Bullying is a widespread public health problem. While its prevalence, key correlates and major health outcomes have been well researched, important gaps or controversies remain. In particular, the association between bullying and both socioeconomic status and ethnicity remains unclear. Furthermore, other areas are under-researched, such as sibling aggression and its relationship to peer bullying. Finally, while there is evidence of the adverse effects of bullying on mental health, there is still uncertainty whether any experience of being bullied, or only sustained, chronic victimisation, will lead to adverse consequences. Do those who escape bullying fare better? This thesis comprises five studies. Study 1, a meta-analysis, explored the relationship between bullying and socioeconomic status, finding victims and bully-victims, but not bullies, more often came from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Study 2 examined sibling aggression, identifying a strong homotypic association with roles taken in school bullying. Study 3 explored ethnic differences in bullying, finding ethnic minority children were not more likely to be victims, but in some cases were more often bullies. Study 4 identified individual, social and sociodemographic correlates of school bullying. Distinct profiles were observed for each bullying role. Finally, Study 5 examined the timing of bullying in relation to individual and social outcomes. Stable and concurrent victimisation was associated with more negative outcomes, while escaping bullying reduced the adverse consequences. The findings are considered in relation to ecological systems theory. Distant environmental factors, such as socioeconomic status, were only weakly associated with school bullying, while more immediate socio-ecological influences, including sibling relationships and individual characteristics, predicted victim, bully and bullyvictim roles. Further research should focus on the association with sibling aggression, and identify characteristics which can explain why some children escape being bullying, thereby limiting the adverse consequences. The findings have implications for interventions, which should take account of children’s home environments.

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.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze current housing and supplemental income programs on a national level to measure success and failures of different programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, Earned Income Tax Credit, and Housing Vouchers. Furthermore, this thesis attempt to discuss questions of ethics and precedent in determining to what degree the United States should engage in social safety net policies. This paper analyzes contemporary American social safety net policies on the basis of their cost to American taxpayers as well as how well it benefits those in poverty.

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.

No description available.

Four investigations were conducted to assess the effects of feeding selected novel feed ingredients on the nutrition and health status of ornamental fish. Each dietary ingredient was assessed by determining the effects on growth performance, feed utilisation, haematological status, serological status and immuno-competence of mirror carp, a model ornamental fish species. The first experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of feeding a tropical earthworm meal (Perionyx escavatus) and soybean meal on the haemato-immunological response and growth performance of mirror carp (Cyprinus carpio). Fish were fed diets for a total of 88 days, fishmeal served as the main protein source in the control diet. Two remaining diets consisted of fishmeal fixed at 33 % provision of protein and the remaining 66 % protein was provided by soybean meal (SBM diet) or P. excavatus meal (EW diet). After 60 days of feeding fish fed EW diet showed a significant elevation in final body weight compared to fish fed a fishmeal diet and fish fed a SBM diet. Similar improvements were observed in feed utilisation efficiency. After intraperitoneal injection with heat inactivated Aeromonas hydrophila and 28 days of feeding EW diet to mirror carp showed decrease in some aspects of the innate immune response. Contrary to this, fish fed soybean meal showed signs of inflammation. The second experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of feeding two plant protein concentrates and a combination of whey protein concentrate and casein protein on the growth performance, haematological and serological responses of mirror carp (C. carpio). Fish were fed diets for a total of 84 days, fishmeal served as the main protein source in the control diet. Three remaining diets consisted of fishmeal fixed at 33% provision of protein and the remaining 66% protein was provided by rice protein concentrate (RPC diet), corn protein concentrate (CPC) and a combination of whey protein concentrate (8%) and casein protein (58%) (WPC diet). After 84 days of feeding fish fed WPC diet showed a significant elevation in final body weight compared to fish fed a fishmeal diet and fish fed RPC and CPC diets. Similar improvements were observed in feed utilisation and protein efficiency. At the end of the trial feeding fish fed WPC diet showed a significant elevation in mean corpuscular haemoglobin levels compared to fish fed fishmeal and RPC diets. Serological analysis showed that feeding carp the WPC showed a significant increase in serum albumin and protein concentrations compared to fish fed fishmeal diet. The final experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of feeding selected exotic ingredients on immune responses and expression of immune related genes in mirror carp (C. carpio). Fish were fed diets for a total of 63 days. Fishmeal served as the main protein source in the control diet and two experimental diets consisted of fishmeal fixed at 34% provision of protein and the remaining protein was provided either by earthworm meal (EW diet) or a combination of whey protein concentrate (8%) and casein (58 %) (WPC diet). At the start of the trial fish were injected intraperitoneally with A. hydrophila bacterin. Compared to fish fed fishmeal, a significant increase in mRNA expression of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β (24 h post injection) and TNFα (at 12 h and 48 h post injection) was observed in fish fed EW. Moreover a similar trend was observed for complement 3 (C3) gene, where fish fed EW showed significant elevations in mRNA expression values at both 12 and 48 h post injection compared to control fed fish. In contrast, fish fed WPC showed a significant decrease in C3 and TNF-α mRNA expression compared to fish fed fishmeal (48 h post injection). Fish fed EW and WPC diet showed a significant increase leukocyte levels compared to fish fed fishmeal 14 days post injection. Fish fed fishmeal presented significantly higher circulatory IgM levels at 7 d post injection compared to fish fed EW and WPC diets. In contrast, fish fed EW and WPC showed a significant increase in IgM levels at 28 d post injection. This study concludes that feeding fish non-plant based feed commodities had a positive effect on carp growth response, feed utilisation and immuno-competence. These findings are both novel and highly relevant for the ornamental industry where high value feed commodities are more acceptable.