Due to the importance of higher education to jobs and economic growth, integration between research, education, and innovation has been paid more and more attention recently. Therefore, practice-involved programs and courses are being offered by many universities in Europe. In this thesis, a case study was conducted in order to explore the challenges and opportunities when involving practice in IT education. Different perspectives have been taken into account from different stakeholders towards the practice-involved program explored in this study. Examining the knowledge boundaries between stakeholders, several challenges among stakeholders were identified. These boundaries prevent the communication between the theoretical world and the practical world, as well as the communication between the stakeholders. Moreover, several opportunities have emerged from involving practice in IT education.

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The purpose of this thesis research is to better understand the experiences of street-involved youth in educational institutions. Data for this study was collected through a five-wave panel study of street-involved youth in Victoria, British Columbia (N=64). I used Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) as a framework for analyzing the responses to open-ended questions regarding the participants’ experience with education. At the time of first interview, 89% of the participants had not continued past grade ten and their average age was 16.7 years. Salient themes throughout the analysis included not fitting in, re-engaging, and connectedness. Under not fitting in participants detailed strained relationships with peers, staff and teachers, and difficult experiences trying to engage with their education and learning that did not fulfill their natural curiosity for knowledge. The experiences of not fitting in led to a devalued view of education. Participants also spoke extensively about trying to re-engage with their education and encountering many barriers. Their experiences re-engaging highlight difficulty fitting in within the school environment, policies that prevented their full participation and continued difficulties within the school environment. Despite this, through re-engaging with mainstream schools or alternative education programs some participants were able to find spaces where they fit. Points of connection within schools including positive relationships, positive experiences, and meaningful learning opportunities worked to encourage their participation and attendance in their education. The thesis concludes with a summary of the findings, limitations, implications for practice and future research. / Graduate

Thesis advisor: Ruth G. McRoy / Thesis advisor: Thomas M. Crea / Youth involved with both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems are referred to as dually involved youth. Children involved in the child welfare system are highly vulnerable for maladaptive outcomes, and in particular, engagement in delinquent behaviors. Those youth who criminally offend are likely to shift back and forth between the two systems, potentially increasing their vulnerability for poor outcomes. The theoretical bases for this study are derived from ecological systems and attachment theories, specifically the influence of trauma on attachment. The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Department of Youth Services (DYS) provided the data for this secondary analysis of the characteristics of dually involved youth and the factors related to offense severity for youth committed to DYS. The study explored: 1) the relationship of gender, race, and age of delinquency commitment to offense severity; 2) the influence of child welfare involvement (measured by total unique count of social workers, home removal, and out-of-home placement) to offense severity; 3) the influence of prior maltreatment to offense severity; and 4) the association of gender and race to the likelihood of dual involvement. Results indicated that while maltreatment was found to be significantly associated with more severe offenses, greater child welfare involvement was associated with less severe offenses. Additionally, the results indicated that female juvenile delinquents were significantly more likely to be dually involved. The issues of racial disproportionality within the juvenile justice and child welfare systems were examined. While results did not indicate statistical significance in determining the likelihood of dual involvement based on race, disproportionality in the juvenile justice system exists. Implications for policy changes included the following: 1) the need for gender specific programming, 2) an increased commitment to reducing disproportionality in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, 3) increased focus on multisystem services to meet the needs of youth. Strategies for using kinship placements as an avenue to maintain familial connections are discussed. Additional research is needed to explore the influence of the interaction between gender and race, mental health and environment factors (e.g., poverty, neighborhood characteristics) on likelihood of dual involvement. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

When a police officer exercises their statutory authority to use force against a member of society, and that force results in death, the public must have confidence that the police acted legitimately. The inquiry this thesis facilitates examines current police oversight law that purports to hold police accountable in circumstances of police-involved death in British Columbia. The research is motivated by two assertions: 1. The government’s response to reform the investigatory and legal processes for the determination of allegations of police-involved death is inadequate; the resulting police oversight regime is too complex, and fails to act in the public interest. 2. Oversight and law enforcement agencies limit access to the information required for families and the public to understand the circumstances of, and to fairly assess, alleged police-involved death. While this research does not anticipate a singular resolution to the complex and longstanding questions of police accountability in BC, it draws attention to an unresolved history of police un-accountability as a matter of public interest. Due to the complex nature of the legal framework, this research does not identify an exhaustive list of issues within policing law. / Graduate

Introduction: The effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been long studied in various populations, but there has been limited research on how differential ACEs can lead to more uncommon outcomes in unique and high-risk populations, such as youth who have engaged in sexually abusive behaviors. These youth experience ACEs at higher rates and with greater comorbidity than those who have engaged in nonsexual crimes or without justice-system involvement. ACEs are associated with increased suicidal ideation and attempts, though little research has examined how different types of ACEs (i.e., direct maltreatment vs. indirect maltreatment/household dysfunction) may lead to differential outcomes. In the current study, I analyze relationships between experiences of direct abuse (i.e., physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse) and indirect abuse/household dysfunction (i.e., neglect, parental absence, caregiver substance misuse, caregiver mental illness, witnessing interpersonal violence) on suicidality outcomes in high-risk youth. I hypothesize that indirect maltreatment/household dysfunction will influence the relationships between adverse experiences and suicidality outcomes beyond the influence of direct maltreatment. Methods: Data were collected from archival records of male youth (n = 290) who had previously engaged in sexually abusive behaviors and received treatment from a private, nonprofit residential and outpatient treatment facility in Tennessee. Hierarchical linear and logistic regressions will be used to determine relationships between adverse experiences and various suicidality outcomes (e.g., presence of suicidal ideation or attempts, age at first suicidal ideation), first with direct maltreatment experiences and then indirect maltreatment/household dysfunction experiences. Results & discussion: Results will be discussed, along with implications for enhancing prevention and clinical intervention strategies for managing suicidality among high-risk youth.

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Little research has focused on street-involved youths’ social relationships. As some scholars have suggested that leisure is inherently social, my research sought to understand whether participation in structured and/or unstructured leisure activities influence street-involved youths’ social relationships with other street-involved youths as well with members of the mainstream community. Written in the publishable paper format, this thesis is comprised of two papers, both of which utilize Foucauldian theory. In the first paper, I examine the impacts of street-involved youths’ participation in Health Matters, a leisure program for street-involved youths in Ottawa, Canada. In the second paper, I examine street involved youths’ unstructured leisure activities (e.g., leisure in non-programmed settings) and their subsequent social impacts. Based on my findings, I argue that street-involved youths use both structured and unstructured leisure to form crucial social connections to make their lives more bearable.

In the current sociological literature, there is very little research on the subject of the love shared between parents and children, and contemporary intimate father’s role in connection to Scottish and Romanian masculinities. Drawing from the aesthetic theory of emotions postulated by Ian Burkitt (2014) and from Esther Dermott’s (2008) reframing of modern fatherhood according to intimacy theory, the present research has looked at a specific group of men’s experiences of love. As such, it sees involved fathers as embedded in an intimate network of relationships: to their children, their partner and their own parents. Presenting results from 47 qualitative semi-structured interviews with a sample of middle-class and working-class, resident and non-resident, Romanian and Scottish fathers, the study explored fathers’ embeddedness in a particular class, culture and family configuration in relation to what guides them to adopt certain forms of emotionality. Results show that involved fathers understand love primarily as an activity (it is something they do), in which both love and power are intermingled, as power in the context of fathering is deeply relational, and socially-constructed as much as love is. In order to maintain loving relationships to their children, involved fathers also do emotion work in discursive and embodied ways. Providing is influenced by the intimate father’s discourse, which has permeated both cultures due to globalization and is increasingly commodified, but fathers can also resist this discourse. The cultural perspective of their fathering has more similarities in common than differences, while class differences appear more prominently, further emphasizing structural inequalities in how love can then be practised. Therefore, the ways in which fathers express their emotions are balanced between the masculine emotional demands of stoicism and the novel discursive prerogative for intimate self-disclosure (or between love and detachment). To help us understand how these tensions are created and then resolved, I have developed the concept of ‘emotional bordering’ from Barrie Thorne’s concept of gender borders (1993). Ultimately, it is argued that investigating love in relation to culturally-diverse masculinities as they interact with the intimate father’s role can offer sociologists a fresh perspective on intimate inequalities by further enhancing the vulnerability of the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. It can also give a different understanding to the role of ideals in the nexus of family practices, into which practices of love and of fathering are embedded.

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to illuminate and compare how teachers and parents are describing the homework. The study will also attempt to answer these issues; How is the purpose of the homework described from teachers and parents? How are the effects of the homework described by teachers and parents? How do teachers and parents describe the responsibility for the implementation of the homework? Methods: Qualitative study, a comparison between teachers and parents description of the homework phenomenon. The material that forms the discussion are fetched from blog forums. Summary of conclusions: The Swedish school system is based on democratic values. This means that the students are supposed to gain equal opportunity for qualified education independent of their socioeconomic backgrounds. Based on this context is the study relevant as the homework reveals that conditions and qualifications differ between students. It also becomes obvious that the homework is a well established method in the Swedish school even though that it no longer is even mentioned in the official curriculum guidance.