qualitative study suggested that immigrants' adjustment process to a new country, their cultural values and the socio-economic background in their home country may explain such findings. Conclusions: The present findings contribute to the literature on economic migrants' mental health, in demonstrating that despite facing adaptation challenges and acculturative stress, migrants are capable of being happy. The findings demonstrate that emotion-focussed coping can be more adaptive than problem-focussed coping for immigrants who face difficult to change, adverse circumstances. The findings in relation to age at migration, perceived health status and language proficiency making a direct contribution to well-being, build on the previous research, which concluded that circumstantial factors have a minor impact on immigrants' well-being. The findings indicate the SHM, that was based on studies conducted on general populations from Western, rich, individualistic countries, may not be applicable to migrant populations from non-Western, collectivist cultures. A new well-being model is proposed which posits that well-being is explained mostly by cognitive-behavioural factors and circumstances. The study encourages future research to test the revised model across diverse populations. The study encourages future research to test the revised model across diverse populations. The study recommends the use of self-help cognitive-behavioural techniques to help maintain high well-being levels among immigrations.

Although previous research has widely acknowledged the phenomenon of film-induced tourism, there is a paucity of research in relation to management of film-induced tourism at built heritage sites. This research, underpinned by a constructivist paradigm, draws on three distinct fields of study – heritage tourism management, film-induced tourism and heritage interpretation – in order to provide a contribution to the heritage management field and address this particular gap in knowledge. Relying on the method of semi-structured interviews with managers, guides and visitors at Rosslyn Chapel (RC) and Alnwick Castle (AC), this thesis provides a rich understanding of how heritage interpretation can address a range of management challenges at heritage sites where film-induced tourism has occurred. These heritage visitor attractions (HVAs) were specifically selected as case studies as they have played different roles in media products. Rosslyn Chapel (RC) was an actual place named in The Da Vinci Code (TDVC) book and then film, whereas Alnwick Castle (AC) served as a backdrop for the first two Harry Potter (HP) films. Findings of this research include a range of management challenges at both RC and AC such as an increase in visitor numbers; seasonality issues; changes in visitor profile; revenue generation concerns; conservation, access, and visitor experience; and the complex relationship between heritage management and tourism activities. The findings also reveal film-induced tourism's implications for heritage interpretation such as the various visitors' expectations for heritage interpretation, changes to heritage interpretation as a result of film-induced tourism, and issues with commodification. These findings also demonstrate that film-induced tourism to some extent influenced visitors' preferences for heritage interpretation, though visitors' preferences differed from one to another. This thesis argues that, in the context of film-induced tourism at HVAs, as evident from the two case studies considered, heritage interpretation can be a valuable management tool and can also play a significant role in the quality of the visitors' experience.