Digital Commons Network^™

College Students' Apparel Shopping Orientation Changes In Relations To Life Events, Yang He

LSU Master's Theses

Apparel shopping orientation studies usually focus on categorizing shoppers into different segments based on individuals’ characteristics. This study presents changes in college students’ apparel shopping orientation, which result from experienced and anticipated life events and lead to store and brand preference changes in retail patronage context. Graduation serves as a milestone of life event leading to role transition in a college student’s life. The experienced and anticipated life events around graduation create new consumption needs that demand readjustment. Graduating college students are likely to change their store and brand preferences since they attempt to change their apparel shopping orientation due …

The Impact Of Choice On Child Sustained Attention In The Preschool Classroom, Kelly Elizabeth Geary

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the mean duration of child attention to a self-selected toy and to determine the longest duration under which teaching condition children attend to toy play (child choice, adult choice, or adult presentation). Forty preschool-aged children were observed under each teaching condition and data were collected on the child’s duration of child attention. Results indicate that children’s sustained attention is significantly different across the three teaching conditions, and it was found that children attended for the longest duration of time during the child choice condition. It was also found that children attended for …

First-Generation College Students: A Comparison Of Graduates And Drop-Outs, Lisa Hoyer

Sociology & Anthropology Theses

With an increase in the number of students who are considered at-risk, much research has been directed at understanding why these students fail to achieve at the same level of their White counterparts. To this end, this study will explore how the experiences of first-generation college graduates compare to first-generation college students who chose not to finish their degree. Three theoretical frameworks were employed as the basis of this examination: resiliency theory, Bourdieu's habitus differences, and Tinto's model of the drop-out process. Twenty first-generation college students were interviewed to obtain a description of their background and educational experiences from kindergarten …

State-Agents Vs. Citizen-Agents: How Parental Values And Socioeconomic Backgrounds Impact The Construction Of Work Related Identities In Street-Level Bureacracy, Jesse R. Booher

Sociology & Anthropology Theses

Scholarship on street-level policy implementation identifies two dominant approaches street-level bureaucrats use to describe their work: the "state-agent" and "citizen-agent" narratives. The former focuses on how street-level bureaucrats implement law and the latter on how bureaucrats interact with clients. To this point, scholarship only recognizes the above narratives as descriptors. I hypothesize that street-level bureaucrats actively construct identities as state-agents or citizen-agents depending on their backgrounds. Using semi-structured interviews with street-level bureaucrats in North Texas, this exploratory study finds that relationships exist between participants' socioeconomic background as children, the values stressed by their parents, and the narrative style they use …

Intergroup Dialogue: An Evaluation Of A Pedagogical Model For Teaching Cultural Competence Within A Framework Of Social Justice In Social Work Programs, Mayra Lopez-Humphreys

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A quasi-experimental, non-equivalent comparison group design with pre, post and follow-up survey data was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an intergroup dialogue intervention on bachelor of social work (BSW) students' levels of cultural competence and social justice behaviors. The sample of convenience consisted of 115 who identified as social-work majors and participated in diversity courses, 76 were intergroup dialogue participants (Site IGD) and 39 were not (Site non-IGD). Five specific questions were explored in the study.

All 115 participants completed Lum's (2007) Social Work Cultural Competencies Self-Assessment and the Confidence in Confronting Injustice Sub-Scale (Multi-University Intergroup Dialogue Research project …

Identity And Behavior: Exploring An Understanding Of “Being” And “Doing” For Catholic Priests Accused Of The Sexual Abuse Of Minors In The United States, Brenda K. Vollman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in the United States has been problematized as a phenomenon that is, in part, a distinction of the priesthood. Although it is known that there are sex offenders in the world who are not, nor were they ever, priests, this study sets forth to uncover whether or not the priests in the sample are, in fact, different on typical psychological risk factors than the at-large sex offender. More importantly, in the absence of notable differences on risk factor characteristics, this study explores the ways in which narrative structures are …

Mother Country: Reproductive Tourism In The Age Of Globalization, Lauren Jade Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mother Country is a multi-sited, qualitative study of the United States fertility industry. I analyze the industry in two dimensions: as a particularly American institution and nascent profession, and as a destination for "reproductive tourism." The United States fertility industry, buttressed by lax federal regulation, free market principles, and high technology resources, is organized to benefit certain classes of American citizens and foreign nationals in their quest to have children. As such, the United States has become a prime destination for people seeking assisted fertility services such as commercial surrogacy, egg donation, and sex selection, which are unavailable, inaccessible, or …

Becoming Normal: The Social Construction Of Buprenorphine And New Attempts To Medicalize Addiction, Julie C. Netherland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on theories about the social construction of knowledge and the sociology of the body, this dissertation analyzes the social construction of buprenorphine, a medication being used to treat addiction to opioids, to better understand the processes of medicalization. Buprenorphine was central the passage of the Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000, a law which overturned an almost one hundred year prohibition preventing physicians from prescribing narcotics for the treatment of addiction in an office-based setting. Buprenorphine is seen by many as central to moving addiction treatment into the medical mainstream. Using documents from government regulators, industry, and addiction researchers, …