The experiences and attitudes of inclusion for pupils with autism attending mainstream primary schools and relevant stakeholders in Leinster were ascertained through the use of questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, visual methodology and documentary analysis. Eight primary schools participated in this research and each school had access to a special class for pupils with autism. This study looked at the impact of inclusive policies on the provision of supports and services for pupils with autism and their overall learning and social experiences in each school. The findings of this research highlight many positive elements of good practice in each school. It was apparent throughout this research that professionals in schools were committed to enhancing the learning and social experiences for pupils with autism. The importance of positive home-school relationships was identified, as positive relationships greatly influenced the outcomes for young children with autism. The majority of teachers, principals and SNAs would like to see more opportunities regarding continuous professional development to accommodate the diverse needs of pupils presenting in schools on the autism spectrum. Evidence in this study highlighted inconsistencies in practice and mixed experiences for all stakeholders across each school environment. Findings from this study suggest that schools are working within a policy vacuum that is negatively impacting on the learning and social experiences for pupils with autism. In this research, the majority of parents had difficulty accessing adequate clinical and educational supports. Many parents do not have access to a special class in their locality, which can cause isolation and loneliness for their children locally. Most schools had exclusionary clauses in enrolment policies that made school choice difficult for parents. There was overwhelming consensus from parents and professionals that mixed ability special classes are not viable and the current structure, purpose and role of the special class needs to be revised in that regard. Mixed experiences were reported from parents regarding their children transferring between schools. The transfer from primary to post-primary was a great source of anxiety for the majority of parents of children with autism. This research suggests that inclusive policies must be implemented to provide adequate resource provision and requisite funding to enhance the learning and social experiences for all pupils with autism attending mainstream primary schools.

An Garda Síochána: Culture, challenges, and change is an exploration and understanding of the organisational culture of An Garda Síochána Ireland’s National Policing Organisation. While the Gardaí or officers are often in the news media, there has been very little academic research on who and what this organisation is. On an abstract level, organisational culture provides the framework of the basic rules necessary to function, or survive, in an organisation. Police organisational culture provides an identity to officers that performs this same function. On a more specific scale, internationally, police culture has been understood to consist of masculinity, discrimination, exclusion, suspicion, isolation, solidarity/loyalty, moral and political conservatism, pragmatism, cynicism, aggression, negative views of supervision, selective enforcement of the law, and a prioritisation of the crime fighter role over service-oriented role. However, this understanding has been gathered from countries with very different policing organisations to Ireland. While the international research in police organisational culture is quite vast, there is relatively little to fill this area in Ireland, particularly when you exclude historical accounts of Irish policing and Northern Ireland. Of those studies that have been identified, very few specifically look at the organisation’s culture. Further to this, many of those studies are limited in numerical and geographic scope. While the relatively narrow field has limited a grounding for the findings of this study, they do provide a starting point for identifying what gap needs to be filled, namely an expansive study on the organisation s culture that is not confined to a small number of Gardaí or one geographic region. This considered, the gap identified in the Irish literature is one facet of this research. Naturally if there if the research in this area is underdeveloped in Ireland, then there is also a missing piece of where Ireland situates itself in the international policing literature. The Garda are a unique policing organisation, as such, this type of police culture has not been studied extensively internationally. One of the aims of this research is to understand where Ireland positions itself in the wider world of police organisational culture literature. However, in order for this to be done, and the primary aim of this research, you first need to gain a deeper understanding of what the culture of the Garda is and how this impacts relations within the organisation as well as their relationship with the communities in which they work. While the area of police organisational culture can be quite abstract, some of the more specific aspects of the culture this research aims to understand are in organisational relationships, accountability, and managing change. Though the aims listed thus far are wholly substantive, there is also remit for connecting these findings to a theoretical basis in social learning, social identity, and rotten apple theories to further understand how the culture of the Garda is transmitted throughout the organisation and over time. While this research fills a theoretical and empirical gap, there is also a methodological innovation in how the data was obtained and analysed. Certainly underutilised in Ireland, document analysis in the area of police organisational culture is also underutilised internationally. The data used in this research was obtained from eight documents, consisting of several thousands of pages of text, and spanning a 30-year period. The data from the documents was thematically analysed and a story was constructed based on the data to provide a deeper understanding of what the Garda culture is. While the documents of course contained the data necessary to provide an understanding of Garda culture, perhaps one of the more advantageous contributions of this methodology is the extended observation period provided that allowed for an analysis of the Garda culture over time, something not typically possible in other data collection methods due to their point in time collection nature. This research has contributed many key findings to the understanding of Garda culture. The first approach was to look at the organisation s culture from a top down level and what the relationship between the organisation and its members is. The findings in this area included what type of policing organisation the Garda is and what resources the organisation provides to its members (these resources included both physical resources as well as services provided). From this discussion stemmed a reconceptualization of the traditional types of policing organisations (i.e., militaristic and community/service oriented) as the Garda does not wholly fit in to either. Beyond this, the resources were examined in relation to making do with what little they are given despite increased demand for their services as well as how Gardaí are then left to cope with the added burdens. In particular reference to mental health provisions, how the organisation facilitated, or rather did not, practical and beneficial mental health services was looked at. Further to this organisational relationship from a top down perspective was an understanding of both internal and external organisational relationships and how these are influenced by the training Gardaí receive. These included how the Gardaí interact with each other on an individual level, encompassed within this is the idea that silence is necessary for survival in the organisation, as well as the Gardaí’s relationship with and to the communities they work in. In terms of training, as well as in conjunction with the idea of socialisation and Social Learning Theory embedding these characteristics into the organisation s culture and its members, it was found that the Gardaí are separated from the community from the outset of their training. This strengthened the earlier proposed idea that the Garda do not truly fit into a community oriented policing style. Internally, the relationships among Gardaí were examined both in relation to how they reacted to external and internal threats and it was concluded that the Gardaí overwhelmingly value self-preservation over loyalty. Chapter seven looked closer at accountability and blame within the organisation and how the lack of accountability on a wide scale coupled with the ever present blame culture impacts on Gardaí behaviour and actions. Though some of the examples given were seemingly indicative of individual level actions, it was argued that, stemming from Rotten Apple Theory, these behaviours are manifestations of organisational level behaviours that have been observed and learned by individual members and acted out based on this observation. In essence, even when behaviour was observed at an individual level, it was still reflective of organisational culture as rotten apples do not form in isolation but rather stem from rotten orchards. The final chapter brought the findings together with an added theoretical lens and the previous Irish and international literature to more fully understand where the Garda, and Ireland, fit into a larger scope of police organisational culture. It was reflected that while Ireland has always been considered quite different to many other international policing organisations, the more recent literature, particularly from the UK, seems to be more in line with some of the Irish characteristics found in the Garda culture. However, what this means for police culture, as a whole, has still not been fully explored.

Bullying is a social phenomenon that impacts girls and boys inside and outside of school at both primary and secondary school age and is recognised as a social problem both by academic researchers and in the ‘real world’ by the media and by anti-bullying charities. Although bullying is a widely used concept there is no universal definition. Research on bullying has been conducted over the past four decades looking at various aspects from prevalence and severity to coping strategies and effectiveness of interventions. Studies have also considered specific types of bullying and sex differences but these studies do not consider the full variety of types of bullying boys and girls use or which ones are the most upsetting to experience. Most of the studies on girls’ bullying have been conducted in secondary schools; less attention has been given to tweenage girls. This research redressed this imbalance. It began from the position that it is important for adults to listen to tweenage girls’ views as they may have different understandings of bullying compared to adults and this may have policy implications. It assumed that girls were experts on bullying that happened to girls their age in their school. Weekly research lunch club sessions were used with 32 tweenage girl research advisers/assistants from three primary schools. Together we listened to tweenage girls’ views of bullying broadly through developing and administering questionnaires, conducting group interviews and designing anti-bullying resources to be used in their schools. In addition, I conducted one-off focus groups with 11 teenage girls as a comparison to consider age differences in girls’ views. I argue that this research revealed that both girls’ bullying and using pupil research to engage with tweenage girls’ views on this topic was messy and complex. While relational aggression between girls was reported to be most prevalent and severe, focusing on this alone does not reflect the full extent of the behaviours used in girls’ bullying. Both the tweenage and teenage girls’ views on bullying, coping strategies and anti-bullying interventions were similar and were only subtly different in the detail. The research decisions were influenced in an ongoing process by the wants and expectations of the girls, the schools and the researcher and changed through the prolonged interactions during the research. I also argue that ethical practice was an ongoing process and using pupil research created further ethical dilemmas. Although pupil research with tweenage girls on girls’ bullying was challenging and messy, this research gives an example of how it is a viable, successful way to engage with pupils on this sensitive topic. The use of girls’ free time at lunchtimes showed how pupil research positioned as an extra-curricular activity enabled marginalised voices to be heard and was beneficial for the girls, the schools and the researcher involved. This research suggests ways in which school based anti-bullying policies and practices might be more nuanced to take account of the variety of experiences, understandings and preferences for intervention that exist if they engaged in pupil research. There has been little discussion of the issues of the messiness of research and the ongoing nature of ethical practice in either the pupil research literature or methods texts generally for researchers to refer to. I suggest that it would be useful for others to share their messy experiences of pupil research and the ongoing ethical issues they encounter to enable future researchers to be somewhat prepared and confident in responding to the challenges they may face in their own research.

This thesis explores how digital technologies such as social media, smart devices and gaming platforms are shaping young people’s sexual cultures. While the majority of research on young people’s digital sexual cultures has maintained a narrow focus on risk and harm, and limited what digital practices are considered relevant and for whom, this thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to support children and young people to navigate the complexities of an ever-changing digital sexual age. I worked with a socio-economically and culturally diverse sample of twenty-five young people aged 11 – 18 years from England and Wales. Rather than focusing on a pre-defined set of digital practices, I set out to foster a creative, curious and open-ended approach that allowed participants to identify which digital practices mattered to them. Over a period of fifteen-months, I employed a range of creative, visual and arts-based methods in group and individual interviews to explore a flexible set of core issues including digital worlds, relationships, networked body cultures and media discourses. Taking inspiration from feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘affect’, ‘phallogocentricism’ and ‘feminist figurations’, I trace normative articulations of gender and sexuality as well as activate different ways of seeing and relating to young people’s digital sexual cultures. My data highlights the enduring force of heteronormative and phallogocentric power relations in young people’s digital sexual cultures through the publicisation of intimate relations online, social media’s visual culture of bodily display and gendered harassment online. However, it also maps ruptures and feminist figurations that displace vision away from the heteronormative and phallogocentric mode. I illustrate how young people’s digital sexual cultures can be the site of unexpected and unpredictable relations that move beyond normative notions of (hetero)sexuality and towards possibilities for re-imagined sexualities that exceed heteronormative and phallogocentric norms.

Despite reports that people with learning disabilities (PWLD) are more vulnerable to being bullied than the non-LD population, there is a paucity of research into bullying of PWLD. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 adults with LD, using bullying vignettes, to explore how PWLD understand bullying; their knowledge of coping strategies for dealing with bullying; and what PWLD understand the consequences of bullying to be. Interview data was analysed using thematic analysis and categorised into four super-ordinate themes; Bullying is a bad thing; Reasons for the bullying; Coping strategies; and Consequences of own bullying experiences. The findings are discussed in relation to attribution theory (Heider, 1958) and socio-moral reasoning theory (Gibbs, 1979; 2003). Recommendations for clinicians working with PWLD involved in bullying are made; including considering the application of the concept of the “provocative-victim” (Sheard, Clegg, Standen, & Cromby, 2001); exploring how individual’s understanding of bullying experiences in terms of attributions made and socio-moral reasoning; exploring coping strategies and addressing aggressive or avoidance-based strategies, and consequences of bullying such as social and psychological problems. Recommendations are made for future research with larger, more representative samples.