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Recent years have seen the development of a body of research on stalking behaviour. However, this research has primarily focused on the experiences of female victims creating an identifiable gap in exploring the experiences of male victims. This thesis seeks to address this gap by examining the experiences of 23 male victims of stalkers. In examining the experiences of male victims, this thesis begins by identifying the dominant discourses that have evolved around stalking. Then, by the adoption of a grounded methodological framework, common meanings and understandings in the male participants' narratives are identified. These themes reveal that the men's understanding and experiences of being stalked are at odds with the view that being stalked is not a problem for men. This perspective is confirmed by the participants' experiences within the criminal justice system as they seek to accomplish victimisation. By drawing on a constellation of sociological theories, my study reveals the problematic experiential nature of being stalked. This includes the effect a stalking experience can have on a masculine identity, so much so that a man may respond by 'reclaiming' his masculinity. For some men, a stalking experience can threaten their identity even to the point that their identity can appear to be on the verge of collapsing. My study also shows how men try to make sense of their stalking experiences by drawing on stalking discourses from popular culture. As my study reveals the problematic nature of being stalked for men, there is the need for all those researching and developing policy for stalking victims to adequately take into account the experiences of male as well as female victims.

Theories of cultural evolution have been called into question during the past few decades, recognizing that concepts such as "chiefdom" and "cultural adaptation" do not directly address changes in power relations or social inequalities. Political economy and power have begun to replace systemic generalizations regarding cultural evolution. The present study examines the development and decline of Native American polities in late prehistoric and protohistoric southeastern North America, what is commonly referred to as the Mississippi Period (ca. AD 800--1700) or Mississippian culture. The meanings of "Mississippian" have also changed, reflecting theoretical trends and the accrual of new data. The historical trajectories of Mississippian polities did not follow a uniform or simultaneous cultural expansion, adaptation, evolution, or decline. Recent studies have proposed that structural instabilities were an underlying factor in the cyclical recurrence of simple and complex chiefdoms. An alternative approach is based on political culture as an historical process of structural power and political-symbolic actions.

Introduction: The aims of this thesis was to explore novel data types in healthcare that could enhance epidemiology studies in epilepsy and to develop novel methods of analysing routinely collected linked healthcare data, unstructured free text in hospital clinic letters and genetic variation. Method: The SAIL Databank was used to source linked healthcare data for people with epilepsy across Wales to study the effects of epilepsy and social deprivation, coding of epilepsy in GP records and the educational attainment of children born to mothers with epilepsy. Hospital clinic letters from Morriston Hospital in Swansea were analysed using Natural Language Processing techniques to extract rich clinic data not typically recorded as part of routinely collected data. An automated pipeline was developed to predict the pathogenicity of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms to prioritize potential disease-causing genetic variation in epilepsy for further in-vitro analysis. Results: Incidence and prevalence of epilepsy was found to be strongly correlated with increased social deprivation, however a 10 year retrospective follow-up study found that there was no increase in deprivation following a diagnosis of epilepsy, pointing to deprivation contributing to social causation of epilepsy rather than epilepsy causing social drift. An algorithm was developed to accurately source epilepsy patients from GP records. Sodium Valproate was found to reduce educational attainment in 7 year olds by 12%. A Natural Language Processing pipeline was developed to extract rich epilepsy information from clinic letters. A pipeline was created to predict pathogencity of epilepsy SNPs that performed better than commonly used software. Conclusion: This thesis presents novel studies in epilepsy using population level healthcare data, unstructured clinic letters and genetic variation. New methods were developed that have the potential to be applied to other disease areas and used to link different data types into routinely collected healthcare records to enhance further research.

Increasing crop yield is a critical research target for future food security, and advancing our understanding of the factors contributing to plant growth is vital if yields are to be improved effectively. This thesis sets out the requirement for a unified perspective on plant growth and investigates the relative limitations imposed by carbon and nitrogen sources and sinks on growth. I firstly demonstrate that source-sink interactions underpin plant growth when viewed through three perspectives: physiology, allocation and development. I then report data from experimental manipulations of the carbon and nitrogen source:sink ratios in domesticated annual and wild perennial barley. I measured resource uptake, metabolites, partitioning and growth, to gain an integrated perspective of the contribution of sources and sinks to growth in my system. The key findings of this experimental work are: • Annual barley shifts from being more carbon sink limited to more carbon source limited during vegetative development. • Growth in annual barley is carbon sink limited and growth in perennial barley is carbon source limited during vegetative development. • Growth in both species is nitrogen sink limited during vegetative development. This implies that annual barley may not respond favourably to future elevated carbon dioxide; an increase in carbon and nitrogen sink capacity during vegetative growth will be required to improve source capacity and yield effectively. The supply of carbon and nitrogen to crops is a pertinent issue in the current global context of rising CO2 levels and increasing environmental pollution via nitrogen fertiliser use. To implement the findings of this research effectively for crop improvement, it will be important to carry out field experiments over the whole lifetime of the crop, and to gain a deeper understanding of how carbon and nitrogen interact in the context of plant growth.

In this thesis we tested the predictions from the CSR theory for the community membership. Predictions are that, in the absence of competition, species from all strategies (Competitors, Ruderals and Stress-tolerants) will persist in low-stress habitats, whereas in high-stress habitats, only species with Stress-tolerant traits will survive. CSR recognizes that species evolved similar traits to one universal stress. For this reason, we were interested in testing which strategies will survive in different sources of stress. Our results from field and greenhouse experiments suggest that CSR theory does not predict community membership from the initial stages of a plant life-cycle. Instead, we found that the habitat stress plays a major role in determining the species that are incorporated into a community. In this thesis we also used a trait-based approach to evaluate: 1) the relationship between key traits using annuals species, and 2) the links between genome size and phenotypic variation within species. Firstly, we studied the triangular relationship reported for seed mass and leaf area in woody species. These traits are involved in the plant reproduction strategy and plant water and energy-use. We found a triangular relationship in annuals species, suggesting that is conserved across groups (woody and annuals). We also found that the driver of this relationship is related to soil fertility. Finally, for the relationship between genome size and phenotypic variation within species, we found that larger genome species display higher variation in traits than small genome species. This can be a potential advantage in heterogeneous environments where the amount of phenotypic variation would allow the species to adapt to them.

The seedling stage is an important part of a plant's life cycle. The seedling determines whether or not the plant will establish and reach maturity, will grow tall and deep enough to out-compete enough of the surrounding vegetation to become a strong and healthy plant and survive the many stresses that may easily damage a young seedling that has not yet developed the protection and reserves found in mature plants. One particular focus of seedling ecology is growth rates. This is currently a fast-moving topic, with the introduction of a new method of calculating growth rates. Therefore, this thesis investigates growth rates on an inter-specific scale, with particular interest in calculating growth, as: a log-linear formula based on biomass and time; the sum of its growth components and the non-linear size-corrected relative growth rate. Growth rates are investigated in relation to various mild and fatal stressors, such as nutrient and herbivory stress to see if the different methods of calculating growth can enhance our understanding of Ecology. This thesis found that seed mass is not a key factor explaining the differences in growth rates between growth forms (Chapter 2). It found that plant survival of stressful environments is based on a complex interaction of seed mass, growth rate and biomass (Chapter 3) and that biomass is very important in surviving a sub-optimal and then an extreme stressor (Chapter 4). The components of growth are potentially size-biased, creating a possible problem when attempting to compare the relative importance of each component across different environments (Chapter 5). Additionally, experimental standardisation (Chapter 2) and modelling single vs multiple traits (Chapter 3) are also questioned. Plant traits are important and useful determinants of plant growth. Understanding variance in plant growth can help us to understand functioning on a population and community level more effectively.