This thesis is concerned with children as familial caregivers. To date 'young carers' have received limited attention from researchers, and the current body of literature has mainly developed from the social welfare field. This is in contrast to a vast body of research, which has established the psychological impact of care giving on adults. The first paper critically reviews the concept and research on 'parentification'. This is a systemic/dynamic perspective on the psychological and developmental implications of children's involvement in caring roles. It has been submitted to the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (see Appendix A for instructions to authors for all papers). The brief paper is a qualitative study employing focus groups and individual interviews to consider the views of twenty young carers. The aim was to gain an insight into their perceptions of the caring experience and to provide data which might be helpful in developing a measure of 'young carer stress' to be used in the main study. This paper has been prepared for the journal 'Qualitative Health Research'. The main research focused upon the application of a stress- coping model to a study of 108 adolescent young carers. It was found that those children who felt devalued in their caring role, overloaded, and used avoidant coping styles to manage their stress were most at risk of suffering from psychological distress. The results are considered in the context of the adolescent stress-coping literature and implications for prevention and intervention are discussed. Papers are prepared in accordance with the instructions to authors, although small changes to the formatting have been made to ensure consistency across all the papers. The whole thesis is less than 20,000 words (excluding references, and tables).

This thesis analyses the construction and negotiation of ‘the tween’ and tween cultural spaces online, forming part of an emerging field of digital girlhood studies. The research is situated in two online ‘tween’ spaces: Stardoll, a commercial website, and The Ugly Side of Stardoll, a blog run by members of Stardoll. Combining a ‘cultural analysis’ approach with ethnographic traditions such as ‘immersion’ and ‘mapping’, this thesis interrogates articulations of tween culture through interlinking online case studies. The key findings of this thesis are centred on three themes. First, the construction of an explicitly tween culture on Stardoll that situates the site within a commodified pinkification of girl culture. Second, the governance of boundaries of tween girlhood, examined through two features of the site. (1) I argue that the production of Cyrus as a tween celebrity, by Stardoll and the girls’ who consume her, are moderated within a 'tween speech’ genre; and (2) interrogating discourses of risk I argue that the boundaries of Stardoll’s tween culture are governed by understandings of risk within the site and from the girls’ blog The Ugly Side of Stardoll. The third theme is the articulation of tween femininity; I argue that Stardoll produces a neoliberal, postfeminist tween identity on the site. Interestingly, the girls who use Stardoll (re)position other, younger girls within Romantic discourses of childhood in their governance of tween girlhood. However both Stardoll and the girls are invested in similar constructions of tween girlhood based on ‘wholesomeness’ and framed by understandings of age, through complex discourses of postfeminism and Romantic childhood.

This thesis places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood among affluent middle-class women of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using qualitative research methods, combining audio-visual materials, focus group discussion and multiple in depth interviews, I examine the complex and heterogeneous constructions of new womenhoods in relation to women’s negotiations with public and private sphere roles and Bangladeshi norms of female propriety. My conceptual framework facilitates analysis of the everyday interactional negotiations of new women in relation to their gendered and classed practices of respectable femininity, and the potential for this boundary work to enhance their agency. My analysis illuminates three aspects of the dialogical nature of respectable femininity and new womanhood. First, new women are part of the neoliberal affluent middle class and they construct their class identity as a status group, claiming inter-class and intraclass distinction from other women. Their claims to distinction rest on their levels of higher education, types of paid employment and exposure to transnational lifestyles, alongside their gendered, classed and culturally attuned selfhood performed through their ‘smart’ aesthetic practices, 50-50 work home life balance and female individualism. Secondly, new womanhood is legitimized by alternative and multiple practices of respectability, varying according to women’s age, stage of life, profession, household setting and experience of living in western countries. Finally, as new women forge alternative forms of respectability theirs is not a straightforward abandonment of old structures of respectability; rather they conform to, negotiate and potentially transgress normative conceptions of middle-class respectable femininity, substituting, concealing, or legitimizing particular practices in particular fields. Nonetheless, these processes enable them to practice increased autonomy and agency, and while their gains are vested in the self, rather than a wider feminist politics, they have the potential to positively influence the terrain of possibilities for other Bangladeshi women. Overall, my thesis shifts the focus of respectability research in South Asia from exploring the binary of respectable and unrespectable practices to evaluating how women make and remake their respectable status and class privilege in neoliberal Bangladesh, and the implications for gender relations.

The work started when I first registered as a part time Postgraduate student at Warwick, after finishing my MSc degree in medical sociology at Bedford College, London University in October 1982. Some preliminary investment had been done and a few essays written while I was in Taiwan teaching in a medical school. But it was only after April 1985, when I secured a grant from the Chinese Central Government in Taiwan to come over to England again and switched to full time study that the real work could really start. Since then, many parts of the work have been changed, such as the target problems and the methodology to tackle them. The whole working process was dynamic. Ideas exchanged, floating to and fro between my supervisor, Professor Margaret Stacey and me over years to find out results, as well as problems and methods. Only the original purpose of the study (Chinese women) and the sample group (nurses) have remained the same and still fascinate me. The problems were focussed gradually. The process of emergence of the problems and the conceptual framework used in the study will be described in part 1: introduction. The methodology changed in response to the focusing of the problems. Both the original plan and the evolving current design will be presented in Part 2: the research process. The field work and data analysis will be also dealt with in the same part. Some further but small alterations away from the research pIan were made to adjust to the situation of the field work as it happened in practice. Part 3 will be the results of the historical and literature review. The literature review gave me a more clear and closer look at my sample against their background of Chinese women's life in the past (chapter 8) and at the present day in Taiwan (chapter 10). Also traditional Chinese women healers and carers and the modern nursing history (chapter 9) were brought to light to elucidate the problems in nursing today. Part 4 will be the emergent themes which were attained through analysis of the field work. From these themes, a general profile of the life of these women in our sample in present day Taiwan gradually emerged. In part 5 conclusions are drawn concerning 'the new patriarchy', in which our respondents' lives are formed, as always around their menfolk – father, husband and son - although with certain differences from the situation in the past.

This thesis studies the method of gender social stratification and its circumstance in contemporary urban China. Firstly, a ‘social class schema’ is created after comparing the occupational classification in class schemas of Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and taking into consideration of the Standard Occupational Classification system (2010). Later, each stratum is subdivided into three sectors to reflect the Chinese dualist system of state and market, and the divisions in the market. Based on this schema and the data sets from the Chinese Household Income Project, 2002 and 2007, the shares of each social stratum and the earnings distribution are discussed, especially gender comparisons and changes. Moreover, to further scrutinise the differences in the same social stratum and to observe the impact of the household on men and women, the principal component analysis is applied to create a direct and indirect ‘Social Class Index’ (SCI) for each observation. Both indices are comprehensive and combine many aspects of the social stratification. The indirect ‘SCI’ also reflects the impact of the household with a changed variable set. After inspecting the composition changes of the social groups constructed on direct and indirect ‘SCI,’ the adjusted social stratification of genders are illustrated.

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Over the past few decades the number of ʻolder mothersʼ – women who begin their families at age 35 or over, has markedly increased. Concerns about rising numbers of ʻolder mothersʼ have been expressed by health professionals, who have warned of the risks of infertility and health risks to mother and baby that increase with advancing maternal age. Informed by a social constructionist epistemology, a central aim of this thesis is to contribute to understandings of ʻolder motherhoodʼ, through the identification of the ʻdiscursive terrainʼ that constitutes its meaning. A second aim is to consider the implications such discursive meanings may have for women who are positioned as ʻolder mothersʼ. In order to address these aims, 26 newspaper articles about ʻolder motherhoodʼ, and 11 in-depth interviews carried out with ʻolder mothersʼ were analysed using a critical discursive psychological approach. It is considered that the media predominantly position ʻolder mothersʼ as ʻselfishʼ - as those who ʻchooseʼ to ʻdelayʼ motherhood and therefore position them as responsible for putting themselves and their babies ʻat riskʼ. The ʻolderʼ mothers in this study did not identify with this representation and often worked to resist it through challenging the notion that their timing of motherhood was a choice, negotiating their degree of personal ʻriskʼ, and constructing themselves as ʻgoodʼ mothers. Moreover, it is argued that far from a ʻselfish choiceʼ, older motherhood is shaped by societal definitions of the ʻrightʼ or ʻidealʼ situation in which to become a mother, in addition to current ideologies of ʻgoodʼ motherhood that effectively define when a woman is ʻreadyʼ for motherhood. Finally, some recommendations for health professionals are made with respect to appropriate handling of the communication of the risks associated with later motherhood.

Two thirds of the 4,000 women who are in prison in England and Wales are mothers of dependent children. Imprisonment can severely alter, disrupt or even terminate mothering. However, there is a relative absence of empirical research within this area. Therefore, we know little of the meaning of mothering and motherhood for women in prison. The main aim of this research was to explore the way in which women in prison make sense of motherhood and construct their mothering identity. To achieve this, the analytical framework of biographical disruption was adopted and adapted; replacing chronic illness as the critical event with imprisonment. The study was underpinned by a narrative methodology to focus upon the ways in which the narratives of mothers in prison are constructed/ reconstructed and presented. In depth narrative interviews were conducted with 16 women. The interviews lasted between forty five minutes and three hours. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using the Listening Guide. On the basis of those interviews, three different narratives were constructed, the Wounded Mother, the Unbecoming Mother and the Suspended Mother. The findings of this research illustrate that the relationship between imprisonment and biographical disruption is multi-faceted. Mothering identities can be fundamentally threatened, yet can also be reinforced. This research has also highlighted that it is often the compounding impact of repeated disruptions, culminating in prison that represents the most profound disruption to the mothering identities of women in prison. The implications of the research for policy and practice are also considered.

No description available.

No description available.