The ways of reaching out to the people to supply news are substantially increasing after the emerge of the Internet. Because of the Internet anyone can make their message heard. The Young Turks claims to be the largest online news show in the world and they have over 650 000 subscribers on Youtube. Therefore it is important to study how alternative media differs from more traditional media.  This study focuses on alternative journalism on Youtube. The aim of this study is to identify the difference between the Youtube channel The Young Turks and CNN. The weight in the study lays in the ways the news is being presented. This study uses qualitative content from four news videos made by The Young Turks and four news videos made by CNN. This study focuses on the specific content in a few news videos rather than the overall content in several news videos. A dramatic analysis method is used to determine how the two media channels differ.  The result shows that the news videos made by CNN used objectivity as a means to claim their professionalism more often than The Young Turks. CNN’s news reporting was also clearer in presenting sources, compared to The Young Turks.

This study elucidates the feelings and the experiences by working with the complex of problems of self-injurious behaviour, of six professionals. The purpose with this study has been to examine the feelings and the experiences of the professionals, coming up when they meet and treat young girls with self-injurious behaviour. The empirical basis of this study is built on interviews of six female professionals, working in the County of Kalmar. The statements of the informants were analyzed out of Goffman’s Role Theory and the norm perspective on social behaviour. Through the interviews we saw that the professionals act out of the rolls that they are expected to. There are expectations from the colleagues, from the clients and from the community that every professional handles in an individual manner. The way they handle the problematic situations varies between persons and depends on the character of the circumstances. The result shows that the work of the professionals arouses many feelings. It varies what kind of feelings they experiences but they do feel fear, powerlessness, sadness, happiness and most of all frustration. They handle their feelings through tutorial, support from the co-workers and through reflection.

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs, hereafter) are important drivers of the global economic development. For the SMEs, to establish and growth, having access to the sources of finance is of great importance. Anecdotal evidence suggeststhat while the importance of having access for the SMEs is apparent, they have been disadvantageous in many different ways. The disadvantage position of the SMEs can even be worse when they are younger (e.g., The World bank, 2001, p. 6-7). Prior research documents many factors that affect the financial constraints of SMEs. In this study, we investigate the association between SMEs age and financial constraints. In addition, we test the moderating effect of collectivism on SMEs’ financial constraints, as collectivism is documented to have an effect on bank corruption. We first hypothesize that there is a negative association between SMEs’ age and financial constraints. We further propose that the negative association between SMEs’ age and financial constraints decreases as collectivism (at the country level) increases. Using a World Bank’s sample of 31422 firms across 38 countries, we find that younger firms, compared to the older firms, experience higher level of financial constraints.Further, we observe an insignificant results regarding the moderating effect of collectivism on the proposed association.We offer contribution to the existing empirical evidence onfactors that affect financial constraints. Providing such an evidence may be found relevant to the economic institutions such as the World Bank and regulatory bodies, as they are allocating resources and making macro level decisions regarding the economicdevelopment through SMEs around the world.

Care has seldom been linked with memory and the natural environment. Moreover young people have been largely absent from geographical explorations of memory and memories. This research seeks, in part, to fill these gaps by examining young people's memories and memory formation within frameworks of care and the natural environment. More specifically this research provides insights into socially and economically marginalised young people's memory processes as well as the multiple emotional geographies that are created in an affective web of care, other people and the natural environment. This thesis provides an original, critical examination of a third sector charitable organisation Country Holidays for Inner City Kids (CHICKS) and their respite breaks for disadvantaged young people between 8-15 years of age. 26 young people who attended CHICKS were interviewed in addition to multiple staff members, volunteers and referral agents. Additionally exhaustive observations were carried out on 17 different respite breaks. This thesis has three research aims. Firstly it sets out to examine how care experiences shape memory formation at CHICKS. Secondly, it explores how care produces space, particularly in the natural environment. And thirdly it examines what kind of emotional geographies does care produce. First and foremost this thesis contributes into geographies of care. Furthermore, it ties care into other scholarly niches. It offers a somewhat novel conceptualisation of nature as a space of care: a therapeutic landscape that extends beyond literal connections between the physical environment and feelings of well-being. This research also contributes to the geographical research on care and memory by integrating young people in such research, as well as by suggesting that memories can become a vessel for well-being. Overall, the unique research arena makes this an original piece of work thus adding knowledge to geographies of care on affective, methodological and theoretical levels. This research demonstrates flat ontology of care, fun, geographies of love and the natural environment can open up transformative spaces where identity processes and the self can be processed and re-processed. Ultimately, this all makes it possible for memory and memories to become an intervention; a tool against adversity that allows the young person to go to a better mental and emotional place.

Objectives: There is evidence that childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with increased risk of offending and violent crime. This study aimed to explore associations between TBI in a group of delinquent and vulnerable young people (VYP) at risk of offending, and facial emotion recognition (FER) abilities, inhibition control (Stop-IT) and self-reported reactive-proactive aggression (RPQ). Methods: There were two studies. The first study used a cross sectional between group design to compare 45 VYP (with and without TBI) and a control group of 59 students on FER task measuring emotion recognition accuracy of six basic emotions. The second study examined differences between TBI and non-TBI groups in the VYP sample (N=21) on a Stop-IT task, FER accuracy and self-reported reactive-proactive aggression. Results: A history of TBI was reported by 60% of the VYP group (48.9% with loss of consciousness [LoC]), whereas 30% of the control group reported a history of TBI (25.4% with LoC). The VYP group (with and without TBI) demonstrated a similar pattern of reduced overall FER accuracy that was significantly different to the control group. Compared to the control group, The VYP groups (with and without TBI) were less accurate on recognising anger, disgust, sadness and surprise, but not happy and fear. There were no significant differences between the TBI- and non-TBI groups. The second study did not find any significant differences between the TBI and non-TBI groups on overall FER accuracy, Stop-IT performance, and RPQ scores. There were also no significant associations between these measures. Conclusions: Future research requires larger samples that enable investigating the association between different severity of TBI, FER and inhibition control ability. Better and more youth-friendly measures are also needed.

This research aims to establish a new way of understanding the ‘problem’ of children and young people’s participation. The problem is that the reality of participation has not lived up to its theoretical promise of enabling children and young people to meaningfully shape their environment on their own terms. With a reflexive approach, the research reformulates the relationship between the theory and reality of children and young people’s participation through investigating two case studies of participation projects in museums and galleries in the UK. In the literature review the problem of participation is situated within the policy, organisational and personal contexts; at each level of context, it is argued that there are fundamental, intractable reasons why the promise of participation cannot be realised in practice. In the case studies participation in practice is investigated in an in-depth way from a range of perspectives, focusing on the framing, practice and experience of the projects through discourse analysis of project documentation, observation of the projects in practice, and interviews with the participants. In the case studies the theoretical contradictions of participation emerge in practice; while the organisations attempt to enable the participants to engage with the project on their own terms, the top-down organisation of the project mean that controls over the participants are unintentionally created. The participants engaged with and experienced the projects in different ways and types of participants were identified in terms of how the projects were navigated. It was found that all participants were able to draw a positive experience from the projects even though there were problematic aspects. In response to the intractable problems of participation, in conclusion it is suggested that ‘spaciousness’ may be a more useful concept, focusing on enabling young people to make sense of their ambivalent experience in organisations in their own way.

National prevalence surveys indicate that lifetime and recreational drug use among all social classes have increased steadily over the last decade in Ireland (Moran et al., 2001a, Mayock, 2002, National Advisory Committee on Drugs, 2008a). Drugs research has been traditionally based on the identification, weighting and interrelatedness of risk and protective factors within a "risk prevention paradigm". This paradigm has been criticised for its lack of inclusion of individual, group and wider structural aspects, and occurs within a greater awareness of greater social discourse and societal shifts. The research papers in this portfolio of work are thematically analysed and conceptualised within the theoretical framework of cognitive and structural social capital. The descriptive research and later, more conceptual papers investigating drug use among rural youth, Travellers and cocaine use, are thereby explored in terms of the potential ‘normalisation of rural youth drug use’ within contemporary risk discourse, the assimilatory threat of increasing drug use among the ‘Traveller community’., and the emergence of the ‘recreational cocaine user’ in Irish society. The social processes of individualisation, reciprocity and trust which constitute social capital are deemed to provide potent collective frameworks for the navigation of risk in day to day ‘localised’ settings. The ‘interrelated normative frameworks’ and ‘processes of risk neutralisation’ are underpinned within a wider social capital understanding of the meaning of drug activity in associational life based on ‘interpersonal and institutional trust’ and ‘mutual resource acquisition’. Contemporary drug policies must consider the contextual constraints of the ‘risk society’, which impact on inherent individual ‘power resources’, whereby individual agency and drug taking is better understood within situational agency of ‘localised’ social, gender, ethnic and cultural capital.

No description available.

This research presents the first empirical study of music provision in Scottish prisons and explores the potential benefits of music engagement for prisoners, with a focus on young offenders’ experience. The scope of the study begins with an investigation into music provision in prisons throughout Scotland by means of a small-scale survey. This survey showed that despite a lack of documentation, music is currently present in Scottish prisons and has been previously, albeit intermittently. Music provision included a range of activity: learning how to play musical instruments, singing, music theory, song-writing and composition. Subsequently, two music intervention studies were conducted with young offenders at HM Young Offenders Institution Polmont. The first study was a ten-week project with three participant groups: a music group, an art group and a control group. Pre- and post-interviews and measures were used to assess participants’ self-esteem, self-control, behaviour, literacy skills and engagement with education. Numerous difficulties were identified with conducting such research in a prison environment, including the recruitment process and using standard assessment measures. However, results from the small number of men involved showed!an increase in engagement with education for all three groups during the project and a steady continued increase in education engagement for the music group after the project ended. Additionally, the music and art groups showed a small increase in mean scores for self-esteem, positive emotions reported and self-control. The second study examined two music interventions with young offenders as part of the year-long Inspiring Change pilot project. This study used interviews and session review forms with education staff and arts practitioners to document the process of the organisations involved in the planning and implementation of the projects. Focus groups with young offenders were carried out to gather their opinions of the programmes. Participants expressed that they especially appreciated the high level of professionalism of the arts practitioners, working as a group, and being recognised as making an individual contribution towards a final project. In addition to the survey and intervention studies, a Knowledge Exchange workshop was designed for music tutors in Scottish prisons to meet, learn about research on music in prisons, and exchange ideas for best practice. A workbook and afternoon workshop format was investigated in terms of its effectiveness and was found to be beneficial for music tutors in learning more about the research and practice of teaching music in prisons. This thesis contributes to the developing research on the benefits of music provision for prisoners and provides a baseline of music provision in Scottish prisons for further study.

Previous research has shown an increased use of IT amongst young people. This has made it problematic for parents to set boundaries for their children's use of IT. The aim for this study was to create a deeper understanding of how parents relate to boundaries of IT, and how they monitor their children's use of it. This study was a qualitative study through semi-structured interviews to enable to capture the parents' experiences. The results showed that parents have boundaries but that there is a gap between the occurrence of boundaries and causes for boundaries. The study showed that parents monitor their children's use of IT but it is unclear whether the methods they use actually give them sufficient insight and knowledge regarding their children use of IT.