Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is commonly reported to be more prevalent in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. In this thesis I will explore in more detail the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and ADHD. This thesis comprises six studies, starting with a systematic review in order to evaluate existing published evidence, which is followed by a qualitative study that explores educational practitioners’ conceptualisation of the causes of ADHD. A series of three analyses utilising existing data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) then explore which measures of socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with a research diagnosis of ADHD and potential mediators of this association, and whether timing, duration or changes in exposure to financial difficulty impact on the SES-ADHD association. In the final study in this thesis, I explore whether SES-health associations in general are likely to be due to epigenetic differences in children exposed to low SES. Existing literature provides evidence that an association between SES and ADHD is commonly detected. The facet of SES most predictive of ADHD was mother-reported experience of difficulty affording basic necessities (financial difficulty), associated with an increased risk of a research diagnosis of ADHD of 2.23 (95%CI 1.57, 3.16). Exposure to financial difficulty between birth and age seven was associated with higher levels of ADHD symptoms across childhood of 0.78 points on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire Hyperactivity subscale (95% CI 0.54, 1.00, p < 0.001), whereas later exposure to financial difficulty was not associated with ADHD symptoms. In addition, I found tentative evidence that different patterns of SES exposure are associated with different levels of ADHD symptoms, with those consistently low SES having symptom scores 0.41 points higher than those in difficulty (95% CI 3.46, 3.57, p<0.001). I did not find strong evidence that low SES impacts on epigenetic profiles across childhood. These findings add to emerging evidence of an association between SES and ADHD that has implications for theory and policy.

Population-based evidence suggests that the prevalence of psychotic symptoms varies with ethnicity. However, the validity of these self-reported experiences, both as measures of psychotic symptoms per se and as measures of ethnic variation in risk for reporting these symptoms, is questionable. Cultural background and social position may affect the experience and expression of symptoms, which may in turn affect their measurement in survey research. This thesis explores these issues by assessing the psychometric properties of psychosis screening instruments as measures of ethnic differences in psychosis risk in two contexts, Great Britain and the United States. Following this, differences in risk for reporting psychotic symptoms were examined in the context of the varying social and economic conditions to which different ethnic groups and migrant generations are exposed. This was accomplished in the following way: Firstly, the prevalence of self-reported psychotic symptoms was examined across ethnic and generational groups in two large samples of British and American populations; Secondly, the construct validity of the instruments was assessed by means of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of response to their symptom indicators. The concurrent validity of the symptoms with measures of self-perceived cognitive and social dysfunction was then examined in a structural equation modeling framework; Thirdly, the cross-ethnic and cross-generational validity of response to these screening instruments was assessed in a multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis framework in which in which the psychometric characteristics of the instruments were compared; And finally, ethnic and generational differences in risk for reporting psychotic symptoms were examined in the context of differential exposure to racial discrimination. Both instruments had construct validity in their measurement of psychotic symptoms, with the exception of one item in the British instrument, as well as concurrent validity with measures of self-perceived cognitive or social dysfunction. The British instrument performed adequately in the measurement of psychotic symptoms across ethnic groups, but did not across migrant generations. The American instrument performed adequately in the measurement of psychotic symptoms across generations, but not across ethnic groups. The effect of measurement noninvariance on the estimation of risk across groups was, however, modest in size. Finally, there was evidence for risk of reporting psychotic symptoms being raised among those who were exposed to racial discrimination. These findings suggest that these self-reported psychotic symptoms constitute clinically relevant phenomena which appear phenotypically similar to the clinical symptoms in diagnosed psychotic disorder. Risk is distributed unevenly over ethnic groups in Britain and the US, is higher among minorities who were exposed to social adversity, and higher among the second generation (in most cases). These patterns are, therefore, highly suggestive of social causation in the aetiology of these self-reported symptoms.

The focus of this study is to examine how schoolteachers talks about the relation between the level of expectations and the identity construction of school students.  Teachers expectations is a recurring concept in the school world and in the Swedish school law. It is highly recommended in the teaching processes that teachers should have high expectations on their students. Individuals understands and interpret the concept of expectations in different ways according to their own values, standards and norms. The aim in this study is to clarify what discourse is common or used among teachers. Two discourses where identified in the analysis of teachers construction of expectations in relations to students in ground school and also of their social background. Since 2009 results from the Pisa test shows that Swedish schools are progressing a big gap between the students that achieves and those who doesn`t. It also shows that the students who is preforming the worst results are those whom lives and goes to school in a socioeconomic disadvantaged area. Through this study it can be visible how  the grade of a teachers expectations forms by the way a child build his or her own identity towards the world. The data is collected through semi-structured interviews with four teachers. The analyses are based on a discursive psychological analysis. This study shows that teachers speaks and understands different of expectations but a discourse of goals and achivements is clear and a part of a political school discourse.  It also appears that, depending on the students background, the teacher can change the grade of the expectation and refers to pupils from a socio economic disadvantage areas as poorly impaired students.

An abundance of research has implicated socioeconomic disadvantage as a major risk factor for increased rates of morbidity and mortality worldwide. While advances in science, medicine, and technology have enabled a positive trend in health outcomes over the previous two decades, individuals of lower socioeconomic status have experienced negligible improvements in health and longevity. Furthermore, individuals of lower socioeconomic status face higher risks of mental health disorders than their higher socioeconomic status counterparts. In order to improve methods of intervention, it is important to understand how the roots of these issues are cultivated during childhood. Socioeconomic status is operationalized in multiple ways, including objective measures at both the household and neighborhood levels such as income, education, occupation, employment status, and single-parent status, as well as subjective measures such as perceived social status. This work explores the relationships between exposure to childhood socioeconomic disadvantage and the development of psychopathology. It reviews the literature for impacts of lower socioeconomic status during childhood on both internalizing (mood and anxiety) and externalizing (behavioral and substance use) disorders. Overall, mental health disorders constitute a significant proportion of the worldwide health burden, affecting one in four adults across the global population, including one in five adults and one in two adolescents in the United States. These staggering prevalence rates illuminate the importance of better understanding the mechanisms by which mental health illnesses emerge. Childhood exposure to socioeconomic deprivation has been identified as a robust contributing factor to the increased risk of psychopathology development. Exposure to socioeconomic disadvantage increases the risk for mood disorders such as major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, bipolar I and II disorder, cyclothymic disorder; anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and specific phobias; behavioral disorders such as oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; and substance use disorders such as alcohol and tobacco use. These conditions can disrupt normal growth and development; cause significant impairment in social, academic, and occupational environments; and create tremendous distress in important areas of daily functioning. An ecobiodevelopmental model reveals how the interplay of biological factors, such as genetic inheritance and physiological adaptations/disruptions, with ecological factors, such as the social and physical environment, occurs continuously across the entire life span from the prenatal period through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to drive development and the evolution of individual health and disease. Application of this approach helps to explain how genetic predispositions interact with exposure to poverty to cultivate an environment more prone to adverse childhood experiences. Adverse childhood experiences are stressors occurring prior to the age of 18 that can be threatening or harmful emotionally or physically, which can include traumatic or potentially traumatic experiences such as neglect and abuse. Examples include socioeconomic hardship, racial/ethnic discrimination, parental death, separation from parents, divorce, neighborhood violence, parental mental illness, abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, violence and criminality in the home, and life-threatening physical illness. Adverse childhood experiences promote toxic stress, which occurs from distressing situations high in magnitude, duration, or frequency without protective, buffering adult relationships to help the child cope. Toxic stress is characterized by an overloading of the body’s normal physiologic response mechanisms, which can have adverse long-term consequences through brain circuitry alterations and physiologic disruptions of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis occurring during sensitive, critical periods of development. Toxic stress-induced alterations can occur in brain regions such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex, which are important in mood control, anxiety, stress coping, decision-making, and self-regulation. Self-regulation is a critical mediator in the link between childhood deprivation and subsequent psychopathology, as deficits in self-regulation increases the risk of both internalizing and externalizing disorders. In summation, the ecobiodevelopmental model is a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates developmental science constructs of toxic stress and self-regulation with ecology, neuroscience, and life course sciences to supply promising explanations for the underlying mechanisms linking childhood poverty to mental illnesses.

Modern education has to take on various roles and contingencies over the last decade – both for good and worse. Public school systems are competing with private and now charter schools for student enrollment and virtual or online learning schools. A question many parents and educators struggle with – how do we grow and develop children and young adults' academic needs through the use of technology? The question may be simple; however, the answer is far complicated. Technology provides help in various ways a human being cannot, including instant gratification of Google searches, video education, synchronous education game formats, distant learning from different ends of the country, and so on. Virtual education has seen a growing demand in the last decade. Many institutions worldwide are implementing online classes as academic needs are switching from traditional to non-traditional. Professional development in virtual settings is rapidly increasing along with education budgets to support these technological mammoths' databases and software programs. However, is one ‘one-size-fits-all' model adequate for all learning styles? Despite the rapid growth of online education, many challenges and dispositions exist with the design and delivery to students on all academia levels. Software engineers and lack of developmental acquisitions for user-friendly formatting to students with exceptional learning styles differ from the norm. This paper addresses the question of virtual learning opportunities missed in online programs' software development compared to their physical alternatives in ‘brink and mortar' or face-to-face instruction. The three research questions behind this study were as follows: Are there areas and functions of virtual education that need to be fixed within the public-school setting platforms? If, so what? Are the platforms/software's used ‘one size fits all' or individually programmed to grade level, age of user(s), and/or academic needs (Gifted/IEP, mental/physical disabilities, learning disabilities, language)? Areas of recommendation to positively change missing or unsuccessful platforms to accommodate research questions one and two. Observations, documents and records, and open-ended structured interviews were the data collection methods used in this study to understand virtual education in midst of a pandemic. The researcher is interested know how children are significantly challenged – internet connectivity, socioeconomic and support systems of both social and emotional needs, gifted children were equally compared to their non-gifted peers in the wake of a global pandemic. Schools districts overlooked many areas causing significant concern for both teachers and parents of student academic needs. To justify a ‘one-size-fits-all' approach given lack of planning, cannot justify a substitute for education, through resource limitations and declining success tools to students who need it most. Teachers were split in seeing the progressive advances in fully virtual education which were favorited by younger, tech-savvy educators, compared to their older colleagues who preferred traditional methods of paper and {pen}cils. Public and Charter Schools have the option to continue fully virtual, hybrid education and traditional methods of education based on students adaptation, chronological age, maturity, including teachers opting in for lower class size, ability to work from home and providing more resources to students who are significantly handicapped based on socioeconomic, disabilities, and/or parents reliance as first/active responders.

Aims: The aims of this thesis were to investigate the risk of severe maternal morbidity amongst women from different socioeconomic groups in the UK, explore why these differences exist and compare these findings to the setting in Australia. Methods: Three separate analyses were conducted. The first used UK Obstetric Surveillance System (UKOSS) data to assess the incidence and independent odds of severe maternal morbidity by socioeconomic group in the UK. The second analysis used quantitative and qualitative data from the 2010 UK National Maternity Survey (NMS) to explore the possible reasons for the difference in odds of morbidity between socioeconomic groups in the UK. The third analysis used data from the Victorian Perinatal Data Collection (VPDC) unit in Austra lia to assess the incidence and odds of severe maternal morbidity by socioeconomic group in Victoria. Results: The UKOSS analysis showed that compared with women from the highest socioeconomic group, women in the lowest 'unemployed' group had 1.22 (95%CI: 0.92 - 1.61) times greater odds associated with severe maternal morbidity. The NMS analysis demonstrated that independent of ethnicity, age and parity, women from the lowest socioeconomic quintiJe were 60% less likely to have had any antenatal care (aOR 0.40; 95%CI 0.18 - 0.87), 40% less likely to have been seen by a health professional prior to 12 weeks gestation (aOR 0.62; 95%CI 0.45 - 0.85) and 45% less likely to have had a postnatal check with their doctor (aOR 0.55; 95%CI 0.42 - 0.70) compared to women from the highest quintile. The Victorian analysis showed that women from the lowest socioeconomic group were 21% (aOR 1.21 ; 95% CI 1.00 - 1.47) more likely and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were twice (aOR 2.02; 95%CI 1.32 - 3.09) as likely to experience severe morbidity. Discussion: The resu lts suggest that women from the lowest socioeconomic group in the UK and in Victoria have increased odds of severe maternal morbidity. Further research is needed into why these differences exist and efforts must be made to ensure that these women are appropriately prioritised in the future planning of maternity services provisio n in the UK and Australia.

Forskning har visat att metoder som inbegriper filosofisk dialog i skolan kan varafördelaktig för utvecklingen av en mängd färdigheter hos elever. Endast ett fåtal studier harundersökt effekterna av filosofisk dialog hos socioekonomiskt utsatta elever, och den härstudien syftar till att avhjälpa detta. Mer precist har denna studie fokuserat på utvecklingenav argumentationsförmågor i årskurs 4 (elever med en ålder av ungefär 10 år) i en svenskkommunal skola. Under en period av åtta veckor deltog gruppen av elever på 12 sessionermed filosofisk dialog baserad på Philosophy for Children-metoden. Varje session utom denförsta spelades in (bild och ljud). Datan bearbetades sedan med observationsverktyget Argumentation Rating Tool. Resultatet från tidigt i interventionen jämfördes med resultatetfrån slutet av interventionen, och positiva förändringar i att kunna diskutera kritiskt ochdiskutera tillsammans kunde noteras. Mer forskning om effekterna av filosofiska samtal försocioekonomiskt utsatta elever behövs. / Research has shown that methods of philosophical dialogue in schools can be beneficialfor the development of a variety of skills among students. Few studies have examined theeffects of philosophical dialogue for students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged,and this study aims to help remedy this. More precisely this study focused on thedevelopment of argumentation skills in a fourth year-class (students approximately 10 years of age) in a Swedish municipal school. During a period of eight weeks the group ofstudents participated in 12 sessions of philosophical dialogue based on the Philosophy for Children-method. Every session except the first was recorded (image and sound). The datawas then analysed with the Argumentation Rating Tool. The results from early on in theintervention were compared to the results from the end of the intervention, and positivechanges in ability to discuss critically and discuss together were found. Further research onthe effects of philosophical dialogues for socioeconomically disadvantaged students isneeded.

This thesis presents three empirical analyses in the economics of Higher Education within the United Kingdom. The first analysis evaluates the impact of student funding reforms on participation and course choice, through the use of a difference-in-differences strategy with heterogeneous treatment effects. The results show that students who received the largest increase in study costs were less likely to move further away and also more likely to study a subject with lower graduate wage premia due to the significant reduction in the risk of investing in higher education. Students who received the largest increase in up-front financial support were more likely to attend a university further away. The second question addresses whether undergraduate subject choice is affected by changes in the expected benefits and opportunity costs of investing in HE through variation in the labour market. Students who reside in areas of high unemployment are found to be less likely to choose subjects with the largest graduate wage and employment premia. This suggests that students may be afraid of failure in challenging labour markets and instead choose to study subjects with a greater chance of success. However, lower socioeconomic status students are more likely to study subjects with the highest graduate wage and employment premia. This suggests that the students who may be the most aware of the costs, are also the most aware of the benefits. Finally, the third analysis investigates whether students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged incur a further penalty in terms of degree attainment. The results show that the most disadvantaged students outperform their advantaged counterparts. This may be due to pre-university attainment being an imperfect measure of ability in the most disadvantaged students, or that students who have had to overcome the most challenges to attend university are better-equipped and more determined to succeed.

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