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<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>With the recent combat in Afghanistan, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) is once again in the public eye. With this it has sparked researchers interested in P.T.S.D. and the experiences of soldiers post combat. However, much of this literature has framed P.T.S.D. as abnormal psychology versus a normal reaction to extreme violence. Further, the literature has concentrated on P.T.S.D. and not explored Operational Stress Injuries. As well, it has been stated that there has been an influx of soldiers and combat veterans seeking social services. This is an exploratory study that examines the narratives of five veterans for their perspectives of operational injury support services. The research is based on an anti-oppressive interpretative social science framework and narrative based qualitative interviews with five veterans residing in Southern Ontario. The findings revealed stories of the veteran’s identity, the emotional impact of war, barriers to seeking treatment and facilitators to accessing services.</p> <p>Each of these veterans spoke about their employment and culture and how this had an effect on seeking services. Many aspects of the veterans’ stories were comprised of stigma and the impact it had on seeking treatment. Condensed with stigma, the structural barriers exacerbate the soldier’s ability to seek culturally appropriate services in a timely fashion. Furthermore, these structural barriers do not solely impact the veterans in one area of their lives but have a ripple effect on all areas. Lastly, these veterans provided explicit service provisions that they believe would assist them and other veterans in the future. Not only do these men believe that individual support is important to them, but supporting their families also seems to be an important aspect of treatment. Even with individual treatment each veteran talked about the importance of peer support, whether it was too informal or formal, and the role of peer support seems vital in a holistic culturally appropriate treatment.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This dissertation investigates the educational practices surrounding English Learners (ELs) with disabilities, a unique population of learners who are not only acquiring English as a Second Language (ESL) but also have an institutionally identified disability. Possessing these characteristics, these learners are located at an intersection--the intersection of minority social categories and the intersection of two disciplines, special education and ESL. This intersection is the source of educational ambiguity; namely educators are left wondering how they can possibly target the heterogeneous learning needs of these students within the course of any given school day. Employing ethnographic methodology, this dissertation was designed as a vertical case study of two elementary schools within Pennsylvania. With over a year of observations, 40 interviews, and artifact collection, this dissertation draws on intersectionality for its theoretical underpinnings to investigate the educational practices of service provision for ELs with disabilities. More concretely, it examines how institutional factors and personnel's beliefs construct and even limit the opportunities ELs with disabilities are offered within their learning contexts. It argues that second language (L2) identities are erased during service delivery practices through specific institutional and ideological factors, so that in effect, ELs with disabilities become learners with disabilities. Further, this dissertation questions the de facto policy of eliminating ESL services for special education with the understanding that such practices fail to address the multidimensionality of these learners while simultaneously circumventing educational law. / Teaching & Learning

Background With an expected increase of seven to eight-fold in the UK in the number of people from a Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) heritage living with dementia, there will be a similar increase in the number of family carers. Whilst policy and research have discussed issues pertaining to awareness and access issues for minoritised ethnic communities, there remains an under-representation of these communities in services. A lack of understanding on the part of service providers as to how services could meet the needs of these carers, together with a mistrust of services, leads to bias and misconceptions about dementia care amongst South Asian families. Added to this, migrant communities are now well established in the UK, yet little is understood about the factors impacting on care and coping in the face of discrimination and prejudice. This adds to the complexities of caring for older relatives living with dementia. Aims The aim of this doctorate was to develop an understanding of how South Asian families cope with caring transitions connected with the care needs of advancing dementia. Emotional and physical coping strategies require some elements of individual capability but also some external elements, such as information, support and access to services. This research set out to identify what, and how, it influenced South Asian family carers’ ability to cope, especially in the light of a lack of culturally appropriate services. I set out to explore these influences, as they are especially salient in the cultural context. The research explored how South Asian carers coped with transitions in dementia care whilst taking into consideration factors such family dynamics, cultural perspectives, values (including faith) and service provision. Design and methods I undertook two studies, both using a phenomenological methodology, underpinned by a social constructivist approach. The first study gathered retrospective accounts from former carers to identify key transitions in their experience of providing dementia care, and to identify factors to explore in a subsequent longitudinal study. It included in-depth semi-structured interviews with former carers from 5 families. The interviews were transcribed and then analysed using thematic analysis to identify key themes. These themes influenced the second study, where I interviewed carers from 7 South Asian families, who were actively caring for a relative living with advanced dementia. Four interviews took place bi-monthly with each family over a period of six months. Results Analysis identified a number of themes, which influence South Asian family carers’ ability to cope with the care needs of a relative living with advanced dementia. Study one identified five key themes, which were: stigma from family and community, access to information, appropriateness of services, expectations regarding caregiving, and attitudes arising from faith and religion regarding care provision. Family carers identified the transitioning aspects of South Asian communities themselves and how these influenced the adapting nature of culture, values and social norms in society. These include the changing nature and constructs associated with care and caregiving as care needs increase or become complicated, in relation to what is acceptable as care needs increase or become complicated. Study two incorporated findings of study one. Themes from the analysis identified some general factors, such as changing attitudes to cultural influences, faith-based impacts, carers’ own ability to cope with caring, coping as a family, gender-based influences, services and stigma as factors that impacted their coping experiences. Conclusion This PhD raised some interesting aspects relating to coping with care that included the value of nuanced approaches to understanding the needs of the family carers and their frustrations with barriers to accessing services that were associated with faith, gender and cultural expectations or obligations. There was a clear difference between the views of older South Asian family carers, who held more traditional values to providing care, and younger British-born carers, who saw their faith and values as not opposing their ability and desire to seek external sources of support, community or statutory services. The research therefore moves forward the previous discourse mainly restricted to awareness and attitudes. It moves it towards practical recommendations that can help support services to be more open-minded and tackle their own biases. Encouraging this, whilst taking into consideration aspects such as family-centred approaches or faith-based influences in supporting carers to better cope with the demands of caring for a relative with advancing dementia. / Alzheimer’s Society

Yes / Health and social care services are under strain providing care in the community particularly at hospital discharge. Patient and carer experiences can inform and shape services. Objective To develop service user-led recommendations enabling smooth transition for people living with memory loss from acute hospital to community. Design Lead and co-researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 pairs of carers and patients with memory loss at discharge, 6 and 12 weeks post-discharge and one semi-structured interview with health and social care professionals and Admiral Nurses. Framework analysis was guided by co-researchers. Two focus groups of study participants, facilitated by co-researchers, met to shape and finalize recommendations. Setting and participants Recruitment took place in acute hospitals in two National Health Service (NHS) Trusts in England. Patients were aged 65 and over, with memory loss, an in-patient for at least 1 week returning to the community, who had a carer consenting to be in the study. Results Poor delivery of services caused considerable stress to some study families living with memory loss. Three key recommendations included a need for a written, mutually agreed discharge plan, a named coordinator of services, and improved domiciliary care services. Discussion and conclusions Vulnerable patients with memory loss find coming out of hospital after an extended period a stressful experience. The SHARED study contributes to understanding the hospital discharge process through the eyes of the patient and carer living with memory loss and has the potential to contribute to more efficient use of resources and to improving health outcomes in communities. / National Institute for Health Research. Grant Number: PB-PG-1112-29064

The IoT concept has revolutionised the vision of the future Internet with the advent of standards such as 6LoWPAN making it feasible to extend the Internet into previously isolated environments, e.g., WSNs. The abstraction of resources as services, has opened these environments to a new plethora of potential applications. Moreover, the web service paradigm can be used to provide interoperability by offering a standard interface to interact with these services to enable WoT paradigm. However, these networks pose many challenges, in terms of limited resources, that make the adaptability of existing IP-based solutions infeasible. As traditional service discovery and selection solutions demand heavy communication and use bulky formats, which are unsuitable for these resource-constrained devices incorporating sleep cycles to save energy. Even a registry based approach exhibits burdensome traffic in maintaining the availability status of the devices. The feasible solution for service discovery and selection is instrumental to enable the wide application coverage of these networks in the future. This research project proposes, TRENDY, a new compact and adaptive registry-based SDP with context awareness for the IoT, with more emphasis given to constrained networks, e.g., 6LoWPAN It uses CoAP-based light-weight and RESTful web services to provide standard interoperable interfaces, which can be easily translated from HTTP. TRENDY's service selection mechanism collects and intelligently uses the context information to select appropriate services for user applications based on the available context information of users and services. In addition, TRENDY introduces an adaptive timer algorithm to minimise control overhead for status maintenance, which also reduces energy consumption. Its context-aware grouping technique divides the network at the application layer, by creating location-based groups. This grouping of nodes localises the control overhead and provides the base for service composition, localised aggregation and processing of data. Different grouping roles enable the resource-awareness by offering profiles with varied responsibilities, where high capability devices can implement powerful profiles to share the load of other low capability devices. Thus, it allows the productive usage of network resources. Furthermore, this research project proposes APPUB, an adaptive caching technique, that has the following benefits: it allows service hosts to share their load with the resource directory and also decreases the service invocation delay. The performance of TRENDY and its mechanisms is evaluated using an extensive number of experiments performed using emulated Tmote sky nodes in the COOJA environment. The analysis of the results validates the benefit of performance gain for all techniques. The service selection and APPUB mechanisms improve the service invocation delay considerably that, consequently, reduces the traffic in the network. The timer technique consistently achieved the lowest control overhead, which eventually decreased the energy consumption of the nodes to prolong the network lifetime. Moreover, the low traffic in dense networks decreases the service invocations delay, and makes the solution more scalable. The grouping mechanism localises the traffic, which increases the energy efficiency while improving the scalability. In summary, the experiments demonstrate the benefit of using TRENDY and its techniques in terms of increased energy efficiency and network lifetime, reduced control overhead, better scalability and optimised service invocation time.

This thesis examines the implications of the changes introduced by the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 for mental health services. It focuses on two main issues. Firstly, the impact on mental health services of the 'market' system of purchasers and providers introduced by the 1990 Act. Second.ly, the extent to which the 1990 changes had led to any increase in user participation and involvement in the planning and delivery of psychiatric services. Analysis of the existing theoretical literature found that there had been little research which focused on the specific implications of health care 'markets' for mental health services. In addition, much of the work on the development of psychiatry had not focused on the role of the local context in influencing the nature of mental health service provision. In this thesis these issues are explored through a case study of the mental health services of one English county. Semistructured, qualitative interviews were und.ertaken with managers, professionals and individuals in purchaser, provider and voluntary sector organisations. People using community mental health services in the county were also interviewed. This contrasts with many previous studies which have tended to concentrate exclusively on users of in-patient services. The study found that local circumstances played a significant role in the relationships between those purchasing, providing and participating in mental health services. The imminent closure of a large Victorian psychiatric hospital and the uncertainty about which services would replace it had been a source of tension between the newly formed purchaser and provider organisations in the county under study. The lack of any strong existing groups in the local area representing users of mental health services was also significant. It meant that increased user participation in the county after the 1990 Act was reliant on initiatives by managers and professionals rather than organised pressure from user groups and users themselves. The variety of different local mental health agencies purchasing and providing mental health services in the county called for a degree of cooperation between organisations which conflicted with the competition encouraged by the 'market' system introduced by the 1990 Act. The focus, first, on psychiatric services in the examination of 'markets' and, second, the importance of the local context in mental health service development provides the basis for the study's contribution to theoretical and policy debates both about the 1990 Act and psychiatric services in general.

This work proposes a new theory of authoritarian regimes: responsive authoritarianism. Most existing theories of autocracies take as their point of departure elite politics or the state’s repressive apparatus to explain the rise and fall of regimes. I argue that, for many states, regimes also have to consider the consent of the governed when designing policies. Specifically, when regime legitimacy is low but the central leadership maintains a long time horizon, autocratic regimes are predicted to become more responsive to the needs of citizens. This theory is tested against a number of aspects of the Chinese fiscal system dealing with public goods provision during the period of 2002-2011 and generally finds in favor of the theory. Chapter 4 tests the fiscal transfer system, Chapter 5 tests the fiscal expenditure data, and Chapter 6 tests data on the results of the transfer and expenditure data: actual public goods provision. This theory has a number of implications that suggest that scholars begin to rethink how they conceptualize power dynamics within an authoritarian regime, in particular paying closer attention to the relationship between the ruler(s) and the ruled. It suggests that, at least in the political science literature, power be returned to the people.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh over five million people live in low-income, informal settlements (bustees) with limited access to basic services, secure land tenure and political voice. Whilst collective action among the urban poor is central to accessing affordable services and - when taken to scale - a broader politics of 'redistribution, recognition and representation' (Fraser 1997; 2005), little is known about how Dhaka's slum dwellers organise, and the extent to which this is (or can be) transformative. To deepen our understanding, this thesis utilises collective action theory to examine intra-group dynamics, the instrumental value of groups and broader context of urban governance that enables and/or constrains certain forms of collective action in Dhaka's bustees. Case studies of Community Based Organisations (CBOs) in three bustees are used as a lens to explore how slum dwellers organise to obtain basic services, such as water and sanitation. CBOs are disaggregated into two main types (externally or NGO-initiated and internally or leader-initiated) and sub-types (formal and informal), with three sub-themes; participation (leadership and membership), function (activities and responsibilities) and outcomes (equity and sustainability). A mixed qualitative toolkit, including in-depth observations of CBOs, interviews with CBO leaders, members, non-members and key-informant interviews with NGO, government officials and citywide urban poor groups, reveals the complex relationship between collective action, service provision and urban governance in Dhaka. Two key findings emerge. Firstly, similar patterns in participation and outcomes are observed regardless of CBO type, whereby politically-affiliated local leaders and house owners create, enter and/or use CBOs to address their strategic agendas, and reinforce their authority. This demonstrates that, as opposed to bounded groups, CBOs are in fact nodes of interconnected individuals, some of whom are better able to participate in (and benefit from) collective action, than others. Secondly, although collective action plays an increasingly important role in service provision in Dhaka (especially legal water supply), it is largely practical in nature (i.e. addressing immediate needs). In cases where it is more strategic (i.e. to access land and housing), or both practical and strategic (i.e. obtaining legal water supply to secure land), certain male local leaders seek to benefit over others. In all cases, transformative collective action is constrained. This, it is argued, relates to the broader context of urban governance that enables certain forms of collective action, while constraining others, in Dhaka's bustees. Three (interrelated) spheres of urban governance are identified as particularly important: 1) patron-centric state; 2) risk-averse and market-oriented development sector; and 3) clientelistic society. Whilst existing collective action theory has value for understanding intra-group dynamics, fieldwork suggests that the urban governance context is the overarching factor affecting collective action in Dhaka's bustees. The thesis concludes with potential ways forward.

Thesis (MPA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2001 / Refer to the document