This thesis explores how young resisters and desisters in their teenage years maintain their resistance to and desistance from offending and asks to what extent they are agentic in the process. The term ‘resister’ refers to those who, according to a self-report survey, have never offended, and the term ‘desister’ to those who have offended and then ceased for at least twelve months. By situating desisters analytically adjacent to resisters, I have moved towards conceptualising desisters as current non-offenders. Desisters may have shared a past with persisters, as they have both offended. However, desisters share their current experience, that of maintaining non-offending, with resisters. It is this obvious, yet largely ignored, link between young resisters and desisters which underpins the thesis. Two qualitative methods, both of which elicited young people’s own perspectives, were employed between 2003 and 2005. Secondary analysis of 112 qualitative interviews with resisters and desisters in their teenage years was conducted and peer led focus groups (in which a young peer, rather than an adult researcher, acted as the facilitator) were held with 52 teenage resisters. Young people’s resistance to offending does not feature prominently in the literature. When it does, it is often associated with a state of innocence or passivity, while young desisters are said to ‘grow out of’ offending. This emphasis on an absence of offending, rather than on actively attained resistance, reflects an adult oriented view. The thesis challenges this by drawing on the sociology of childhood, a theoretical perspective which has not previously been applied to young people’s resistance to and desistance from offending and which emphasises young people as agentic. Their agency is evidenced by the findings. Chapters Four and Five report how young people employ numerous strategies of resistance and desistance and Chapter Six how that they face trials and tribulations in maintaining their nonoffending, while Chapter Seven focuses on the ‘being’ rather than the ‘doing’ of sustaining non-offending. It is the work of Derrida that enables the argument to be taken a step further. Derrida’s (1981) assertion is that binary oppositions are rarely neutral, but that one is the dominant pole. For example, in Western society the first of the following binary oppositions are usually regarded as the dominant or privileged pole: white/black, masculine/feminine, adult/child. In respect of the binary opposition at the heart of the current thesis, namely offender/non-offender, the non-offender is – from an adult perspective at least – the dominant pole and the non-offender is hailed as the norm. By contrast, several findings in the thesis point to the fact that the dominant pole in the binary opposition for young people is the offender rather than the non-offender. First, the discourse of young resisters and desisters suggests a view of the offender rather than non-offender as the norm. Secondly, many resisters and desisters face trials and tribulations, such as bullying, relating to their nonoffending status. Yet, if it were the case that the non-offender was the dominant pole and was privileged by young people (as it is in the adult population), resisters would not be penalised in such ways for not offending. Thirdly, some of the strategies used by resisters, such as involvement in anti-social behaviour, signify an attempt to compensate for their non-offending status. Again, if the non-offender was the dominant pole in the binary opposition, far from resorting to mechanisms to compensate for their non-offending behaviour, this behaviour would be encouraged, as it is by adults. This inverted world has implications for young resisters and desisters. Their resistance is to be understood in the context of an expectation of offending, rather than non-offending. Contrary to the notion of the pull of normality bringing desisters back to a non-offending state, the pull of normality among young desisters – and many resisters – is better understood as being towards offending. Resistance, evidenced by the strategies and trials and tribulations of resisters and desisters, is against this pull. Moreover, as non-offending is the modus operandi in the adult world, to be an adult non-offender requires less effort. For a young person, being a non-offender is more challenging than it is for adults and maintenance of resistance constitutes a struggle not previously reflected in adult representations. Adults, not having taken account of the different modus operandi of the young person’s world, have not attributed agency to resistance and have underestimated young people’s struggle to maintain resistance. The strategies demanded of resisters and desistcrs to maintain non-offending and the trials and tribulations which they face when they do have heretofore been overlooked.

The aim of this study was to establish how stressful secondary aged students find being bullied at school and how they cope with it. Variations in stress caused by different types of bullying were considered as were individual differences in levels of stress reported. A further aim of the study was to identify whether students who experienced less types of bullying employed a different set of coping strategies to those used by students who experienced a wider range of bullying behaviours. 1131 students attending 6 different secondary schools were involved in three related questionnaire surveys. This was supplemented by interviews with 22 students who were known to have been persistently bullied. The results suggest that bullying causes low level stress for most students, leading to common stress effects such as irritability, feeling panicky or nervous, repeated memories, impaired concentration. For a smaller number of students bullying causes high levels of stress and more significant effects. Long term bullying and rumour mongering were perceived as most stressful. Most frequently used immediate coping strategies included ignoring the bullying or walking away. Common preventative coping strategies were staying close to other peers, standing up to the bullying students with peer support and working out a solution. Bullied students used a wide range of strategies, with no particular group of strategies appearing more effective. Self esteem, resilience and assertiveness all seem to buffer the negative impact of bullying. The thesis goes on to explore the implications of these findings for school based intervention, in particular need to identify bullying as an organisational stressor and therefore resistant to change at an individual level.

The basic premise of appraisal theories of emotion is that the way people interpret a situation will be critical for their emotional response to it. The key hypothesis states that others’ emotional reactions to the same situation have an influence on this appraisal process such that people tend to adopt significant others’ appraisals and emotionally converge with them. The first set of 3 experiments (N = 240) established the occurrence of such social appraisal processes using a film-viewing paradigm. Participants observed a confederate’s videotaped reactions to film excerpts. In two of three studies they simultaneously watched the films themselves. For disgust and amusement, but not for sadness and anger, results revealed that participants were able to decode the confederate’s emotional state and related appraisals from her facial expressions ad that their own feelings and appraisals converged with her response. The subsequent 2 experiments (N = 242) investigated social appraisal processes in mediated and face-to-face dyadic interactions between naïve participants. These were either friends or strangers and either could or could not see each other while watching emotional film clips. For amusement, disgust, fear, and sadness, there was support for social influence processes. Convergence in emotional responding within dyads of friends who could see each other was most pronounced in the cases of amusement and disgust. Two online vignette experiments (N = 1,710) further explored the role of possible moderators of social appraisal, including social motives within the relationship, subjective certainty about what was happening, congruence with respect to the target situation, and informational advantage of the other person. Finally, the applied relevance of the findings in relation to emotion communication in the context of negotiations, school bullying, and mass media communication is discussed.

This study has involved the preliminary development and evaluation of a questionnaire designed to explore the beliefs and experiences of children with ADHD.  Following small-scale piloting of the questionnaire, it was administered to a sample of 30 children with ADHD, aged 8-13, along with a measure of self-esteem and coping strategies.  The findings highlight the complex and heterogeneous nature of these children’s experiences, beliefs, self-perceptions and coping styles. Although most participants saw themselves as having ADHD diagnosis and reported some difficulties consistent with this diagnosis, they did not identify strongly with their own concept of what ADHD was. As a group, participants reported a lower than average self-esteem, but there was a large range within the sample. Participants gave a mixture of both internal and external attributions for their successes and failures, and some reported using ‘non-compliant’ behaviour to cope with threatening situations (e.g. bullying, struggles with work). A cognitive style involving perceived control over behaviour appeared to be most adaptive, in that it was associated with higher self-esteem and more positive coping. Participants reported a complex pattern of attitudes towards medication, perceiving both positive and negative effects of medication. Greater perceived effects of medication on attention and lesser perceived side-effects were predictive of a more positive attitude to medication. It is hoped that these findings will be used by parents and professionals to enable a better and more rounded understanding of these children’s experiences, and help inform both medical and psychological interventions. These findings also have implications for attribution theories and state regulation models of ADHD.

Few studies have examined the social skills problems of victims of bullying. Thus, the general aim of this thesis was to assess social skills problems and peer victimisation in Junior School pupils. A Peer Nomination Inventory (PNI) was developed to assess social skills problems, peer victimisation and friendship/peer acceptance. In addition, a number of psychosocial adjustment variables (i.e. depression, anxiety, self-esteem) were assessed, using self-report. 449 children (aged 9 to 11 years) completed the measures at three time points over the course of an academic year. Using the data collected at Time 1 and Time 3 (N=449) concurrent and longitudinal associations between social skills problems, peer victimisation, and friendship/peer acceptance were investigated (‘Study One’). Study One found that social skills problems predicted an increase in peer victimisation over time, and that this relationship was weaker for those children with lots of friends, and for those children with a ‘popular’ best-friend. On the basis of the data collected at Time 1, 28 children were selected to take part in a Social Skills Training Programme for victims of bullying. Using the data collected at all three time points, it was possible to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention (‘Study Two’). Study Two found that there was an increase in ‘global self-worth’ (i.e. self-esteem) for the experimental group (compared to the control group). However, there were no other significant improvements, e.g. in terms of social skills problems or victim status. These findings have important implications for interventions to tackle the problem of bullying in schools.