This paper contributes to the discussion on the effects of single motherhood on happiness. We use a mixed-method approach. First, based on indepth interviews with mothers who gave birth while single, we explore mechanisms through which children may influence mothers' happiness. In a second step, we analyze panel survey data to quantify this influence. Our results leave no doubt that, while raising a child outside of marriage poses many challenges, parenthood has some positive influence on a lone mother's life. Our qualitative evidence shows that children are a central point in an unmarried woman's life, and that many life decisions are taken with consideration of the child's welfare, including escaping from pathological relationships. Our quantitative evidence shows that, although the general level of happiness among unmarried women is lower than among their married counterparts, raising a child does not have a negative impact on their happiness.

Czech and Vietnamese are the national languages of the Czech Republic and Vietnam, re- spectively. The distinctive features and the shortage of resources renders Czech-Vietnamese machine translation into a difficult task, leading to the fact that no effort has been put into developing a translation tool specifically for the language pair. In this thesis, we develop phrase-based statistical machine translation systems for the language pair and investigate the potential to improve the translation quality with pivoting. Pivoting refers to a set of ma- chine translation approaches through which a natural language, called pivoting language, is introduced to solve the problem of data scarcity between source and target languages, one of the most challenging problems of statistical machine translation. Selecting English as the sole pivoting language for Czech-Vietnamese translation, we prepare training and test- ing corpora for the three language pairs. All possible corpus sources are explored regarding each specific language pair. The next step is to improve quality of the training corpora through normalizing and filtering. Various experiments with pivoting methods are carried out to analyse the performance of pivoting methods in a realistic working condition.

Conflict in recreation is a major problem for recreation managers who are trying to provide satisfying experiences for all recreationists. This thesis is about conflict between mountain-bikers and trampers. Mountain-biking has grown in popularity in New Zealand over the last ten years, and these increasing numbers have threatened the quality of walkers' and runners' recreational experiences, particularly in peri-urban areas. Conflict is a complex social interaction process which occurs around times of change. It involves the interplay of perceptions and attitudes, behaviour, and an incompatible situation. This complexity required the use of a range of methods to successfully understand the conflict between walkers and mountain-bikers. Like many other recreational conflicts, the conflict between bikers and trampers is asymmetrical - walkers dislike meeting bikers much more than bikers dislike meeting walkers. A majority of walker respondents disliked or strongly disliked meeting bikers on walking tracks. Walkers' questionnaire answers indicated that their greatest concerns with mountain-biking are (in order of decreasing importance) track damage and other environmental damage, personal safety, and the feeling that bikes interrupt their peace and quiet. Further exploration during in-depth interviews show that the perception of these problems are closely related to the way different users feel about that places that they use, and the way meetings with other users can be incorporated into the experiences of the recreationist. For walkers, meeting bikers is far more intrusive than vice-versa. Political activity aimed at eliminating bikers from many front country areas means that bikers are now developing a dislike of trampers who they see as intolerant and arrogant. Therefore, behaviour affects the escalation of conflict. In addition, wider social change has had an influence on this conflict. Changing economic wellbeing, less regular work hours, a perceived lack of time and a wider choice of activities have all impacted on recreation patterns in peri-urban areas, and on this conflict situation. In addition, this study has indicated that the concepts of specialisation and substitution may need modification. The use of qualitative methods has highlighted the narrow focus that researchers have used when studying these concepts. Both must be seen more broadly in the context of individuals' changing recreational needs both over the life cycle, and in the face of social change as outlined above.

Reading is an important skill that forms part of acquiring knowledge. It improves literacy levels, social skills, personal wellbeing and provides a sense of purpose. However, there are majority of learners experiencing reading difficulties around the world. The purpose of this study revolves around recent trends in academic underperformance that have led to a proliferation of studies which suggest that one of the greatest causes is reading difficulties. The Full-Service Schools (FSS) being part of the support strategy as denoted by Education White Paper 6 are primary schools that are equipped with most resources including Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). For this reason, they were selected so that the perceptions and experiences of their School-Based Support Team (SBST) members and Learning Support Educators (LSEs) can be explored, described and be explained when supporting learners experiencing reading difficulties. Through the concurrent triangulation mixed methods design data was collected using both quantitative and qualitative methods (that is the structured questionnaire, focus group interviews and official documents). The collected data was analysed through mixed analysis and merged to corroborate the findings from quantitative and qualitative data. Findings indicated that there was a small statistically significant difference in the reading performance of participants who were exposed to ICTs as a support mechanism for learners experiencing reading difficulties in the FSS. The slight improvement can be attributed to lack of ICTs guidelines for supporting learners experiencing reading difficulties, limited teacher training on ICTs and the limited use of the ICTs. In conclusion, the ICTs scaffolding guideline for teachers to support leaners experiencing reading difficulties was developed. The guideline incorporated the three theories that unpinned this study namely the social interaction part of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, the readers-response theory and e-reading theory. Throughout the ICTs scaffolding guideline, electronic text feature as part of the e-reading theory. It is the eradication of reading difficulties that can improve the learners’ confidence which in turn will have a positive effect on their academic performance on some or all of the subjects. / Psychology of Education / D. Ed. (Psychology of Education)