A comprehensive review of online, official, and scientific literature was carried out in 2012-13 to develop a framework of disaster social media. This framework can be used to facilitate the creation of disaster social media tools, the formulation of disaster social media implementation processes, and the scientific study of disaster social media effects. Disaster social media users in the framework include communities, government, individuals, organisations, and media outlets. Fifteen distinct disaster social media uses were identified, ranging from preparing and receiving disaster preparedness information and warnings and signalling and detecting disasters prior to an event to (re)connecting community members following a disaster. The framework illustrates that a variety of entities may utilise and produce disaster social media content. Consequently, disaster social media use can be conceptualised as occurring at a number of levels, even within the same disaster. Suggestions are provided on how the proposed framework can inform future disaster social media development and research.

In the GLC Spina Bifida Survey families were interviewed at 11 years old and the effects of a child with spina bifida on the sibs, father and mother were explored. Health and behaviour of the sibs were reported as at least as good as that of sibs of normal children although mothers of disabled children were more likely to feel that the sibs had suffered. Fathers appeared to have been unrestricted in occupational choice; over the last 9 years 40% had moved upward in social class, twice as many as those who had moved downward. Parents of severely disabled children were significantly more restricted in some social activities than were those of the lightly disabled, and significantly more mothers of SB than of controls reported feeling run-down and depressed. No significant relationship could be found between measures of either health or stress in the parents and any measure of the child's disability level, dependence or amount of hospitalisation, nor with measures of social restriction. There is nevertheless a continuing need for help and support for families of disabled children, for them to make use of as they wish.

One weakness with the discursive leadership to date is the failure to explore ways in which material conditions also shape leadership (Fairhurst, 2009). Further, Dougherty (2011) argued that discursive constructionism without a consideration of material conditions is middle class privilege. By privileging the discursive over the material, discursive leadership could be reproducing social inequalities, which relates to issues of social class. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how leadership and social class become mutually constructed through the interplay between discourse and materiality. The concepts of text work and body work are used to understand how social class is linked with the types of work an individual does. Similar to white-collar/blue-collar distinctions, text work refers to jobs that emphasize the use of communication, and body work refers to jobs that emphasize more physical labor (Dougherty, 2011). A thematic narrative analysis was applied to stories about leadership that were told during interviews with a total of 21 participants (10 body workers and 11 text workers), and observations added context and thick description to participants' narratives about leadership. The theory of Language Convergence/Meaning Divergence provided a lens for understanding how meanings for leadership diverge based on different material experiences in day-to-day work. Findings indicate that discursive and material conditions of work interact to construct different meanings for leadership. Text workers emphasized communication in their constructions of leadership, while body workers constructed leadership more as an embodied practice. Additionally, compared to text workers, body workers demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of leadership that integrated a concern for discursive processes in addition to emphasizing material conditions.