Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Sex Or Sexual Assault? Critical Media Literacy As A Tool For Consent Education, Riana S. Pella Dec 2021

Sex Or Sexual Assault? Critical Media Literacy As A Tool For Consent Education, Riana S. Pella

Doctoral Dissertations

Most children’s exposure to media begins in infancy and increases into adulthood. Even programming produced for children is rife with sexist and racist messaging (Harris, 2018). Because of its seductive imagery, media act as a highly influential form of sex education. Problematically, media habitually portray nonconsensual behavior as sexy and consent-seeking as unsexy (Katz, 2019). Black women are routinely devalued, hypersexualized, and exoticized in movies and television (Donovan, 2007). The result of such media exposure is that young people often misunderstand what constitutes sexual assault (Edwards, 2015). Logically, when individuals do not clearly understand the differences between consensual sex and …


Vegan Food For Thought: Moral Constructions Of Animals, Ryan F. Turner Oct 2021

Vegan Food For Thought: Moral Constructions Of Animals, Ryan F. Turner

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how humans make moral sense of and with animals. Each substantive chapter is devoted to one of three topics: animal selfhood, veganism, and animal rights. In chapter two, I examine animal selfhood and its moral implications. I argue that animal selves, particularly in an elemental Meadian sense, are potentially real, but in most cases are unobservable or unverifiable phenomena. I also argue that any moral theory of animal rights based on animal selfhood is limited by the empirical and epistemological limitations of substantiating animal selves. In chapter three, I present the interactional strategies ethical vegans employ when …


American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein Oct 2021

American Understandings Of U.S. Economic Inequality: Redistribution And Resistance, Jacklyn Stein

Doctoral Dissertations

Why has economic inequality in the U.S. continued to grow despite widespread and strong public opinion in favor of reducing it? In this dissertation, I argue that Americans are upset by current levels of economic inequality and support downward redistribution as a means to reduce it. At the same time, many have hesitations about or resistance to the mechanisms through which such redistribution might be carried out. This resistance, I found, varied across respondents’ class and race (and, to some extent, gender). Across groups, respondents’ desires for change were stymied by a social and political context of differential visibility that …


Creating The Emotionally Competent Child: The Education Of Feelings In American Public Schools, Kathleen E. Hulton Oct 2021

Creating The Emotionally Competent Child: The Education Of Feelings In American Public Schools, Kathleen E. Hulton

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation provides a historical and cultural analysis of a school-based approach social and emotional learning (SEL) in the United States. Over the past two decades, SEL has risen from relative obscurity to become a formidable educational movement in the United States and around the world. Its core claim, that schools should be actively involved in the cultivation of children’s emotional selves, has gained tremendous currency. I draw on popular and social scientific writing, state social and emotional learning standards, and SEL curricula to demonstrate the reconfiguration of emotion as central to the competence schools are supposed to develop. While …


Grammars Of Identity: Political Languages Of Activism In Argentina And The United States, Ana M. Ospina Pedraza Oct 2021

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 …


Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro Oct 2021

Policing And Health: Police Encounters As A Fundamental Cause Of Racial Health Disparities, Richard S. Carbonaro

Doctoral Dissertations

Structural racism has taken many forms throughout American history and to this day continues to drive social, economic, and health inequalities. Mass incarceration is a modern tool of social marginalization with well documented and deep-rooted racial inequalities. Research has continually shown that mass incarceration negatively impacts the health of disadvantaged communities. Even police stops, the most common and mundane form of criminal justice contact has been linked with deleterious health outcomes at the individual and community level. In this dissertation, I identify specific social and biological mechanisms connecting encounters with the police and health outcomes. In the first chapter, I …


Platforms And Power: Transnational Guatemala, Eric Sippert Sep 2021

Platforms And Power: Transnational Guatemala, Eric Sippert

Doctoral Dissertations

Moving beyond studies of social movements and NGOs, this dissertation examines how grassroots groups in Guatemala use transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people to create new organizational forms and types of political action. This case study of an organization of returned migrants, former combatants, and indigenous youth demonstrates how marginalized groups create platforms that facilitate connections between disparate actors across nation-state and identity borders. Drawing on field research in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, I explore how these platforms emerged, threats to them, their effects, and what they can teach us about political organizing in crisis. I begin by tracing the …


The Changing Nature Of Inequality In A Time Of Institutional Transformation: An Examination Of Between-Workplace And Between-Industry Income Inequality In A Set Of Thirteen High-Income Countries, Anthony Rainey Jun 2021

The Changing Nature Of Inequality In A Time Of Institutional Transformation: An Examination Of Between-Workplace And Between-Industry Income Inequality In A Set Of Thirteen High-Income Countries, Anthony Rainey

Doctoral Dissertations

This is a three paper dissertation examining between-workplace and between-industry income inequality and their relations with changing labor market institutions and economic structures since roughly the early the 1990s. All three papers use large scale administrative linked employer-employee panel data (LEEP) for multiple years (roughly, 1993-2013) for a set of countries that span North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In the first chapter, I examine country differences in levels of between-workplace income inequality. Countries strongly vary in levels of between-workplace inequality. On the high end for example, over 60% of Germany’s income inequality occurs between workplaces. On …


Hazardous Weather And Human Response In The Southeastern United States, Daniel Burow May 2021

Hazardous Weather And Human Response In The Southeastern United States, Daniel Burow

Doctoral Dissertations

Effectively mitigating the human costs of future hazardous weather events requires examining meteorological threats, their long-term patterns, and human response to these events. The southeastern United States is a region that has both a high climatological risk and a high societal vulnerability to many different meteorological hazards. In this dissertation, I study hazardous weather and human response in the Southeast through three different lenses: identifying uniquely simultaneous hazards posed by tropical cyclones, assessing precipitation and synoptic weather patterns on hazardous weather days, and examining patterns in intended response to tornado watches. I find that simultaneous and collocated tornado and flash …


A Collective Metamorphosis Of Breastfeeding Mothers: A Phenomenological Exploration Of A Face-To-Face Healthcare Provider Facilitated Peer Support Group, Emily Alexandria Tucker May 2021

A Collective Metamorphosis Of Breastfeeding Mothers: A Phenomenological Exploration Of A Face-To-Face Healthcare Provider Facilitated Peer Support Group, Emily Alexandria Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations

This research study used phenomenology to examine a face-to-face healthcare facilitated breastfeeding support group. Participant observations and phenomenology were used to address the following research questions: 1) what are the lived experiences of the women participating a breastfeeding support group, 2) how does the group influence their lived experiences, and 3) what were the common experiences of these women? The support group participants were observed while the researcher acted as a participant observer over the course of an eleven-month period. There were a total of seven women interviewed about their lived experiences breastfeeding and attending the support group. Data from …


Criminal Justice Contact And Romantic Relationships: Moving Beyond Marital Dissolution, Colton Tanner Kilpatrick May 2021

Criminal Justice Contact And Romantic Relationships: Moving Beyond Marital Dissolution, Colton Tanner Kilpatrick

Doctoral Dissertations

Changes to U.S. criminal justice policies during the latter part of the twentieth century dramatically increased the number of people incarcerated, and the impact continues to reverberate throughout millions of families today. This three-part dissertation extends scholarship on the effects of criminal justice contact on adult romantic relationships in several ways. The first study uses the PRISMA framework (Liberati et al., 2009) to systematically review what is known regarding how criminal justice contact may increase the risk of marital and non-marital relationship dissolution and whether this risk differs by form of criminal justice contact or by gender. Results were overwhelmingly …


Spatio-Temporal Modeling Of Crime In Chicago, Illinois, Shelby Scott May 2021

Spatio-Temporal Modeling Of Crime In Chicago, Illinois, Shelby Scott

Doctoral Dissertations

Gun crime is a major public health concern in the United States. In Chicago, Illinois, gun crime incurs a significant cost of life along with monetary costs and community unrest. Due to past legislation, there is limited research applying quantitative methods to gun crime in Chicago. The overall purpose of this work is to create a cellular automata model to observe and project the epidemic spread of gun crime in Chicago. To create that model, t-test analyses of temporal patterns, a Bayesian point process model, a negative binomial Bayesian subset selection, and a k-selection algorithm are used. The cellular automata …


The “Puppycide” Of Policing: How The Law Rationalizes The Police Killing Of “Dangerous Dogs”, Jeremy Smith May 2021

The “Puppycide” Of Policing: How The Law Rationalizes The Police Killing Of “Dangerous Dogs”, Jeremy Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

Police officers kill approximately 10,000 dogs every year in the United States, according to an estimate by a Department of Justice official. This amounts to police officers killing approximately 25 to 30 dogs every day. Although it is difficult to ascertain the actual extent of the problem since many law enforcement agencies do not keep track of canine shootings by their officers, the number of dogs killed by police during these encounters has government officials declaring that an “epidemic” is occurring within policing itself. The degree to which dogs die at the hands of police have led some commentators to …


Raising Global Elites From A Distance: Transnational Parenting Of South Korean Students, Juyeon Park Apr 2021

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 …


Multiple Identities In Sport Fandom: Balance, Conflict, & Negotiation, Aaron Mansfield Apr 2021

Multiple Identities In Sport Fandom: Balance, Conflict, & Negotiation, Aaron Mansfield

Doctoral Dissertations

Simultaneous to the sport industry’s ascent, obesity has become an issue of growing societal concern. Scholars have explored the role of social-psychological identification in both fandom and physical health, but have not yet explored the intersection of the two. Throughout life, individuals must negotiate all of their identities, including their attachment to sport teams, yet understanding of role identity within sport management is limited. Likewise, scholars have noted the need for greater illumination of the relationship between fandom and physical well-being. I address these gaps through three studies. In Study One, I completed semi-structured interviews with individuals who consider both …


Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide Apr 2021

Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide

Doctoral Dissertations

The “college experience” is normatively presented as enacting independence, often while financially relying on parents. This view normalizes white, middle-class models of college and family. The three interrelated papers comprising this dissertation investigate race, class, and gender differences and inequalities at college through the lens of students’ talk of family. These inductive, qualitative studies draw on semi-structured intensive interviews with undergraduates to explore divergent ways they make sense of college, family, and their self-development. Analyses highlight the multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory meanings participants attach to themes commonly presented as simple and objective (i.e. “paying for college,” “independence,” and “adulthood”). Findings …