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“The Main Thing I Would Want Somebody Who's To Ever Read My Story To Understand Is…”: Using Narrative Inquiry To Advocate For Systemic Changes For High-Profile Black Athletes, Akuoma Nwadike

Doctoral Dissertations

The academic outcomes for high-profile Black Athletes (HPBAs), the young men participating in men’s basketball and football, continue to trail those of their peers, especially in college. Researchers have uncovered ample evidence that dispels beliefs about reduced intellect, instead pointing to systemic injustices that result in academic under-preparation and miseducation. But these findings have not resulted in widespread systemic change for HPBAs. Therefore, I designed a study to take another look into this underperformance phenomenon, applying a scarcely used framework, methodology, and findings presentation in HPBA research. I applied an ecological systems theory (EST) framework to seek out the specifics …

African American Female Law Enforcement Officers' Lived Experiences And Mentoring: A Thematic Narrative, Harold Wilson

Doctoral Dissertations

Black female officers are an underrepresented sub-group of the law-enforcement profession. The bulk of research on women’s policing has focused on the growth of women in law enforcement, barriers, sexual harassment, gender differences, why women are deterred from law enforcement, physical limitations, and instruments used during the recruitment process, and the stress endured after entry into the profession. When looking at Black female officers’ lived experience and perceptions around mentoring; research is lacking. Eight Black female officers from the San Francisco Bay Area participated in this study. Findings revealed that all of the women have faced a recurring sense of …

Public And Private In The Blogosphere, Sarah Ford

Doctoral Dissertations

The public/private distinction is one of the most influential concepts of the modern era, both in terms of social theory and everyday life. For many, public and private have been treated as completely separate. The assumption that public and private are a dichotomous pair has influenced numerous aspects of social life, ranging from the gendered division of labor to the development of the suburb. However, the division between the public and private realms has proven to be permeable; the public and private realms have bled over into one another, and can no longer be treated as dichotomous. Information and communication …

Navigating The Path To Presence: Ideology, Politics, And The Campaign For Gender Balanced Boards And Commissions In Iowa, Ezra Joseph Temko

Doctoral Dissertations

From 1986 through 1988, Iowa adopted and strengthened a gender balance law that required men and women be equally represented on state boards and commissions. In 2009, Iowa extended this law to also require its counties, municipalities, and school districts to gender balance their boards and commissions. Iowa’s law remains unique in the United States. Through archival research and interviews, my research investigates how advocates navigated the ideological landscape associated with this policy issue. My research unveils the mechanisms that substantially deradicalized gender balance in Iowa, enabling its passage and shifting Iowans’ perceptions of gender, governance, and affirmative action—disembedding gender …

Understanding College Men's And Women's Perceptions Of Sexual Behavior Responsibility Through The Lens Of The Human Papillomavirus, Angela Mitiguy

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an examination of gender differences in sexual behavior responsibility and safe sex decision making, particularly among a college age population. In this study, I address one main research question: How do college-going men and women perceive their own and their partner’s responsibility for sexual behavior and sexual health? More specifically, I use the case of the Human Papillomavirus as a way to examine if there are gendered differences in the way college men and women think about their sexual behavior and sexual health and if these differences exist in the ways men and women act in certain …

Nature Of Formal Intimate Partner Violence Help Seeking: The Influence Of Individual And Community Characteristics, Desiree Ruth Wiesen-Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Intimate partner violence is a public health concern, and intimate partner violence victim help seeking is the focus of many intervention/prevention policies and programs. Help seeking by victims of intimate partner violence from formal support services, such as the police, domestic violence shelters, and/or rape crisis centers, is relatively low (Kaukinen 2002; Davies, Block, and Campbell 2007; Campbell 2008; Kaukinen, Meyer, and Akers 2013; Zaykowski 2014), and the research which considers the nature of help seeking among those victims who seek help is quite limited. This dissertation investigates the nature of formal help seeking among intimate partner violence victims who …

Religious Affiliation And Women's Labor Patterns In U.S. Counties, Andrew Schaefer

Doctoral Dissertations

In the past 50 years, the United States has experienced a large influx of women, particularly those with young children, into the paid labor force. Concurrently, adults across the country have steadily moved away from organized religion. Nonetheless, sociological research has documented relationships between affiliation with conservative religious groups and negative attitudes towards women’s labor force participation. Further, research has shown that women in conservative religious groups like evangelical Protestants and Mormons are less likely than others to enter the labor force upon getting married and, among those who work, more likely to work a reduced schedule.

Building upon this …

Emerging Climate Change Publics: Cultivating Sustainability And Justice In The Pioneer Valley, Vanessa Adel

Doctoral Dissertations

Climate change is setting off erratic weather patterns and environmental changes that threaten the livelihood, stability, and survival of the planet. Communities and institutions around the globe are sounding the clarion call about these devastating impacts, advocating for sustainable practices and deep changes to every facet of our lives. This dissertation research consists of an ethnography of a local network of actors and organizations who are responding to climate change, centered on those who define sustainability as integrally connected to justice. I analyze this network of activity through the lens of the concept of an emerging public. I start from …

Who Do You Think You Are?: Recovering The Self In The Working Class Escape Narrative, Christine M. Maksimowicz

Doctoral Dissertations

This project considers how socioeconomic impoverishment and society's failure to recognize working class women as valued subjects impinge upon a mother's ability to afford recognition to her daughter's selfhood. Situated within the larger North American literary tradition of fiction animated by flight in search of freedom, the texts here explored constitutes a subgenre that I term the “working class escape narrative.” Combining close readings of fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Sigrid Nunez with sociological research and psychoanalytic theory, I explore a relationship between mother and daughter characterized not by mirroring and bonding but rather the absence of intimacy …

Seeing And Believing: The Emergent Nature Of Extreme Weather Perceptions, Matthew John Cutler

Doctoral Dissertations

Perceptions of environmental issues are influenced by a variety of factors. Sociological research on this topic has largely taken a social-psychological approach and as a result the effects of community and biophysical contexts on individual perceptions are given less attention than individual-level predictors, such as political party affiliation or measures of educational attainment. Using data from the Communities and Environment in Rural America (CERA) surveys, I employ a mixed-effects modeling technique to investigate the influence of individual- and county-level characteristics on public perceptions of unusual or extreme weather.

In addition to the survey data, I also utilize county-level weather events …

Life Interrupted: The Experience Of Informal Caregivers Of Aging Family Members, Susan Wirka Fox

Doctoral Dissertations

While publicly-funded long-term care services have traditionally focused on institutionally-based care, informal family caregivers provide 80% of all long-term care in the US (Thompson 2004). This caregiving is physically and mentally demanding, unpaid, and often performed while the caregiver is balancing work and family responsibilities. With stress process theory (Pearlin 1989) as a guide, this research utilizes a mixed methods approach to study the relationships between the objective demands of caregiving, caregiver burden, and caregiver mental and physical well-being; whether burden mediates these relationships; how caregivers experience the demands of caregiving as stressful; and how they utilize coping strategies to …

Enduring Impact Of Childhood Stressors On Adult Health: Testing Psychological And Behavioral Pathways, Tracy Keirns

Doctoral Dissertations

Stress and health has been a topic of interest among researchers in a variety of fields such as medical sociology, psychology, public health, child abuse, and epidemiology. For decades this research had largely been conducted in silos within each of the respective fields. In recent years, these silos have started to diminish. Sociologists have begun to consider the accumulation of stressors over the life course, including how serious childhood stressors (such as child abuse) impact morbidity and mortality later in life. Using Wave I, Wave III and Wave IV data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health …

"Nobody Wants To Feel Different...But It's Just The Way It Is": Experiences Of Stigma And Other Stressors Among People Living With Psoriasis, Alex Parkhouse

Doctoral Dissertations

It is understood that stigmatizing processes can, and do, affect multiple domains of life among people who bear a stigma label. It is also understood that sources of stress (stressors) can spill over into a variety of areas of life, impacting the health and well-being of stigmatized people. However, although both stigma research and stress research advance, little has been done to connect these two important lines of sociological inquiry. To address this gap, 23 semi-structured qualitative in-person and telephone interviews were conducted to examine the daily, lived experiences of stigma and other stressors among people living with psoriasis (PLWP), …

Social Capital In A Diversifying City: A Multi-Neighborhood Ethnographic Case Study, Justin Robert Young

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite major demographic shifts in the nation’s racial/ethnic composition, we know little about how residents of integrating cities and neighborhoods are connected to one another. Research regarding the relationship between neighborhood diversity and ‘social capital’ (ties between individuals) is mixed, often suggesting that diversity reduces trust, close ties, and participation in local civic life. Yet, the extant literature fails to account for ground-level urban social processes underlying social capital formation in diverse neighborhoods. In this dissertation, I reframe the diversity/social capital debate by using ethnographic methods to answer three interrelated questions: How do residents of diverse neighborhoods (compared to less …

Well-Being As A Measure Of Inequality Among The Retirement-Age Population: An Examination Of The Role Of Place, Migration, And Socioeconomic Status In Shaping Happy And Healthy Older Americans, Megan Henly

Doctoral Dissertations

The proportion of the U.S. population comprised of seniors – those aged 65 and older – is projected to increase from 13% presently to 20% by 2030. With this demographic change, it is important to consider how older residents are faring, which older residents do best, and what communities are doing to support this population. Rather than examining income or wealth as a dependent variable, I predict two measures of well-being among older U.S. residents– one subjective and one objective. By linking survey data of the 50 and older population from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to a …

A Woman's Work Is Never Done? Earlier Life Child, Marital, And Work History And Older Women's Relationship To The Paid Labor Force, Anne Shattuck

Doctoral Dissertations

In the past 40 years, women in the U.S. have experienced higher rates of labor force participation and higher rates of divorce and single motherhood. How these changes will affect women when they reach old age is not yet understood. Using a pooled sample from the Health and Retirement Study of 4,350 women born between 1931 and 1943, this dissertation assesses patterns of women’s work/retirement circumstances at age 66-68 and evaluates the relationship between those patterns and women’s earlier life marital, work, and childrearing history. Latent class analysis revealed four distinct classes of older women: the "retired well" (57.6% of …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

The Complexities Of Family Health: Effects On Women's Employment, Jessica Aimee Carson

Doctoral Dissertations

An extensive sociological literature links women's health, their children's health, and their disproportionate designation as unpaid caregivers to variation in women's labor supply and earnings. However, there is a dearth of research that simultaneously considers the health of multiple family members to explore how the distribution of chronic conditions within and across families may relate to women's work. Using data from the 2007 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (and its supplemental surveys, the Child Development Supplement and the Transition into Adulthood Study), this dissertation conceptualizes health as a family-level construct and explores how the distribution of chronic conditions in families …

A Longitudinal Analysis Of The Effect Of Disability Type And Emotional/Behavior Problems On Different Forms Of Maltreatment Across Childhood, Jennifer A. Vanderminden

Doctoral Dissertations

Children are among the most vulnerable people in our population, especially those with disabilities, emotional and behavioral problems (EBP), and those who experience maltreatment. This dissertation increases our understanding of the complex relationships between disability, internalizing symptoms (IS), externalizing symptoms (ES), and maltreatment across developmental stages. Previous literature suggests that children with disabilities (CWD) are at a heightened risk for maltreatment (Spencer, Devereux, Wallace, Sundrum, Shenoy, Bacchus, and Logan 2005 ; Sullivan and Knutson 2000). Yet, recently the Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) has challenged the notion that CWD are at increased risk, showing that …

Everyday Food Practices Among Three Low-Income Groups: Rural, Homeless, And Refugee, Amy L. Redman

Doctoral Dissertations

Lower-income groups are more susceptible to diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease (CDC, 2010). They are also more likely to need food and nutritional assistance (USDA, 2011). Yet very little is known about the day-to-day food practices of these individuals and families. Many times those who are relatively adjacent in terms of income are assumed to have similarities in food consumption (Hupkens, Knibbe, & Drop, 2000); however, this has not been empirically examined. The main objectives of this research are to 1) gain an exploratory in-depth understanding of the everyday food practices of individuals in three low-income groups: …

Culture, Place And Identity In A Mobile Community, Genevieve Ramsey Cox

Doctoral Dissertations

Contemporary communities are no longer necessarily bound by the confines of a specific locality due to spatial mobility. My dissertation examines if and how mobile individuals may create community, the culture of one group, and the significance of place amidst mobility for creating community in modernity. I analyzed three years of ethnographic field notes and 44 interviews with individuals who attend the yearly arts event Burning Man in the Nevada desert. After the event, these burners return to their home environments, most of which are on the American west coast, but also spend a significant portion of their time traveling …

Created In The Image Of: Mormonism And The Rhetorical Production Of Identity In Privately-Published Family Histories, Michael K. Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a qualitative study of seven privately-published family histories written by descendants of Mormon polygamists. Using methods of discourse and rhetorical analysis, these texts and various interviews are analyzed with the contention that identity is a rhetorical production and that the authors (either intentionally or unwittingly) fictionalize each of the identities involved---their own, their readers', and their ancestors'---to bring them together in moments of Burkean identification. These moments of identification are also analyzed in terms of communal and generational memory, temporal proximity, and communal discourses. An important conclusion in this study is that this rhetorical production of identity …

Testing The Procedural Justice Model Of Legal Socialization: Expanding Beyond The Legal World, Rick Trinkner

Doctoral Dissertations

The procedural justice model of legal socialization predicts that perceptions of legitimacy and cynicism toward rules mediate the relation between procedural justice and engagement in rule-violating behavior. This dissertation used a multi-methodological approach to test this model in terms of three authority figures: parents, police, and teachers. In Study 1, cross-sectional methodology was used to test the model in a community sample of adolescents and young adults. Participants completed online surveys assessing the degree to which they perceived three authority figures as procedurally fair, the degree to which they perceived the authorities as legitimate, how cynical they were about the …

Anxious Lives: Tracing The Life Course Of A Medical Diagnosis Through Illness Narratives, Jennifer J. Esala

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of medical diagnosis, specifically anxiety disorder diagnosis, from the perspective and through the narratives of people who have been diagnosed. In this study, I address two core research questions. First, how does social materiality (e.g., bodies and objects) contribute to, shape, and lend empirical understanding to the experience of an anxiety disorder and the experience of illness in general? Second, how does medical diagnosis translate from the medical institution into the lives of people who have been diagnosed, and how do those diagnoses transform in and through the social lives of people? To address these …

Violent Socialization Processes And Criminal Behavior: An International Perspective On Variations In Social Control During Late Adolescence And Emerging Adulthood, Aimee Delaney Lutz

Doctoral Dissertations

Using Gottfredson and Hirschi's parental socialization thesis as a theoretical framework, the present study explores whether or not violent socialization processes are associated with criminal behavior, both at the micro-level and macro-level, across 32 different nations. Analyses were conducted on data from the International Dating Violence Study (Straus & Members of the International Dating Violence Research Consortium, 2004). Bivariate statistical analyses show that violent socialization tends to be more prevalent among nations with indicators of violence (e.g., laws supporting the death penalty) compared to nations without such indicators. The results of ordinary least squares regression analysis indicate that violent familial …

An Exploratory Approach To Social Impact Assessment Of Public Policy Decisions: Multiple Stakeholders Perspectives On The Social Impact Of Overfishing In New England Groundfisheries In The 1990s, Fabienne Lord

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand how stakeholders' perspectives and understanding of social impacts influence decision processes. Understanding stakeholders' comprehension of social impacts provides insight as to how they weigh these impacts against others when making decisions. Moreover, the way stakeholders influence, or are influenced by, management decisions provides information on the use and development of methodologies successful in assessing social impacts and communicating the results. Built on this information, the main objective is to explore and develop a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) approach that could capture and integrate multiple stakeholders' perspectives in predicting impacts from ongoing, renewable resource management actions. …

The Implications Of Socioeconomic Status And A Usual Source Of Care For The Health And Health Care Experiences Of Elders With Chronic Illnesses, Michelle L. Stransky

Doctoral Dissertations

Recently developed models of health care provision have promoted the relationship between providers and patient for improving care continuity and coordination. This may be especially important for the growing population of elders, who often have fragmented care because of multiple chronic illnesses. Previous research shows that elders who have a usual source of care (USC) have better health and health care experiences than other elders. However, research has rarely considered whether the benefits of USCs may be affected by the elder's socioeconomic status (SES), their levels of chronic illness, or various provider characteristics.

This dissertation utilizes the 2007 Medicare Current …

Wage Employment, Traditional Subsistence, And Aspirations Among Inupiat And Yup'ik In The Mixed Economy Of Northwest Alaska, Catherine Turcotte-Seabury

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies, investigates, and analyzes factors contributing to the maintenance of a mixed economy in villages and regional centers largely inhabited by Inupiat and Yup'ik in three regions of Northwest Alaska. By examining employment and subsistence patterns, desires for relocation, and employment and subsistence aspirations, this research will contribute to the understanding of work (both traditional and modern), culture, and population shift within indigenous, Arctic populations.

The Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic (SLiCA) is used in conjunction with aggregate demographic data from the Arctic Observation Network Social Indicators Project (AON-SIP) and interviews of residents in the Northwest …

Raping The Raced Body: Trauma In Asian North American Women's Literature, Amy Lillian Manning

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the representation of racial and sexual traumas in short fiction and novels by Asian American women writing post-WWII to the present. The central focus of this project is on Asian American literary representations of the lingering effects of physical, racial, and sexual traumas to Asian American women, specifically the nuances of narrating traumatic experiences. Each chapter explores various literary representations of post-traumatic psychological states of unrest, instability, and incoherence. Most importantly, this study examines the frequently simultaneous narrations of sexual trauma and racial awareness, of how personal narratives of trauma against the physical body become entangled with …

"If We Want An Education, We Want An Education It's Our Choice": How Four Youth At Risk Of Dropping Out Of High School Experienced Social Capital, Joanne Mcfarland Malloy

Doctoral Dissertations

Youth who are at risk of dropping out of high school are often challenged by significant emotional and behavioral support needs, and are typically disengaged from the educational process and the social networks that can help them succeed in their homes, in school, and in their communities. This research project investigated the experiences of four youth, two females and two males, who were at significant risk of dropping out of high school as they were engaged in a supportive intervention designed to build skills in self-determination, school-to-adult life transition planning, and leveraging social resources. Using social capital as a sensitizing …