<p>The City of Toronto has become synonymous with themes of culture and diversity. With close to one half of the city’s population now comprised of those born outside of Canada, Toronto represents a dynamic and exciting cultural mosaic. Yet, underneath this surface exist real disparities in health and well being for many newcomers and racialized communities. In addition to and because of such disparities, changes in the demographics of Toronto have led to challenges and questions involving the participation of such communities within the formal political realm. Much research to date has focused on issues of representation and the exercise of political franchise within such communities.</p> <p>As opposed to the formal political realm, the aim of this research is to better understand the substantive participation of newcomers and members of racialized communities in processes of government sponsored citizen participation at the municipal level by asking: what is the ability of this approach to policy making to meaningfully include a diverse range of voices? This question is important because it is decisions in this realm that most immediately impact residents of the city. Additionally, if social policy developers are to keep up with shifts in demographics and create inclusive and responsive policy, then consideration must be given to all community members.</p> <p>To understand the ability of government sponsored citizen participation to be inclusive of a diverse range of voices, a literature review was conducted. Also, an analysis of the case of the 2000-2001 Community Consultations on Social Development held in Toronto was undertaken. Finally, five interviews were held with policy practitioners within Toronto to gain insight into the ability of practices of government sponsored citizen participation to be inclusive. The findings of this research study highlight that political will and increased funding must be directed towards the purposeful inclusion of newcomers and racialized communities in processes of government sponsored citizen participation so as to foster increased experiences of inclusion and the creation of responsive and effective policies of social development.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The purpose of this thesis is to study how the Swedish welfare state formulated a question of shorter work hours, 1919—2002. During the 1900s, several official reports were published in order to produce knowledge about this issue and construct a manageable inquiry about shorter work hours. The aim of this thesis is to examine what were formulated as problems and solutions and which arguments and beliefs emerged from these formulations. Official state reports are regarded as instruments of knowledge production by the state. This intelligence was required to justify the possibility and desirability of the reform that shaped the question of shorter work hours in the welfare state.   The aim of the official reports was to create knowledge, which determined the value of working time reduction. Leisure as welfare meant that the state interpreted the citizens’ needs and formulated working-time reduction as either a possible or impossible reform. Working hours have never been justified as a reform that simply gives more leisure and less time for work. The reform was instead considered possible and desirable because it was interpreted as helping to reproduce the labour force or capitalism as a whole. It was thought impossible and undesirable when considered to be a threat to this reproduction.   However, there were two major reformulations of the question of shorter work. In the middle of the selected period, the matter moved from the sphere of production to a consumption sphere, meaning that the issue became less conflicted. The state’s responsibility to push the reform was deemphasized. Another reformulation is when flexibility was formulated as a solution, and thus made regulation of working time undesirable and unnecessary. This study shows how the conception of a question of shorter work hours was a process requiring formulations and reformulations and how these expressions fundamentally changed over time, although the basic premises remained.

Maternal depression is a common mental health disorder that can have significant adverse effects on child functioning, including increased rates of child behaviour problems. Adopting a resilience approach highlights that despite the increased risk there is considerable variation in child behaviour development, although mechanisms through which this occurs are not well understood. This thesis investigates positive parenting, harsh parenting, and child inhibitory control as developmentally salient processes that may explain why some children of mothers with depression develop more positive behaviours than others. Analyses were conducted using data from the Early Steps Multisite Study, a longitudinal randomised controlled trial that includes 731 ethnically diverse families from three sites across the United States. Baseline measures were completed at child age 2, with annual follow-up assessments until age 8. These analyses used mother self-reported depressive symptoms, observed measures of parenting, alternate caregiver-reported child inhibitory control, and mother- and teacher-reported child externalising behaviours. Categorical and continuous variables of maternal depression and child behaviour were tested to explore the implications of different analytic approaches, particularly with reference to the concept of resilience. Logistic regression results indicate that child inhibitory control is a robust predictor of developmentally normative behaviours for children of mothers with depression and children in general. Linear regression results support a risk-specific effect of harsh parenting, such that it interacts with maternal depression to predict increased externalising behaviours specifically for children of mothers with depression. Positive parenting appears to predict the behaviour of children in general but not the behaviour of children of mothers with depression. Path analyses indicate that between the ages of 2 and 4, harsh parenting partially mediates the association between maternal depression and child externalising behaviours. Moderated mediation results suggest that children with lower levels of inhibitory control elicit increased harsh parenting behaviours from mothers both with and without depression. Cross-lagged path analyses provide support for reciprocal influence between maternal depression, harsh parenting, and child externalising behaviour, and suggest an impact of maternal depression severity on the establishment of negative patterns of mother-child interactions from age 2. The findings of this thesis support the importance of reducing harsh parenting behaviours particularly for mothers with depression and of improving child self-regulation from an early age. The concept of resilience as a dimensional and potentially reciprocal process is discussed in the context of maternal depression and child behaviour development. Results emphasise that both mother and child are actively involved in influencing processes of resilience. From early childhood, there is a need to support more adaptive patterns of behaviour between mothers with depression and their children in order to increase the likelihood of positive child outcomes over time.

No description available.

Scotland has the highest rates of child obesity in Europe with more than 1 in every 4 children aged between 2 and 15 being overweight or obese in 2008. The need to curb the nation’s unhealthy eating habits through Scottish public health policy has been acknowledged, although there remains a shortage of policy addressing the eating habits of infants and young children as they develop in the context of family life. This is matched by a shortage of empirical research which uses nationally representative longitudinal data on Scottish children, to look at how diets of children under five develop within the home. This doctoral research seeks to explain how children’s nutritional trajectories develop from birth through infancy and into early childhood in contemporary Scotland within the context of maternal resources, maternal use of nutrition advice, and family meal habits. Theoretical concepts pertaining to social constructionism and the symbolic meaning of meal rituals, as well as theories of risk and responsibilisation, human capital and health behaviours, and discussions about agency and structure, frame the research questions and the interpretation of results. The research draws on the first three annual sweeps of the Growing Up in Scotland nationally representative, longitudinal survey of families and young children. The analysis is based on multivariate proportional hazards regression and logistic regression models. The empirical analysis shows that maternal education is a consistently superior predictor of children’s nutritional outcomes, when compared to maternal occupational classification and household income, and that children of more educated mothers have healthier diets throughout infancy and childhood. This points to the utility of human capital theories which stress the importance of education, rather than income, and also reflects on the need for policy to recognise the structural nature of nutritional inequalities. More educated mothers are also more likely to be proactive in using healthy eating advice, resonating with theories of risk awareness and medicalised childhoods. Surprisingly, mothers from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to use advice from health professionals, possibly as a result of health professionals actively targeting their support to more ‘at risk’ families. Yet these mothers are also more apprehensive about the interference of health professionals in aspects of childrearing. Relevant policy reflections pointed to the need to identify how support for mothers from more disadvantaged backgrounds can be provided in formats which help to overcome the culture of mistrust towards health professionals prevalent among disadvantaged parents. Nevertheless, positive associations between infant diet and maternal use of breastfeeding advice from health professionals are found, in line with theories of power-knowledge, lending support to information-based policy initiatives as a tool for improving infant nutrition. The analysis also indicates that children who are breastfed, and children who are weaned later have healthier diets in their toddler years, which contributes to the proposal of a theoretical typology explaining how young children’s nutritional trajectories evolve from the pre-partum period through infancy and childhood. Finally, the analysis suggests that communal patterns of eating play an important role in children’s dietary quality, attesting to the importance of the meal ritual as a vehicle for socialising children into developing particular tastes for food. Thus, there seems to be room for policy initiatives which address not only what children eat, but how young children and families eat in the context of everyday family life.

The thesis examines the Children’s Centre Programme in England and develops an understanding of its development at national and local level by using Kingdon’s (1995) streams model. Central to the thesis is a case study of the Children’s Centre Programme which looks at influential factors in the development at national level and implementation of the programme in one local authority. Traditionally Kingdon’s (1995) model has been used to understand the way that a wide range of factors interact to enable policy change at national level but a small number of authors have also used the model at local level showing that the range of factors that impact on the local implementation of a policy are also many and varied. One of the most well know aspects of Kingdon’s model is in showing how the problem, policy and politics streams come together to create a window of opportunity which allows or drives policy change and or enactment. This thesis will use the model in a broader sense showing that although this window of opportunity is important the interaction of the three streams is ongoing and not only does it lead to significant policy change but it also informs debates and policy development on an ongoing basis.

The following report examines the contribution my publications have made over the course of a twenty-year career in government departments (in Britain) and academic institutions (in Australia) to advancing scholarly inquiry in the areas of Youth Justice, Young People and Social Welfare, and Criminology. In the section dealing with Youth Justice publications I have given patiicular attention to a dominant and coherent area of study under the heading Families, Crime and Juvenile Justice. The conmmon thematic content of my publications focuses on the ways in which celiain individuals and social groups perceive and experience systems of social control. Additionally, the report highlights a range of allied pUblications that have dealt with the consequences of largely state-sponsored policies and practices in relation to a range of 'subject populations'. It is argued that my contribution to advancing knowledge in the above areas has been achieved in two primary ways: (a) through a range of original pubEcations based on theoretical and empirical studies, and substantial polemical and critical work; (b) through significant engagement in scholarly debate and discussion (including citation of my work in the publications of other academics) and facilitation of reflexive discussion an10ng social welfare practitioners and policy makers. Finally, the report attempts to contextualise my publications through a detailed discussion of the personal and intellectual origins of my work over the past two decades. The latter involves a general review of the sociological, criminological and social welfare literature relating to a prevailing concern with what I have broadly tenned the 'phenomenology of social control'.

The development of Youth Justice in the UK since the early 1990s has been informed by the belief that the family plays a key role in youth offending. In 1998 the parenting order was introduced, based on the assumption that interventions to improve parenting will have a positive effect upon offending. The availability of the order was extended in 2005, reflecting the view that parents who do not undertake parenting support are being wilfully negligent of their responsibilities and must be made to take the help offered. In this thesis the assumptions justifying the parenting order and its extensions are questioned. Evidence suggests that although parenting is influential, it is one of many factors associated with the onset of or desistence from offending. Furthermore, as this thesis highlights, parents likely to receive parenting orders are often experiencing several personal and environmental 'stressors', creating high levels of need. These situational pressures and high level of need, this thesis argues, are likely to make it difficult for them to be effective in their role, or to gain long term benefit from attending a parenting programme. Furthermore, many parents have histories of unsuccessfully seeking assistance from 'helping agencies', refuting the assumption of wilful neglect. This thesis considers the advantages and limitations of parenting work as a form of crime prevention and specifically looks at the use of the parenting order. An argument is presented for a wider, more holistic approach to parenting work than that offered by the parenting order as a form of crime prevention and for providing assistance to families earlier.

published_or_final_version / Urban Studies / Master / Master of Social Sciences

<p>This dissertation takes a step towards providing a better understanding of post-socialist welfare state development from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The overall analytical goal of this thesis has been to critically assess the development of social policies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania using them as illustrative examples of post-socialist welfare state development in the light of the theories, approaches and typologies that have been developed to study affluent capitalist democracies. The four studies included in this dissertation aspire to a common aim in a number of specific ways.</p><p>The first study tries to place the ideal-typical welfare state models of the Baltic States within the well-known welfare state typologies. At the same time, it provides a rich overview of the main social security institutions in the three countries by comparing them with each other and with the previous structures of the Soviet period. It examines the social insurance institutions of the Baltic States (old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, short-term benefits, sickness, maternity and parental insurance and family benefits) with respect to conditions of eligibility, replacement rates, financing and contributions. The findings of this study indicate that the Latvian social security system can generally be labelled as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models. The Estonian social security system can generally also be characterised as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models, even if there are some weak elements of the targeted model in it. It appears that the institutional changes developing in the social security system of Lithuania have led to a combination of the basic security and targeted models of the welfare state. Nevertheless, as the example of the three Baltic States shows, there is diversity in how these countries solve problems within the field of social policy. In studying the social security schemes in detail, some common features were found that could be attributed to all three countries. Therefore, the critical analysis of the main social security institutions of the Baltic States in this study gave strong supporting evidence in favour of identifying the post-socialist regime type that is already gaining acceptance within comparative welfare state research.</p><p>Study Two compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the essay is to highlight the forces that have influenced the transformation of the social policy from its former highly universal, albeit authoritarian, form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This study demonstrates that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. The results of this analysis revealed that people's attitudes towards distributive justice and the developmental level of civil society also play an important part in shaping social policies. The shift to individualism in people’s mentality and the decline of the labour movement, or, to be more precise, the decline in trade union membership and influence, does nothing to promote the development of social rights in the Baltic countries and hinders the expansion of social policies. The legacy of the past has been another important factor in shaping social programs. It can be concluded that social policy should be studied as if embedded not only in the welfare-economy nexus, but also in the societal, historical and cultural nexus of a given society. </p><p>Study Three discusses the views of the state elites on family policy within a wider theoretical setting covering family policy and social policy in a broader sense and attempts to expand this analytical framework to include other post-socialist countries. The aim of this essay is to explore the various views of the state elites in the Baltics concerning family policy and, in particular, family benefits as one of the possible explanations for the observed policy differences. The qualitative analyses indicate that the Baltic States differ significantly with regard to the motives behind their family policies. Lithuanian decision-makers seek to reduce poverty among families with children and enhance the parents’ responsibility for bringing up their children. Latvian policy-makers act so as to increase the birth rate and create equal opportunities for children from all families. Estonian policy-makers seek to create equal opportunities for all children and the desire to enhance gender equality is more visible in the case of Estonia in comparison with the other two countries. It is strongly arguable that there is a link between the underlying motives and the kinds of family benefits in a given country. This study, thus, indicates how intimately the attitudes of the state bureaucrats, policy-makers, political elite and researchers shape social policy. It confirms that family policy is a product of the prevailing ideology within a country, while the potential influence of globalisation and Europeanisation is detectable too.</p><p> The final essay takes into account the opinions of welfare users and examines the performances of the institutionalised family benefits by relying on the recipients’ opinions regarding these benefits. The opinions of the populations as a whole regarding government efforts to help families are compared with those of the welfare users. Various family benefits are evaluated according to the recipients' satisfaction with those benefits as well as the contemporaneous levels of subjective satisfaction with the welfare programs related to the absolute level of expenditure on each program. The findings of this paper indicate that, in Latvia, people experience a lower level of success regarding state-run family insurance institutions, as compared to those in Lithuania and Estonia. This is deemed to be because the cash benefits for families and children in Latvia are, on average, seen as marginally influencing the overall financial situation of the families concerned. In Lithuania and Estonia, the overwhelming majority think that the family benefit systems improve the financial situation of families. It appears that recipients evaluated universal family benefits as less positive than targeted benefits. Some universal benefits negatively influenced the level of general satisfaction with the family benefits system provided in the countries being researched. This study puts forward a discussion about whether universalism is always more legitimate than targeting. In transitional economies, in which resources are highly constrained, some forms of universal benefits could turn out to be very expensive in relative terms, without being seen as useful or legitimate forms of help to families.</p><p> In sum, by closely examining the different aspects of social policy, this dissertation goes beyond the over-generalisation of Eastern European welfare state development and, instead, takes a more detailed look at what is really going on in these countries through the examples of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In addition, another important contribution made by this study is that it revives ‘western’ theoretical knowledge through ‘eastern’ empirical evidence and provides the opportunity to expand the theoretical framework for post-socialist societies.</p>