Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Ambivalent Sexism And Condom Use Self-Efficacy Amongst Men Who Bottom: A Serial Mediation Model, Elliott Nolan Devore

Doctoral Dissertations

The effects of gendered power dynamics between men and women during sexual encounters are well documented in the literature. Specifically, internalizing sexist beliefs about masculine dominance and feminine submission is related to worse sexual health outcomes. Less is known, however, about gendered power dynamics between men having sex. Those who engage in anal sex as the receptive partner (i.e., bottom) are feminized and shamed in various cultures, viewed as submissive, and may have internalized sexist beliefs and, thus, sexual role prejudice. Consequently, bottoms may feel less sexual autonomy, which influences their condom use self-efficacy. This is important given that bottoms …

Sexual Harassment As A Narrative Contest, Christine Vossler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how stories shape both the perpetration of sexual harassment and the experiences of victims during and after sexual harassment. During and after the experience of sexual harassment, a narrative contest transpires between the harasser, victim, and others who contribute to the contest by engaging in the formal and informal conversations that follow known experiences of harassment in the workplace. I analyze 22 public statements, interviews, and investigative reports, including statements from men accused of sexual harassment, women who were sexually harassed, and bystanders. A narrative framework, including concepts of narrative believability and story credibility, is used to …

Beyond Revolutionaries, Victims, And Heroic Mothers. Reproductive Politics In War And Peace In Colombia, Vanesa Giraldo Gartner

Doctoral Dissertations

During the 2016 peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), reproductive policies in this guerrilla group became a site of contestation in producing new discourses about peace, gender, and nation. This dissertation addresses this controversy and explores the implications of reproductive politics in war and peace among ex-combatant women. The data for this project was collected through archival research and a multi-sited ethnography in Caquetá-Colombia. It discusses the role of contraception in the transformation of the FARC from a grassroots guerrilla movement to a revolutionary army and analyzes the multiple discourses produced about …

Organizational Variation In Federal Agencies’ Gender Pay Gaps, Karen M. Brummond

Doctoral Dissertations

Although previous research has identified differences in the gender pay gap by employment sector, existing research on the causes of employer variation in the gender pay gap, particularly in the U.S. Federal Government, is limited (Smith-Doerr et al. 2019; U.S. Government Accountability Office 2020). This dissertation fills that gap by exploring organizational characteristics contributing to varying inequality regimes (Acker 2006) and subsequent pay equity variation. Using a linked employer-employee administrative dataset covering over 2 million federal employees, I measured governmentwide and agency-level gender pay gaps and explored organizational characteristics that explain agency-level differences. I found a governmentwide gross gender pay …

Grammars Of Identity: Political Languages Of Activism In Argentina And The United States, Ana M. Ospina Pedraza

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent history, democratic popular assemblies have played a significant role in political organizing worldwide. Contemporary theorists and social movement scholars see a global ethos of collective action in the growth of the assembly form. This dissertation studies the language of collective action in two movements that illustrate the global significance of assemblies: the neighborhood assemblies of Buenos Aires in 2002 and the New York General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. These movements were connected by transnational networks of activism and a commitment to internal democracy now prevalent in the global left. This research asks two questions: what …

Raising Global Elites From A Distance: Transnational Parenting Of South Korean Students, Juyeon Park

Doctoral Dissertations

Drawing on interviews with 74 South Korean (hereafter Korean) students and 34 parents at ten elite U.S. colleges, I examine how elite Korean parents seek to reproduce and extend their family privilege through children’s transnational education. I analyze how each group – children, mothers, and fathers – interprets and represents their views of the elite transnational parenting they experienced or practiced. By triangulating the narratives of three groups, I explore the family dynamics of the transnational families of high-achieving Korean students abroad. Well-educated yet opt-out mothers intensively managed their children’s early education, often relying on gender-segregated networks. In contrast, cosmopolitan …

Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston

Doctoral Dissertations

Parenting in queer families calls into question some of our most fundamental assumptions: that parents are biologically related to their children, that only women give birth, that all fathers are men, that families push away friendships and communities based in anything other than “blood” ties, and that parenting is life-long. In this dissertation, presented through five in-depth family case studies and a series of analytic chapters based on fifty semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ adults in families with children I discuss gay sperm donors, gestational fathers, non-binary foster parents, transwomen dads, queer adopters of kids from queer birth parents, trans step-dads, …

Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …

Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …

Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation examines three organizations that promote premarital sexual abstinence. These three organizations broadly mirror different strands within the New Right: an evangelical Christian abstinence ministry called Purity Ring Posse, Revolutionary Romance, an elite group of conservatives on an Ivy-League campus, and Stand Up! a group at a Mormon university that seeks to “burst the bubble” and facilitate outreach between pro-family organizations and students. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and content analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how each group attempts to promote a unique version of abstinence that can be successfully mobilized in the public square. Purity Ring Posse articulates “ …

Three Essays On “Doing Care”, Gender Differences In The Work Day, And Women’S Care Work In The Household, Avanti Mukherjee

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation provides a theoretical perspective on why women’s responsibility for care work lengthens their workday relative to men due to subsistence requirements, and draws attention to the relevance of other female family members. Building from theories of institutional bargaining research insights from “doing gender”, I develop a theoretical perspective on “doing care” that considers both bargaining power and social norms as determinants of differences in time allocation across and within gender. Conventional bargaining models predict that women who earn incomes can substitute hours of paid work for unpaid work. Using qualitative field work from India, and my theory of …

Negotiating Race, Work And Family: Cape Verdean Home Care Workers In Lisbon, Portugal, Celeste Vaughan Curington

Doctoral Dissertations

In Portugal, high levels of women’s labor force participation, rapidly aging populations, along with the retrenchment of welfare states, has led to the expansion of publicly subsidized private care work such as home care. Much of this caring work is carried out by low-paid citizen and migrant women from the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an independent archipelago nation off the West African coast. At the same time, Portugal is a “post-colonial” setting, with comparatively progressive policies around family settlement for migrants, and where the language of “legal race” does not exist. Taking the lived experiences of Cape Verdean …

Factors That Shape Arab American College Student Identity, Abdul Rahman F. Jaradat

Doctoral Dissertations

Arab American identity has not yet received the research attention and scholarship that it deserves. In this dissertation, I have qualitatively studied the narratives of young Arab American college students and recent graduates. The research questions that I explored include what makes them Arab Americans, and what are the factors that help them identify as such. By focusing on Arab Americans and their identity factors, I have presented the narratives of those women and men who self-identify as Arab American and quoted their accounts of how they navigate this undervalued, misunderstood, and stereotyped identity. I have used ethnic and racial …

The Role Of Mentoring For Women In Upper Management In The National Basketball Association (Nba), Manuela Picariello

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite years of progress by women in the workforce, climbing the corporate ladder is still a very daunting task for most women (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Evans, 2010; McKinsey Report, 2013), and occupational segregation still exists (Davidson & Burke, 2011). Research studies have reported that mentoring in general is critical to upward mobility (Allen, Eby, O’Brien, & Lentz, 2008; Allen, Eby, Poteet, Lentz, & Lima, 2004; Eby, Allen, Evans, Ng, & DuBois, 2008). To date there has not been a study with a focus on mentoring and female executives in professional sport. In the 2014 Racial and Gender Report Card …

Seguimos Luchando: Women Educators’ Trajectories In Social Movement Based Popular Education Projects In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jennifer Lee O'Donnell

Doctoral Dissertations

Through a multisite ethnographic investigation, I provide a look at the vision and practices of women teaching in the popular education sector, particularly those who impact social, economic, and political public spaces in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As an alternative to Freirean based education theory, which may overshadow the collective work of women in popular projects, this work highlights women’s commitments to education that contests neoliberal reform, transforming not only curriculum and pedagogies, social practices, and discourses inside classrooms, but the communities where they live as well.

Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos

Doctoral Dissertations

This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …

The Professionalization Of Male Circumcision In Turkey, Oyman Basaran

Doctoral Dissertations

Male circumcision is seen as a cultural and religious event and a rite of passage for boys in Turkey. It is surrounded by public rituals and as there is no equivalent rite of passage for girl children, circumcision signifies a crucial marker of not only religious but also gender differentiation between boys and girls. Circumcision is a men’s affair and performing circumcision bestows economic privilege and social status on circumcisers (sünnetçi). In this dissertation, I trace the practical and discursive changes in the experience of male circumcision from the perspectives of practitioners. I argue that while circumcision was always a …

Developing And Implementing A Lgbt Family Studies Course: A Pre-Post Evaluation, Kathryn Alexandra Conrad

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the pre- and post-course knowledge and attitudes regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and families. An upper-level, Child and Family Studies undergraduate course, Modern Families, was constructed and piloted during the Spring 2016 semester to provide students with empirically-based information on contemporary families with a heavy emphasis on LGBT individuals and families. Participants (N = 19), who were enrolled in the course, participated in a series of open- and close-ended surveys at the beginning (Time 1 [T1]) and end (Time 2 [T2]) of the semester that assessed their knowledge and attitudes towards diverse …

Internalized Heterosexism, Religious Coping, And Psychache In Lesbian, Gay, And Bisexual Young Adults, Jon Raymond Bourn

Doctoral Dissertations

Psychache, or unbearable psychological pain (Shneidman, 1993, 1999), has been found to be the most proximal predictor of suicidality. There is evidence that heterosexism (Crain-Gully, 2011), including internalized heterosexism (IH; Bourn & Miles, 2015), is related to psychache among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. The current study sought to further examine the relationship between IH and psychache, by identifying potential factors that moderate and mediate the relationship between IH and psychache. It was hypothesized that, in a sample of religiously-identified LGB young adults, (a) IH would be significantly, negatively correlated with positive religious coping (PRC) and significantly, positively correlated …

A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria

Doctoral Dissertations

Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, women’s participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers’ experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field …

The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Women are underrepresented in crime and criminal economies compared to men. However, research on the gender gap in crime tends to not employ relational methods and theories, even though crime is often relational. In the predominantly male world of Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century existed a dynamic gender gap. Combining social network analysis and historical research methods to examine the case of organized crime in Chicago, I uncover a group of women who made up a substantial portion of the Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Before Prohibition, women of organized crime operated …

Reading Queerly In The High School Classroom: Exploring A Gay And Lesbian Literature Course, Kirsten Helmer

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how teaching an English literature curriculum centered on the stories, experiences, cultures, histories, and politics of LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex) people constitutes a meaningful site for teaching and learning in a high school classroom. The dissertation offers insights on how the teaching of LGBTQI-themed texts in English language arts classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer theory to critical literacies teaching. The project follows principles of critical qualitative research and employs an ethnographic case study approach with the purpose of transforming educational …

Exploring Coping Mediators Between Heterosexist Oppression And Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms Among Gay, Lesbian, And Bisexual Persons, Kyle M. Bandermann

Doctoral Dissertations

Recently, scholars have begun to advocate that categories of traumatic events be expanded to include experiences that do not meet the traditional diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), such as oppression. Our study builds on this work by examining experiences with two kinds of heterosexist oppression, one that meets the traditional diagnostic criteria for PTSD (i.e., sexual orientation-based hate crime victimization) and one that does not (i.e., heterosexist discrimination), as predictors of PTSD symptoms in a sample of 427 gay, lesbian and bisexual persons who responded to an online survey. In addition, we examined the mediating roles of coping …

Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann

Doctoral Dissertations

Mothers have contributed disproportionately to women’s rising employment rates in the United States, and contemporary fathers spend more time caring for children compared to previous generations of men. Still, parenthood continues to shape women’s and men’s employment participation patterns in profoundly gendered ways. Changes and continuities in aggregate labor market participation patterns raise questions with regard to the variation in mothers’ and fathers’ employment participation, and in the ways in which different-sex couples organize engagement in paid work after they become parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation examine the variation in new parents’ long-term …

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …

Understanding Health Issues Among Adolescent Females In A Northeast Province Of Afghanistan, Amina Davlatshoeva

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to develop a deeper understanding of the health issues facing adolescent females (ages 18-21) in rural, northeastern Afghanistan. Incorporating participant observations, in-depth interviews, and narrative inquiries, this study seeks to illustrate adolescent females’ perspectives on health issues. To achieve this goal, ten adolescent females were interviewed in rural, northeastern Afghanistan during 2010. The participants were between 18- and 21-years old. The one-on-one interviews were conducted in a multiple-response format and were structured around three research questions:

• How does a young female’s understanding of health issues shape her identity in northeastern Afghanistan?
• In what ways …

Characteristics Of Foster Parents Willing To Care For Sexual Minority Youth, Justin Douglas Bucchio

Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

Sexual minority foster youth living in out-of-home care are in need of enhanced services to promote successful development. Scholars have focused on providing insight into the lives of these youth as well as effective treatment approaches. None have focused on the willingness of the providers of their care. This nationwide non-probability cross-sectional study assessed foster mothers’ (N = 304) willingness to care for sexual minority youth, using secondary data analysis.

Willingness was assessed using the Willingness to Foster Scale (WFS), which identifies four levels of willingness ranging from not willing at all to willing without any extra help …

Using Critical Race Theory To Read Fantasy Football, Stephanie Rene Hill

Doctoral Dissertations

Fantasy sports are the latest addition to the sports industry. Fantasy sports (FS) participants compete against one another by using players from the “real” world to create a virtual team. FS simulates the structures of the real sporting world. The most popular FS is football, due to the success of the National Football League (NFL) (World Fantasy Games, 2009). Black males represent a vast majority of the athletes in the NFL and are often bought and sold by white participants who represent a critical mass of FS players. The purpose of this dissertation is to read fantasy football participation and …