Data on pairs of subjects (dyads) are commonly collected in social research. In family research, for example, there is interest in the extent of agreement in family members' perceptions of relationship quality or how the strength of parent-child relationships depends on characteristics of parents and children. In organisational research, cooperation between coworkers may depend on factors relating to their relative roles and company ethos. Dyadic data provide detailed information on interpersonal processes, but they are challenging to analyse because of their highly complex structure: they are often longitudinal because of interest in dependencies between individuals over time, dyads may be clustered into larger groups (e.g. in families or organisations), and variables of interest such as perceptions and attitudes may be measured by multiple indicators. The principal aim of the proposed research is to develop new methods for the analysis of longitudinal multivariate dyadic data. While these methods have a number of potential applications, this project focuses on one important case study: the analysis of exchanges of support between parents and their adult children, using data from the British Household Panel Study and Understanding Society (or UK Household Longitudinal Study, UKHLS). Substantive questions to be investigated include: - What characteristics are associated with giving and receiving support for respondent-parent and respondent-adult offspring dyads? To what extent is the giving and receipt of help persistent over time for a given dyad? And to what extent is the level of exchange associated with lifecycle events? - What is the level and nature of reciprocity of exchanges? - For respondents with non-coresident parents and adult offspring, are norms of reciprocity strained where there are competing demands on respondents' time and resources? - To what extent are financial transfers and 'in kind' transfers (i.e. spending time to help someone) complementary and to what extent do they appear to be substitutes? How does this depend on the socio-economic circumstances of the donor? We propose a general latent variable modelling framework for the analysis of exchanges between respondents and their parents and adult children over time. Our approach will extend existing research in three major ways. First, most previous research has studied exchanges at a cross-section or between two waves. We will use longitudinal data from five waves of BHPS/UKHLS, spanning a 16-year period, which permits examination of associations between exchanges of support and changes in donor and recipient circumstances over time. Second, it is common to analyse support given separately from support received, which precludes the study of reciprocity. We propose a joint model of bidirectional exchanges with support given and support received treated as a multivariate response, and covariances between responses measuring the extent of reciprocation between generations. Third, family support is measured by a set of binary indicators of different kinds of help. The widespread practice of taking the sum score across items implicitly assigns equal weight to each indicator. We will instead specify a latent variable model that relates the binary items to underlying variables representing overall helping behaviour. The model will be extended to include indicators of financial transfers between family members. Sensitivity of results to measurement error and non-random dropout will also be considered. Project outputs will include both methodological and more substantively-oriented articles to communicate the research to social scientists. R routines will be written to implement the proposed methods. Extensive online resources will also be produced, including detailed instructions of how to conduct analyses in R, discussion of modelling decisions, and interpretation of results.

Natural disasters can cause physical destruction and human suffering. Due to anthoropogenic climate change, some types of natural disasters are likely to increase in intensity and frequency in the future

It will do this by drawing on recent literature on the nature of political community and civic friendship, the way political institutions mould citizens, and state neutrality and perfectionism. The criticism that liberalism is problematically individualistic is a longstanding one. Yet this criticism has had little traction in the past two decades. I believe the main reason for this is that liberals such as John Rawls (following his political turn) and Will Kymlicka, responding to this criticism, drew the insights from the communitarian critique of liberalism while preserving liberalism's essential characteristics. However, the thesis will seek to argue that even the updated liberalism of political liberalism is indeed undesirably individualistic, but not in the way the communitarian criticisms of the 1980s and 90s alleged. Focusing on John Rawls - an emblematic contemporary liberal - for the sake of simplicity and clarity, the thesis will first establish whether justice as fairness is individualistic, distinguishing between three kinds of individualism. It will argue that Rawls is committed to 'moral individualism'. It will then argue that his moral individualism leads Rawls to two further types of individualism, which I term 'procedural individualism' and 'sovereign individualism'. The thesis will then press three objections to Rawls' procedural and sovereign individualism using recent work on political liberalism. The three lines of criticism are united by their objection to Rawls' attempt to leave individuals as free as possible to hold their own view of the good and pursue their own projects. The first questions whether the shared commitments of the members of a Rawlsian polity would be strong enough to maintain the social unity and stability Rawls himself emphasises is so important for justice as fairness to succeed. The second suggests that justice as fairness, in seeking to maximise the freedom of individuals to pursue their own interests, would encourage the kind of individualistic dispositions Rawls explicitly tries to avoid. And the third suggests that Rawls' desire to respect individual autonomy, and consequent wariness of state intervention in the lives of individuals, actually disrespects citizens by failing to use the resources of the state in ways that promote their good.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This research seeks to invoke critical international relations and normative theory lenses to advance our understanding of why many foreign interventions continue long after they have failed to achieve their stated goals and the normative implications of perpetual 'failed' interventions in terms of attributing responsibility and even legal culpability for such continued 'failure'. From botched humanitarian interventions to prolonged military aid programmes, foreign intervention policies often gain notoriety for 'doing more damage than good'. In explaining such 'failures', critiques often focus on the role of a handful of individual decision makers in an endless game of naming and shaming, a tendency toward attributional oversimplification that is well-documented in literature on organisational theory. This research proposal engages the theoretical premise that in order to understand and improve upon foreign interventions, it is first essential to expose and examine the diffuse web of interests and influences that perpetuate the status quo. Michel Foucault's critical theory underpins this framework: Foucault calls into question the negative nature of 'failure', demanding that we consider "the whole play of dependencies that make up a functional system" (Foucault 1968, 58) in order to understand it. Within the scope of this research, Foucault's approach pushes us to critically examine the secondary, hidden functions and benefits of prolonged foreign interventions, probing the possibility that seemingly 'failed' efforts may hold hidden benefits and secondary functions for a diffuse set of actors. I thus seek to critically examine the role of agent-driven strategic intent as opposed to less intentional and more diffuse factors in contributing to apparent policy 'failures', asking: a) how can we characterise the role of hidden and diffuse benefits in perpetuating supposed 'failed' foreign interventions? I will then consider the normative implications of such diffuse drivers behind apparent 'failure', ultimately asking: b) what are the normative implications of diffuse benefits of 'failure' in terms of attributing responsibility for continued 'failure'? How can we attribute blame if benefits of a 'dysfunctional' system are widely shared? By endeavouring to challenge entrenched notions of attribution of responsibility for such 'failure', we interrogate the unexplored premises of why and how-and if-we 'help'. I tentatively propose to consider the diffuse functions of 'failed' interventions through exploring the case of perpetuated counter-narcotics assistance to Tajikistan. While this case study may evolve as I refine my project, Tajikistan provides an interesting possible case: funding to the Central Asian republic has repeatedly proven ineffective in stemming the flow of drugs from Afghanistan. Nonetheless, funding has been maintained. This project would seek to unpack the role of intentional decision-making on the part of donors and recipients as opposed to more diffuse forms of power such as path dependency and discourse in perpetuating assistance, before considering the normative implications of such a case of shared responsibility. This project ultimately seeks to contribute to critical theory literature on the functions of seeming 'dysfunction', questioning how we assign responsibility for 'failures' that produce benefits for actors living within systems and that are derived from a complex array of factors.