Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Local Residents' Experience Of The Coal Ash Spill In Kingston, Tennessee: A Phenomenological Study, Amy Lynn Mathis

Doctoral Dissertations

On December 22, 2008, near Kingston, Tennessee, a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) retention pond holding approximately 1.7 million cubic yards of coal fly ash failed, spilling the ash into the nearby Emory River and inundating farms and homes in the Swan Pond community. As a result more than 100 people were permanently displaced from their homes and the clean-up effort is ongoing.

The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of living near Kingston, Tennessee, in the aftermath of the spill. Using existential phenomenology as the guiding research methodology, I interviewed 9 participants from the area and asked …

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 …

The Politics Of Protection And Promotion: The Case Of The Coal Industry In Environmental Politics, Elizabeth Ashley East

Masters Theses

Business actors have historically been an important point of discussion for environmental sociologists. However, theoretical assumptions of business as an environmental actor provide divergent understandings of business’s role in environmental problems, politics, and improvements. Also, empirical studies of business actors primarily examine how individual firms or industry-funded organizations participate in specific environmental controversies or in the attempted implementation of specific environmental policies. Although these approaches have been instrumental in understanding the roles power, privilege, and resources play in environmental politics, they present an understanding of business engagement in environmental issues as reactionary rather than sustained. Such a characterization neglects the …

Understanding Biotechnology: Conceptualizing And Measuring Us Public Concern, Jenna Ann Lamphere

Masters Theses

Biotechnology has had a short but rather conflict-ridden history. The technology was commercialized in 1995 and since has become a volatile topic for international debate. Arguably, the United States is the biggest supporter of this technology. The United States conducted the first study using recombinant DNA, grows more biotech crops than any other country, and houses the vast majority of the largest biotech corporations. Proponents frequently claim that biotech crops are a way to improve crop production, lower food prices, decrease the need for petrochemical inputs, and alleviate international food security problems. Others see them as accelerating the loss of …

"To Preserve This Much-Injured Race": Techniques Of Neutralization And Indian Removal, 1829-1831, Robert Michael Keeton

Doctoral Dissertations

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave the President of the United States the authority to negotiate treaties with the Native American tribes in the east for their emigration to territory west of the Mississippi River. Although the emigration was technically voluntary, in practice, the Native tribes emigrated under coercion and force, the most infamous instance of which was the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838, which resulted in the deaths of at least 4,000 Native people. This dissertation applies Sykes and Matza’s (1957) neutralization theory to archival data including the papers of Andrew Jackson and publications documenting the removal …

The Intersection Between Home And School: Developing A Scale To Measure Parental Perceptions Of Childhood School Stress, Teresa Marie Henke

Doctoral Dissertations

Abstract

Parents in the home and educators in the schools are key adults in the most important contexts in the daily lives of school-age children. In the demanding, achievement, and accountability oriented culture of today, it is expected that children experience normal everyday stressors as they move between these two environments. The impact of stress related to daily hassles has been reported to have both cognitive and physical effects on the present and future well-being of children. This study represented an attempt to advance the understanding of childhood stress in the intersection between school and home by investigating the perceptions …

Perform + Function: A Proposal For A Healthy Public Housing Community, Brandon M. Harvey

Masters Theses

PERFORM+FUNCTION: Proposal for A Healthy Public Housing Community

Architecture exists in Place, the integrated context of both the built and natural environments, including socio-economic, cultural, and political climates that influence our growth, development, and survival. As architecture necessitates around human purposes, it is important that architecture is built for and sited in an environment compatible for human well-being. My thesis focuses on human habitation and its immediate relationship with human health, assessing the performance and functionality of Place that have an impact on human health. Using public housing as the vehicle of my investigation, I will seek the appropriate application …

The Global Debt Minotaur: An Analysis Of The Greek Financial Crisis, Steven Alfonso Panageotou

Masters Theses

Since November 2009, Greece has been mired in financial crisis with little indication that it will be solved in the near future. Research and media accounts have faulted Greece for sowing the seeds of its own financial crisis through fiscal mismanagement extending back to the 1980’s. Successive Greek governments have been criticized for racking up an unsustainable amount of foreign debt. Due to the prevalence of such accounts, European officials and Greek politicians have adopted a nationally oriented strategy to resolve the current crisis. This strategy means that the brunt of the reform effort falls on Greece to neoliberalize its …

Short-Term Missions: Reinforcing Beliefs And Legitimating Poverty, William Vaughan Taylor

Masters Theses

Every year more than a million short-term missionaries travel abroad. Many encounter intense poverty. Popular discourse suggests short-term missionaries return home radically changed. Social movement theory shows collective experiences can transform participants. In this thesis I explore the narratives of short-term missionaries to understand how they understand the poverty they encounter abroad. I have found short-term mission participants think about encounters with the poor in ways that produce contradictory beliefs and legitimate poverty. Interviewees consistently employed deficiency and fatalistic theories of poverty that provide little moral or practical justification for helping the poor. However, these beliefs conflicted with religious convictions. …

Equal Protection Under The Law? Examining Tennessee's Drug Free School Zone Act (Tndfsza), Jordan T. Smith

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Parenting Behind Bars: A Qualitative Study Of Incarcerated Mothers, Beth Allen Easterling

Doctoral Dissertations

Policies of mass incarceration have resulted in a dramatic increase in the prison population in the United States over the past few decades. The number and proportion of women who are incarcerated have vastly increased as a result. Despite increased interest among criminologists, a variety of questions remain as to how women experience incarceration. Most women who are incarcerated are mothers, but criminological literature has yet to fully explain how mothers fulfill their parenting roles or navigate motherhood while incarcerated. No dominant theoretical framework exists to explain the experiences of incarcerated mothers in relation to their mothering roles. This research …

Changes In Us Ethnic Niches, 2005-2010, James N. Maples

Doctoral Dissertations

Ethnic niches are overrepresentations of an ethnic group in an occupation or industry. Ethnic niches occur as a mechanism for coping with discrimination in the larger labor market. Studies on ethnic niches have typically focused on single cities (such as Los Angeles or New York), but they have failed to provide a larger picture of ethnic niches in the United States. Hence, researchers know much about niches in a few places but very little about the state of ethnic niches across the United States. Additionally, researchers know a great deal more about the niche behavior of some groups (notably Cubans …

Gender, Social Ties, And Reentry Experiences, Jennifer Rhiannon Scroggins

Doctoral Dissertations

A great deal of research has been conducted on factors associated with successful prisoner reentry. However, except for a few studies on women's reentry, most studies have failed to examine the role of parolees' social ties in contributing to reentry outcomes. Additionally, most studies on prisoner reentry only focused on male parolees, and few addressed the influence of gender on reentry experiences. Thus, my goal in this dissertation is to understand the influence of gender on male and female parolees' social ties, and how the resources their ties provide shape their reentry experiences. My dissertation research examines men and women’s …

Life In The Stands: The Experiences Of Female Major League Baseball Fans, Kelly Lynn Balfour

Doctoral Dissertations

Females have long been overlooked as sports fans in our society, especially female fans of men’s professional sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA). There is a vast amount of research available as to what motivates females to attend sporting events, but not on their experience of being a sports fan. Professional sport organizations are now beginning to acknowledge the female fans in their marketing and team apparel. The purpose of the proposed research study is to understand the experience of females who self-identify as fans of Major League Baseball (MLB). Ten female fans of MLB were interviewed and asked to …

"When Are You Going To Get A Real Job?": An Experiential Sport Ethnography Of Players' Experiences On The Men's Pro Tennis Futures Tour, Jacob Cannon Jensen

Doctoral Dissertations

In this experiential sport ethnography, I examined the experience of former NCAA college tennis players competing on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Men’s Pro Futures Tour, the entry level of professional tennis. Limited research has focused on players competing on this tour, especially former top-level NCAA players transitioning from collegiate to professional tennis. The contributions of ethnographic studies are gaining greater recognition in sport psychology literature, and I conducted a year-long experiential ethnography in which I entered the field as a participant and researcher. I gained access to Futures tournaments and players by participating in the qualifying rounds and collecting …

New Means, Old Ends? World Bank Governmentality In Thailand And Lao People's Democratic Republic, Nicholas Ryan Zeller

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research is to make explicit the arts of government, defined as a field of power in the Foucauldian sense, employed by the World Bank in the cases of Pak Mun Dam in Thailand and Nam Theun II Dam in Lao PDR. Much of the literature on the latter case, both from the World Bank and its critics, focuses on the incorporation of conservation practices and the creation of state apparatuses which account for natural resources and local populations through a discourse of environmentalism. Using World Bank planning and evaluation documents, I argue that although these practices …

The Effect Of Race On Crime: A Multilevel Analysis, Wanjun Cui

Doctoral Dissertations

Many studies have been carried out to examine the sources of racial disparities in crime. However, there are some limitations in most of those studies. One limitation is that the majority focus on black-white comparisons. Another limitation is that many primarily examine violent offending. In addition, most studies have solely relied on either contextual level or individual level explanations. My dissertation attempts to address these limitations in previous literature by using data from the first wave of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine racial disparities in different types of offenses among non-Latino whites, non-Latino blacks, non-Latino Asians, …