Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Neighbourhood Context And Youth Mental Health: The Role Of Local Community Programming In A Mid-Sized Ontario Urban Centre, Monica Christine Bochus

MA Research Paper

Existing research indicates that neighbourhood disadvantage takes a cumulative toll on mental health across the life course beginning in childhood. This study used a qualitative approach to explore the role of local community resources on buffering the harmful effects of adversity for youth in a mid-sized Ontario urban centre. The following questions were addressed: 1) What role do youth-centered community resources play in child and adolescent mental health promotion and awareness, particularly for at-risk children? 2) How can they serve to improve child and adolescent well-being? By interviewing key informants, the study found that affordable youth-centred programming has the potential …

Living In A Transnational World: Identity Negotiation And Formation Among Second-Generation Lebanese Young Adults Living In London Ontario, Wajeha Chams

MA Research Paper

According to the 2011 Canadian Census, immigrants make up 20.6% of the total Canadian population (Statistics Canada, 2014), and a growing body of research is raising questions about immigrants’ experiences, their identities and how transnational lives have shaped and influenced Canadian society and citizenship. Recent research on transnationalism enhances understanding of immigrants’ relationships within both their source and host countries. This research demonstrates that first-generation immigrants tend to maintain their ethnic identities, language and cultural traditions through the active maintenance of transnational ties and activities. However, the lives of their children are less directly tied to the parents’ homeland. As …

Gender, Generation, And Jobs: Differences In Gender Role Ideologies By Age And Occupation, Christina Treleaven

MA Research Paper

Gender inequality in the workplace remains a salient issue today; women continue to earn less than men, driven in part by occupational segregation and by general perceptions about socially constructed gender norms. Using the United States General Social Survey, I conduct multivariate Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis to explore the differences in gender role ideologies by generational cohort and occupation. The results highlight differences in gender role ideologies amongst occupations and suggest that while perceptions of gender influence occupational choices, so too do occupations impact our perceptions of gender roles. Individuals working in occupations atypical for their gender, those who …

Addiction: The Colonization Of Rituals, Matthew Prokopiw

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What is addiction? Since its transformation as a word in the late 19th century, not only has it taken on the form of a scientific concept, but it also contains a complex social-historical component that tells a story of how and why addiction is now conceived of as a harmful and deviant behaviour. The objective of this text is to highlight how addiction fundamentally eclipses scientific discourses and instead functions as a social concept in the interests of colonization – comprised of forces of State and capitalism. Based on a critical reading of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane …

The Use Of Point Pattern Analysis In Archaeology: Some Methods And Applications, James R. Keron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explores a field of spatial statistics known as Point Pattern Analysis (PPA) and its application in archaeology. The overall goal is to provide a resource which will guide and assist the reader in the proper application of PPA. Past archaeological applications are combined with more recent geographical and statistical mathematics to create a more inter-disciplinary, synthesized approach. Included are a discussion of analytical methods and two detailed case studies/applications. The study begins with an overview of PPA approaches in archaeology, starting with a general introduction and several commonly understood concepts such as first and second order effects and …

The Demographic Links Between The 1890 And 1918 Influenza Pandemics In Ontario, Stacey A. Hallman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Previous research has shown larger than expected numbers of deaths at the age of 28 during the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic in Canada. To analyze whether this was related to the Russian influenza pandemic that occurred 28 years previously in 1890, the Western, McMaster, Montreal Influenza Pandemic (WMMIP) database was created. It utilizes the death records of 3,316 individuals who died in Ontario between the ages of 23 and 35 from September to December, 1918, and who were also born in Ontario. These were linked to birth records, the 1901 and 1911 Canadian censuses, marriage records, and attestation papers.

A …

The Impact Of The Operational Environment On The Commitment Profiles Of Canadian Armed Forces Soldiers, Christina L. Eastwood

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The aim of this study was to use latent profile analysis to determine whether commitment profiles found in previous studies could be replicated in a deployed Canadian military sample. This study examined antecedents contributing to the development of the profiles, outcomes associated with profile membership and stability of profiles solutions. A total of 4254 (pre-deployment) and 2365 (post-deployment) military personnel completed surveys related to affective (AC), normative (NC) and continuance (CC) organizational commitment, unit climate, operational preparedness, psychological distress, and intention to stay. Four commitment profiles (e.g., high AC- dominant, low CC/NC-dominant, Moderately and Weakly committed) emerged across both samples. …

Explaining The Evolution Of The Arctic Council, Andrew Chater

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Arctic Council is an international institution made up of the eight states that have territory in the Arctic, namely Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, as well as six indigenous peoples’ organizations. When states created the Council in 1996, it was a research institution that addressed environmental issues and a loosely defined version of sustainable development. It was a weak institution, without a permanent secretariat. By 2014, it had become a policy-making body, as well as a research body, that addressed a wide range of issues, with the aid of a permanent secretariat. New …

Relationship Between Household Food Insecurity And Health In The Upper West Region Of Ghana, Kilian Nasung Atuoye

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although the importance of food as a social determinant of health has been elucidated, it remains underexplored in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where a significant population is faced with challenges of accessing food, largely from a combination many factors including low economic power, poor livelihoods, political instability and policy gaps. Despite tremendous improvement on food security in Ghana, the northern part of the country including the Upper West Region still experience disproportionally high levels of deprivation and food insecurity. Research has tends to explain the dynamics and complexities of food insecurity in the Region, yet variation of the incidence of food …

The Value Of Postsecondary Education: Human Capital Theory In Ontario's Postsecondary Education Discourse 1962 - 2005, Adam M. Jog

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Contemporary understandings of postsecondary education systems are informed by a globalization discourse that incorporates human capital theory to explain the economic importance of postsecondary education institutions in the global economy. In this study, the influences of human capital theory and of liberal education in Ontario’s postsecondary education discourse are examined through a content analysis of government-commissioned reviews of Ontario’s postsecondary education system from 1962 to 2005. In particular, I hypothesize that instances of human capital theory would increase over that time period while instances of liberal education would decrease. The results of the content analysis clearly demonstrate that instances of …

Prosody: An Important Cue To Word Learning, Monica Dasilva

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Infants rely on cues from their environment during language acquisition. Prosodic features of words are one such cue and involve changes in stress and rhythmic patterns within speech. Studies have examined prosody’s influence on word segmentation and have found it to be a useful cue for detecting word boundaries (Johnson & Seidl, 2009). What is less understood is how prosody helps infants form associations between novel labels and their referents during word learning. The present thesis investigated the influence of prosodic cues on word learning. The looking times were recorded of 13 infants (19-25 months) exposed to object-label pairings that …

Guilty Subjects: The Biopolitical Function Of Guilt In Neoliberal States, David Miller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the function of guilt as an emotion and affective state in the production of voluntary servitude. Drawing on psychological research into the effects of guilt, as well as the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, I argue that guilt is instilled within the population by a particular political arrangement of relations of power (the State form of social relations) via a controlled process of subjectivation. As such, guilt should be read as a distinctly biopolitical mechanism of control. Additionally, I argue that the emotional experience of guilt works to attach individuals to their own …

To Walk About As They Pleaseth: An Exploratory Study Of Limb Treatment And Positioning In Ancient Egyptian Mummies, Hallie Tennant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examines evidence of limb manipulation and positioning in a sample of eighty one (n=81) Egyptian human mummies archived in the IMPACT radiological database housed at The University of Western Ontario. The purpose of this research is to expand upon the existing research on the positioning of the arms and hands in Egyptian mummies (cf. Gray, 1972) to include the lower body in order to shed light on how the embalming process altered the legs and feet. The results of this study demonstrate that some aspects of lower body positioning vary across time periods in conjunction with other stylistic …

The Role Of Androgens In Life History Theories Of Attachment, Janani S. Sankar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Life history theories (LHTs) of attachment address how attachments to caregivers in infancy/childhood and to romantic partners in adulthood are used to negotiate mating and reproductive choices. Greater insecure-avoidant attachment has been suggested to be associated with the adoption of a low-investment, short-term reproductive strategy. The role of sex hormones, including the androgen testosterone (T), in the development of attachment-related reproductive strategies has been speculated in some LHTs. This research tested an integrated-LHT model of early environment, attachment, and reproductive strategies in men, using structural equation modeling. Androgen-related effects were hypothesized to occur prenatally and/or in adulthood, consistent with various …

"She Will Drive The ____": Verb-Based Prediction In Individuals With Parkinson Disease, Kelsey G. Santerre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cognitive changes in Parkinson disease (PD) affect language processing, including sentence comprehension impairments, difficulties with processing verbs, and discourse impairments. In many theories of language comprehension, efficient language processing depends on successful implicit prediction of upcoming concepts and grammatical structures. Such prediction processes, in part, may be regulated by the neural dopaminergic system, which is markedly impaired in PD. In non-language tasks, persons with PD (PwPD) are impaired in prediction, sequencing, and probabilistic learning. However, the contributions of these dopaminergic-mediated prediction and probabilistic learning processes to language processing impairments in PD remain unexplored. We tested whether PwPD are impaired in …

Conduits Of Communion: Monstrous Affections In Algonquin Traditional Territory, Ian S.G. Puppe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012).

Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations Peoples, local …

The Cultural Connectedness Scale And Its Relation To Positive Mental Health Among First Nations Youth, Angela Snowshoe

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The mental health and wellbeing of youth is one of the most urgent concerns affecting many First Nations communities across Canada. Despite a growing recognition that cultural connectedness (i.e., the extent to which an individual is integrated within his or her First Nations culture) is an important factor for promoting the mental health of First Nations youth, there remains a clear need for a conceptual model that organizes, explains, and leads to an understanding of the resiliency mechanisms underlying this construct. Study 1 involved the development of the Cultural Connectedness Scale (CCS) with a sample of 319 First Nations, Métis, …

Congruent Familiar Size Relationships Decrease Size Contrast Illusion, Margarita Maltseva

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

We examined the effect of familiar size of objects on size perception. Participants matched the size of a target image to the perceived size of a central image in the Ebbinghaus illusion. The central image was identical throughout all trials (a 25-mm-wide dog), but the annuli varied in physical size (12 mm vs. 37 mm), semantic category (animate vs. inanimate), and familiar real-world size (cat vs. horse for the animate category; shoe vs. car for the inanimate category). Importantly, the familiar size relationship between the center and the annuli was either congruent (e.g., dog surrounded by small shoes or large …

The Coffee Shop Effect: Investigating The Relationship Between Ambient Noise And Cognitive Flexibility, Emily G. Nielsen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to think diversely in order to solve problems and learn concepts. It has also been suggested that cognitive flexibility supports creativity. Research has demonstrated that creativity is enhanced by moderate volumes of ambient noise. This thesis sought to replicate and extend this line of research by investigating how noise affects cognitive flexibility. Study 1 assessed the effects of noise on three creativity tasks. Performance was found to be enhanced by ambient noise, particularly among those who listen to music while they study/work. Study 2 examined how noise affects performance on a category learning task designed …

Evolution Towards “Housing First”: A Qualitative Analysis Of Service Provider And Participant Perspectives, James Kennedy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the past decade, “Housing First” has gained momentum as an approach to address the needs of individuals facing homelessness. More recently adopted within the Canadian context, Housing First has received considerable praise for effectively housing the chronically and episodically homeless, by getting them off the streets and out of emergency shelters. While the increased adoption of Housing First within the homeless sector in Canada has been backed by evidence-based research, qualitative studies regarding the perceptions of front-line service providers towards Housing First are limited. Using qualitative methods, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with service providers and …

Bulky But Still Beautiful: Representations Of Healthy Femininity In The Crossfit Narrative, Cheryl Madliger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Positioned in the area of feminist cultural studies, this thesis examines representations of femininity, fitness, and health in four key publications related to the fitness programs offered by the CrossFit™ Corporation. A critical discourse-analytical methodology is used to deconstruct notions of fit femininity in the CrossFit narrative. I argue that themes on femininity reflect contemporary healthist ideologies that promote concerns for health as an individual, moral responsibility, and normalize entrenched notions of the female body as a project to be managed. Drawing on the language of feminine empowerment, the CrossFit narrative constructs the ideal female body as one with increased …

Identification Of Ancient Maya Agriculture In The Periphery Of Motul De San José, Alexandra E. Smofsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Agricultural systems were investigated in the Motul de San José periphery, an ancient Maya polity in Guatemala, using soil geochemical techniques. The δ¹³C values of soil organic matter delineated areas of ancient maize agriculture at the satellite center of Kante’t’u’ul. A new method to locate areas of former cacao cultivation or processing was developed using HPLC to detect theobromine, an alkaloid of the cacao plant, preserved in soils. Extraction of spiked soils revealed that theobromine adsorption is inversely correlated with organic matter content of soils. Detection of naturally occurring theobromine was successful, demonstrating its utility as a tracer. …

Looking To The Future: Considering The Educational Transitions Of Deaf Youth In Ontario, Kaitlyn A.W. Blair

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

National and provincial policy development reflects increased attention to inclusivity for all Ontarians in education and work. However, academic and government literature examining educational and employment transitions, fails to effectively address the experiences of those who are deaf. The limited research that does exist suggests that deaf Ontarians have lower educational and occupational attainment levels than their hearing peers (PALS 2006). Drawing on four qualitative case studies of deaf youth, this study analyzes participants’ planned transitions from high school to post-secondary education. Findings suggest that high levels of perceived self-efficacy are helpful in motivating transitions to higher education. The life …

"There Are No Rules! Except These 108." The Multidirectional Flow Of Influence Between Sportication, Subculture, And Violence On The History Of Mixed Martial Arts, Jared V. Walters

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), found in 1993, has a very tenuous history. Three influencing factors, sport-related violence, the sportization process, and subculture, have interacted directly with events and individuals through the sport’s history, resulting in these three multi-directional sources of influences having the greatest effect on the direction and development of the sport. MMA, initially promoted as a violent spectacle, became the target of political attacks. Such unprecedented levels and presentation of sporting violence had never before been seen. In reaction, the sportization process of MMA began and the subculture of the sport started to develop as …

The Canadian Truth And Reconciliation Commission: Healing, Reconciliation, Resolution?, Jessica K. Howsam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis assesses the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was created to redress the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system. Using discourse analysis, it examines the commission’s success in promoting holistic healing within Aboriginal communities and reconciliation as decolonization of settler society and government. This thesis argues that the TRC promoted individual, communal, and cultural healing despite government rhetoric supporting premature termination of healing processes. Although it remains too soon to evaluate the Canadian TRC’s effect on decolonization, this thesis contends that the commission has not yet advanced reconciliation. As of the publication of this thesis in …

Dendroclimatic Studies Of White Spruce In The Yukon Territory, Canada, David S. Morimoto

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

An extensive network of 111 white spruce tree-ring chronologies (2983 trees) from treeline sites was developed across the Yukon Territory and adjacent areas of Alaska and British Columbia. Ring-width series from 73 chronologies with adequate signal strength back to 1800 were analysed using correlation and Principal Component analyses. Although 50 chronologies showed a strong common growth pattern over the 1900-1950 period (45.6% of the variance in PC1), PC1 over the 1950-2000 period included only 22 (27.1% of the variance). Correlation with temperature data from the central-north Yukon indicated that 1900-1950 PC1 chronologies showed significant positive relationships to summer (JJA) minimum …

Conceptualizing Response Capacity And Flood Action In The City Of Vancouver And District Of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada, Jonathan P. Raikes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attention to effective local flood response has become a necessity in urban governance as issues pertaining to floods become increasingly visible with disasters rising. This research identifies components of response capacity to floods and municipal action, and potential mechanisms to increase response capacity in the City of Vancouver and District of Maple Ridge using interviews (n=7), Q methodology (n=12), and a literature review. Findings show that legislation, institutional behaviour and collective action, technological pathways and resource management are fundamental to an institution or organization’s response capacity. Municipal action is influenced by competing priorities as determined through legal responsibility and liability, …

National Identity And Attitudes Toward Immigrants: The Role Of Social Comparison And Perceptions Of Competition, Kelly L. Barnes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Research has long demonstrated that negative types of national attachment, like nationalism, are related to relatively more negative intergroup attitudes while more positive forms of national identity, like patriotism, are either related to relatively more positive attitudes or unrelated. Most of this research has been conducted using individual difference measures of national identity. This series of studies seeks to test the difference between nationalism and patriotism empirically, by examining the idea that the presence of social comparison is what separates nationalism from patriotism. Further, the literature suggests that perceptions of competition between groups are an important factor in determining intergroup …

Children's Mental Health Over The Early Life Course: The Impact Of Economic Resources, Neighborhood Disorder, And Family Processes, Jinette M. Comeau

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Drawing upon a stress process and life course framework, and using data from the Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the three papers presented in this dissertation examine the extent to which economic resources, neighborhood disorder, and family processes influence children’s trajectories of mental health.

In the first paper, I empirically construct six categories that represent children with comparable profiles of family income over time: increasing, decreasing, fluctuating, and stability across low-, medium-, and high-income families. The income categories are incorporated in multiple group latent growth curve models to assess the extent to which they initiate and …

On The Economics Of Climate Change And Its Effects, Aaron B. Gertz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis consists of three separate papers; two examining the costs of climate change policy in developing economies and one studying the economic impacts of flooding. In Chapter 2, I use a 2-sector non-balanced growth model to study the impact of structural change (the transition from industry to services) on carbon intensity. I calibrate the model to China and find that structural change plays an important role in reducing carbon intensity and lowering the economic cost of a carbon tax on GDP. For a 65% reduction target over 30 years, a $28/t carbon tax is needed and the output loss …