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Background: Care experienced young people (CEYP) are thought to be at increased risk of experiencing teenage pregnancy but little is known about teenage pregnancy rates among CEYP in Scotland. Objectives: The study used data linkage techniques to compare teenage pregnancy outcomes for CEYP in Fife with those of their non-care experienced but similarly deprived peers. Methods: Social care administrative data for 1119 females looked after by Fife Council between October 1991 and March 2015 were linked to NHS teenage pregnancy data. Probabilistic linkage was used to match CEYP demographic data (names, sex, date of birth and postcodes) to the Community Health Index (CHI) number. The CHI number was used to identify teenage pregnancy outcomes from national Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR) datasets, SMR01 and SMR02. Outcomes for CEYP were compared with a group of non-care experienced peers from a similar socioeconomic background. Three non-care experienced young people (non-CEYP) were selected for every CEYP, matched by year of birth, sex and socioeconomic status at birth. Results: An acceptable match to a CHI number was achieved for 90.5% (1013/1119) of CEYP. 889 CEYP were fully matched to 2664 non-CEYP. CEYP were more than twice as likely as non-CEYP to experience a live birth before age 20 (RR 2.32, 95% CI 2.06 to 2.62). 38.4% (341/889) of CEYP had a live birth before age 20, compared with 16.5% (440/2664) of non-CEYP (p < 0.001). CEYP were 33% more likely than non-CEYP to experience a termination of pregnancy before age 20 (RR 1.33, 95% CI 1.06 to 1.66). 11.2% (100/889) of CEYP experienced a termination of pregnancy before age 20, compared with 8.5% (226/2664) of non-CEYP (p < 0.05). Conclusions: CEYP were significantly more likely to experience teenage abortion and teenage childbirth than their non-care experienced but similarly deprived peers. High levels of teenage childbirth were observed among CEYP.

Technical systems are critical drivers of economic consumption and production, and are generally accepted to be dependent on natural systems and processes throughout their life cycle. Accordingly, their sustainability is under increasing scrutiny. However, the basic constitution of sustainability of technical systems is unclear, and views on how sustainability can be assessed and improved are inconsistent. To address these issues, the research reported in this thesis developed two generic models of technical system sustainability: the Sustainability Cycle (S-Cycle), and the Sustainability Loop (S-Loop). The general elements and relationships involved in sustainability were identified through an inductive literature investigation spanning nine sectors. Sustainability was found to constitute an ability, which is in turn an emergent property of a system and manifested to humans as behaviour that maintains something. Activities were identified as the means by which materials and energy are transformed in a system. From a sustainability perspective, the behaviour of system activities was observed to involve the production of intended output, waste, and intended resources from inputs of renewable and non-renewable resources. This behaviour is formalised in the S-Cycle model. Humans seeking improved sustainability were found to interpret the behaviour of system activities to produce knowledge, and take action on the basis of this knowledge to produce effects that alter activity behaviour. This process is formalised in the S-Loop model, which positions the S-Cycle model within the context of human knowledge and interpretations. The validity, utility, and applicability of the S-Cycle model were evaluated through: two independent worked examples; three independent industrial case studies; two expert appraisal workshops with 27 practicing engineering designers; and an analytical study of 324 sustainability performance indicators (SPIs). Through these methods, the model was applied to ten distinct technical systems and expert opinions were elicited. All model elements and relationships were supported. One additional element/relationship was identified, leading to a refined model. The model was found to be artefact independent, supporting the identification of SPIs for different technical systems, and providing a consistent view on the behaviour of different sub-systems at various levels within a technical system. The S-Loop model received a degree of support through peer review and publication in the Journal of Environmental Management. Lastly, the research and findings were critiqued, leading to the identification of advantages, disadvantages, and recommendations, and areas for future research.

Incubation, which involves putting the problem aside temporarily and performing an unrelated activity, has been widely shown to enhance creativity. It has also been proposed that incubation may facilitate design ideation, though relatively few studies have empirically examined this. As such, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the role of incubation in a design context, including the key psychological factors that may determine the effectiveness of incubation. One possible influencing factor is the mood of the designer during incubation. It is well known that creative cognition is influenced by mood, with positive moods in particular being linked with increased cognitive flexibility and novel thinking. Previous research has also indicated that positive mood during incubation can improve subsequent divergent thinking, although it is not clear whether similar effects occur in a design context. Against this background, this thesis aimed to assess whether incubation, in general, would facilitate subsequent design ideation. In addition, it aimed to examine whether positive moods during incubation would be particularly effective in enhancing ideation. A preliminary study was firstly conducted to establish the cognitive processes associated with the generation of novel design concepts and identify which, if any, of these processes were known to be influenced by mood. To this end, 101 product design engineering students performed a series of open-ended ideation tasks as well as a range of psychological tests that assess different cognitive processes, including measures of associative processing, executive function, mental imagery, and intelligence. Correlation analyses indicated significant positive relationships between idea novelty (assessed by 3 independent raters) and scores on associative flexibility, verbal fluency and fluid intelligence. In addition, a significant negative correlation was observed between inhibition and novelty. Finally, a regression model with the cognitive test scores showing significant correlation as predictors was found to be explain 26% variance in ideation novelty in the sample. Importantly, several of the cognitive processes highlighted as key to the generation of novel concepts (associative flexibility, verbal fluency and disinhibition) have been shown by previous research to be enhanced by positive mood. This suggested that positive moods during incubation, through stimulating these processes, may facilitate subsequent design ideation. This was formally tested in study 2, in which a group of product design engineering students (n=72) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Each participant performed the same ideation task but with: an incubation period with a happy mood induction, or incubation with sad mood induction, or incubation where no mood was induced or no incubation period and no induced mood. The happy and sad mood induction used in the experiment involved exposure to mood appropriate music and text. The neutral group were also exposed to music and text during the incubation period but this was not designed to induce any specific mood. The results suggested that firstly, there was no evidence of a general (i.e. non-mood related) incubation effect in that the control group and the neutral group showed no significant differences in terms of fluency or novelty of ideas generated. Secondly, there were no significant differences in ideation performance between the three incubation groups (i.e., happy, sad, neutral incubation), showing no support for the hypothesis that positive moods during incubation period would have a particularly beneficial impact on performance. Finally, while there was no evidence of an incubation effect, the results did suggest that in general, participants generated more novel ideas in the second half of the ideation task. This is consistent with a substantial body of evidence to suggest that people become more creative with increasing time on task. The findings of study 2 were inconsistent the wider creativity literature, where mood and incubation have been widely demonstrated to be key factors of influence on creative performance. However, much of the evidence for this is based on studies using standardised creativity tasks such as divergent thinking and insight tasks. Thus, a possible explanation of the findings was that incubation and mood simply have reduced influence in more domain specific, applied creativity settings. In general, incubation may interfere with some designers' established routines and preferences regarding if and when to take a break. In terms of mood during incubation, previous work has indicated that mood may exert counter-active effects on more applied creativity tasks, because while it enhances novel thinking and cognitive flexibility, it impairs the more constrained and analytical processes that are required for generating practical solutions - the result being no overall impact on ideation performance. The above arguments could be explored further by examining the effects of the mood-based incubation paradigm in a more domain-general creativity context. If incubation effects (either general or in relation to mood) were observed under such circumstances, this would give support to the notion that incubation and mood have more facilitative effects in general-creativity settings, with reduced influence in more applied, domain-specific contexts. Alternatively, if similar results to study 2 were observed, this would suggest that the findings were due to methodological factors associated with the experimental paradigm. To explore this, a final study was conducted (n=80) which examined the effects of the mood incubation procedure in a more domain-general creativity setting. The same incubation paradigm was employed as in study 2 with the exception that participants were from a non design background (mainly psychology students) and the creativity task was Finke's (1996) mental synthesis task. The results suggested that fluency was marginally affected by incubation, in that while both the control group and the neutral incubation group showed a decline in the number of ideas generated in the second phase of the synthesis task, this decline was less pronounced for the incubation group. However, in most key respects the results were similar to study 2: there was no evidence that incubation facilitated novelty, nor was there any evidence to suggest that positive moods were particularly effective during incubation. Finally, as in study 2, a serial order effect was observed with all groups showing higher novelty in the latter half of the task. Overall, the thesis found no evidence to suggest that incubation facilitates subsequent ideation, nor was there any evidence for the notion that positive moods are particularly effective in enhancing ideation. The fact that this was the case for design ideation and domain-general creativity suggests that the findings may be due to specific methodological factors, rather than an incompatibility between incubation and design ideation, as was initially proposed. Regarding the absence of general incubation effects, this could be due to the nature of the incubation task, as well as participants' lack of awareness of a task return following incubation. The lack of positive mood-related effects could be attributable to limitations with the mood induction procedure, or the influence of sketching during ideation. The potential involvement of these factors and how they may have influenced the results is discussed in the relevant chapters. Suggestions are also made for how future research can further explore their role in incubation. Overall, the research highlights that incubation effects can be elusive, and that taking a break is by no means guaranteed to facilitate performance. Finally, the results do provide clear support for the notion that creativity improves with time (serial order effect). Future research should explore the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the serial order effect in a design context, and whether certain factors (e.g. expertise, fluid intelligence) moderate it.