Digital Commons Network^™

Discovery Orientation, Cognitive Schemas, And Disparities In Science Identity In Early Adolescence, Patricia Wonch Hill, Julia Mcquillan, Amy Spiegel, Judy Diamond

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Why are some youth more likely to think of themselves as a science kind of person than others? In this paper, we use a cognitive social-theoretical framework to assess disparities in science identity among middle school–age youth in the United States. We investigate how discovery orientation is associated with science interest, perceived ability, importance, and reflected appraisal, and how they are related to whether youth see themselves, and perceive that others see them, as a science kind of person. We surveyed 441 students in an ethnically diverse, low-income middle school. Gender and race/ethnicity are associated with science identity but not …

Embody: The Transformation Of Intimate Knowledges Through Generations In Liberal Societies, Lisa Kronberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project aims to examine how intimate knowledges[1] are transferred and communicated between generations in Western, liberal societies. By ‘Intimate knowledges’ I mean to encompass diverse knowledge of emotional intelligence, sexual identity, and gender.

Intimate knowledges evolve with human life circle everywhere and at all times, but in Western popular discourse of today, are treated with confusion and repression; they thus emerge as a “loud display of simultaneously silent sexual desire.” (Fine and McClelland, 2006) I explore this tension through a critical, feminist lens that sheds light on the ways in which political economy creates cultural norms that …

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …

What Is Appealing?: Sex And Racial Differences In Perceptions Of The Physical Attractiveness Of Women, Rachel Sewell

The Pegasus Review: UCF Undergraduate Research Journal

Beauty and physical appearance are considered to be of great importance in today's society. In the U.S., many strive for physical perfection, and much attention is focused on the way one looks. A beauty ideal has been created over time through the combination of several elements within American culture, and this ideal image attempts to define female beauty as fitting into a certain mold. Certain characteristics have been deemed the most attractive when it comes to female physical attractiveness, and a model of beauty has been presented by the media. This research focuses on whether everyone buys into that ideal. …

“Have You Been To Walmart?” Gender And Perceptions Of Safety In North Dakota Boomtowns, Timothy D. Pippert, Rachel Zimmer Scheider

Faculty Authored Articles

Between 2010 and 2015, North Dakota’s economy was out of sync with the rest of the U.S. As a result of the Bakken oil boom, unemployment registered approximately 1% in northwestern North Dakota while the rest of the country suffered the lingering effects of the Great Recession. As one of the only sharply growing economies during that time, job seekers descended from every state in search of high-paying oilfield jobs. The majority of those job seekers were men, and this study examines how the hypermasculinized environment altered perceptions of safety and security for men and women living in the Bakken.

Gender Demographics And Perception In Librarianship, Patricia Mars

School of Information Student Research Journal

This article is an examination of the history of gender demographics in the field of librarianship. The historic development and subsequent "feminization" of librarianship continues to influence the gender wage gap and the disproportionate leadership bias in the field today. This article examines the stereotyping of librarians and the cyclical effect of genderizing the profession. Consideration of current trends and data in librarian demographics demonstrates a consistent decrease in gender diversity, accompanied by a troubling lack of women leaders and executives. Additionally, this article explores options for combating the gender perceptions that negatively impact women in library and information science …

Fear Of Violence During Armed Conflict: Social Roles And Responsibilities As Determinants Of Fear, Nathalie E. Williams, Dirgha Ghimire, Karen A. Snedker

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

This article investigates the prevalence and determinants of fear as a consequence of living through armed conflict. We use survey data from Nepal during the armed conflict (1996–2006) to examine how trauma, sex and gender, age, marriage, and household size affect fear of violence. We also disaggregate types of worry, and find substantial variance on whether respondents were more concerned about livelihood consequences of conflict than physical danger. We supplement quantitative analyses with discussion of in-depth interviews from the study area on these same topics. Overall, our results highlight the enduring impact of gender roles in Nepal and that conflict …

Modifying The Qualitative Delphi Technique To Develop The Female Soldier Support Model, Daniel L. Roberts, Joann Kovacich

The Qualitative Report

The U.S. Army chaplaincy did not have a gender specific model for providing emotional and spiritual support to women soldiers. Such a model was needed because women often experience the military differently than men. The Comprehensive Female Soldier Support (CFS²) model was developed using a modified Delphi technique and a feminist theoretical framework. This study altered the Delphi design by using two successive panels of experts. The first panel, consisting of 10 wounded female soldiers, developed a list of pastoral needs experienced by the women. The second panel, composed of 11 female chaplains, provided solutions for those needs. …

Numbers Are Just Not Enough: A Critical Analysis Of Race, Gender, And Sexuality In Elementary And Middle School Health Textbooks, Sherry L. Deckman, Ellie Fitts Fulmer, Keely Kirby, Katharine Hoover, Abena S. Mackall

Publications and Research

Textbooks are a multimillion dollar publishing business in the United States. Even as 21st-century classrooms become more multimodal, digital and hardcopy textbooks remain a key feature of American education. Consequently, classroom textbooks have been shown to control knowledge dissemination across the content areas. In particular, health texts have been uniquely shown to communicate values that validate or marginalize students and encourage healthy or harmful activity. Thus,what textbook makers choose to include as worthy of study, and how they portray various groups of people with regard to race, gender, and sexuality has societal implications. Employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods, …

How The Workplace Adopts Stereotypical Male Leadership Roles, Shelby Graves

Undergraduate Honors College Theses 2016-

Traditionally, women have not held many leadership positions in the workplace. This is typically due to the existence of gender-based stereotypes. These stereotypes hurt women in both their psyche and in their wallet by limiting their opportunities for advancement into top level executive positions. The glass ceiling, a barrier many women have come to face in Corporate America, has caused many women to accept their fate as “lesser than” when compared to their male colleagues. Very few women have been successful in breaking the glass ceiling. Some modern organizations have taken on the challenge of ridding their culture of these …

Carefree Masculinities In Ireland: Gender Conservatism And Neo-Liberalism, Niall Hanlon

Articles

No abstract provided.

"This Isn't For You, This Is For Me": Women In Cosplay And Their Experiences Combatting Harassment And Stigma, Christopher M. Lucas

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

In the past two decades, cosplay, or “costume play,” has become increasingly popular among fans of anime, manga, and video games. Despite the community’s nature of embracing social difference, problems persist with regard to gender discrimination and breaching of consent boundaries. Discussion in the extant literature on cosplay has yet to address the views of women in the community, specifically the idea of cosplay and popular culture conventions being a “boys’ club.” The principle research questions of this study are: (1) What are the lived experiences of women cosplayers at anime conventions? (2) To what degree have they had to …

Whither The Gender Of Get Out: A Critique Of The Cinematic (Im)Possibilities Of The Black Political Imagination, Daelena Tinnin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the entanglements of spatialized racial-sexual violence, conceptualizations of black female subjectivity, questions of the limitations and excesses of media representations and the socioeconomic, cultural and spatiotemptoral relations that make black images visible and (im) possible as they are situated in the cinematic black political imagination. Through a materialist media analysis of the 2017 film Get Out, I argue that the film and its articulation of the afterlife of slavery fails to account for gender by tangentially engaging black women in its dissection of race and racism. I contend that black women are the absent presence in …

No. 15: The Food Security Implications Of Gendered Access To Education And Employment In Maputo, Cameron Mccordic, Liam Riley, Inês Raimundo

Hungry Cities Partnership

The multiple linkages between gender and household food security in cities have been observed in diverse settings, at multiple scales, and through a variety of disciplinary lenses. The Hungry Cities Partnership is rooted in the importance of inclusive growth of cities, which includes a fundamental concern with genderbased injustices that reduce inclusivity, sustainability and food security by underpinning structural poverty. This discussion paper is motivated by the gap in policy-ready quantitative data needed to identify the ways in which gender inequality, food insecurity, and public policy are interconnected. Analysis of the 2014 survey of household food security in Maputo identified …

Early Contributions To Infants’ Mental Rotation Abilities, Mihaela Constantinescu, David S. Moore, Scott P. Johnson, Melissa Hines

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Some cognitive abilities exhibit reliable gender differences, with females outperforming males in specific aspects of verbal ability, and males showing an advantage on certain spatial tasks. Among these cognitive gender differences, differences in mental rotation are the most robust, and appear to be present even in infants. A large body of animal research suggests that gonadal hormones, particularly testosterone, during early development could contribute to this gender difference in mental rotation. Also, substantial evidence supports an influence of socialization on mental rotation performance. The present study investigated the relationship of two types of factors, early postnatal testosterone exposure and parental …

Against Women’S Sports, Nancy Leong

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This Article challenges the longstanding assumption that sports should be segregated by sex. Imposing sex segregation on sports is problematic for many reasons. It reflects and reinforces a long-disproven binary view of both sex and gender. It communicates that women are physically unable to compete against men, even though research indicates considerable variation among individual athletes and different sports, and further reveals that attributes other than sex are more important determinants of athletic ability. It reinforces unfounded gender stereotypes that harm both women and men. And sex segregation uncritically prioritizes athletic activities involving strengths typically associated with male bodies, without …

Touching Queerness In Disney Films Dumbo And Lilo & Stitch, Katia Perea

Publications and Research

Disney’s influence as a cultural purveyor is difficult to overstate. From cinema screen to television programming, vacation theme parks to wardrobe, toys and books, Disney’s consistent ability to entertain children as well as adults has made it a mainstay of popular culture. This research will look at two Disney films, Dumbo (1941) and Lilo & Stitch (2002), both from distinctly different eras, and analyze the similarities in artistic styling, studio financial climate, and their narrative representation of otherness as it relates to Queer identity.

Who Cares? Attitudes Of High School Students From Various Countries Towards Global And Domestic Environmental Issues, Kseniya Fomichova, Taku Misonou

Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences

This study focused on attitudes of 16 year-old students from six countries towards environmental issues on domestic and global scales. Male and female students from China, Guinea, Japan, Malaysia, Ukraine and Vietnam expressed their level of concern about the following in regard to their country and the world: (a) air quality, (b) drinking water quality, (c) pollution caused by atomic power plants, (d) clearing of forests, (e) extinction of plants and animals, (f) climate change and (g) global disaster. This research focused on gender and cultural variability and invariance under diverse conditions of students’ backgrounds.

The most pronounced intercultural regularity …

"My World Is Upside Down": Transnational Iraqi Youth And Parent Perspectives On Resettlement In The United States, Julia Meredith Hess, Brian Isakson, Matthew Nelson, Jessica R. Goodkind

Pediatrics Research and Scholarship

The U.S. war with Iraq led to the displacement of millions of Iraqis, many of whom have resettled in the United States as refugees. We explore the challenges Iraqi families face after resettlement, with a particular focus on the agency of refugees and challenges/opportunities of familial social reproduction in a transnational context. We conducted 181 qualitative interviews with 38 Iraqis (11 youth, 27 adults) and 5 service providers. Our findings highlight the importance of exploring refugee agency and illuminate how the interplay between structure and agency in transnational contexts is a useful framework for understanding transformations around social roles.

Incivility In The Workplace: The Experiences Of Female Sport Management Faculty In Higher Education, Elizabeth A. Taylor, Robin Hardin, Natalie Welch, Allison B. Smith

Faculty Publications

Access to higher education for women has dramatically increased in the United States during the past 50 years. Female college graduates have reversed the figures and gone from being outnumbered by their male counterparts 3 to 2 in the 1970s, to now outnumbering male college graduates 3 to 2. Women also graduate from masters and doctoral programs at a higher rate than men.

However, increases in the number of women obtaining college and advanced degrees has not translated to comparable representation in faculty positions or leadership roles in higher education. This lack of women in leadership positions, as well as …

How Personal Names Shape The Way Society Sees People As Individuals In The United States., Rand Gabriel M. Buenaventura

UROP Posters

In a world where people are disadvantaged by first impressions and implicit bias, names factor a lot into a person’s successes in life. Whether it be first names, last names, the number of middle initials, the gender and racial implications of a person’s name, and societal standards surrounding names and naming systems, there are multiple ways names shape a person’s identity. Thus, it is important to ask how personal names shape the way people are seen as individuals in the United States and contribute to their identity. Names are a trait that people are born with, usually determined before anything …

The Harsh Reality: A Feminist Perspective On The Experiences Of Women Coaching Male Athletes, Emilee Shearer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This study, using a qualitative approach, examines the impact of patriarchy on females who coach a male-dominated sports team. The purpose of the study is to identify and examine the experiences of females who coach a male-dominated sports team in order to have a better understanding of the impact of the gender binary and patriarchy in the sport field. A qualitative approach was used in this study to gain an understanding of the individual and commonality of the experiences of women coaches. There were five female coaches interviewed; one was a high school basketball coach, two were high school football …

Delivering Impact For Adolescent Girls: Emerging Findings From Population Council Research, Population Council

Poverty, Gender, and Youth

Despite numerous global commitments to invest in improving the lives of adolescent girls, questions remain as to what package of interventions can deliver the best outcomes. This report synthesizes findings from nine recent Population Council impact evaluations, conducted around the world, which indicate that empowerment and asset-building interventions for adolescent girls can improve education, health, economic, social capital, gender-equitable attitude, and violence outcomes for girls. The report includes implications for programs and investment, and identifies open questions for further research and evaluation.

The Sociology Of Staying: Persistent Activism And The Benedictine Sisters Of Erie, Theresa Avila-John

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Gender And Decision-Making In The C-Suite, Trang Doan

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study empirically tests the implications of five theories on the importance of gender in the C-suite. Specifically, I examine the impact of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) gender on the stock price response at the appointment of the executive and on post-hiring firm performance. The results from both tests are in support of the notion that female executives are less overconfident, but not less risk-averse, than their male counterparts. Particularly, I find that investors respond relatively less favorably to the appointment of female CFOs compared to that of male CFOs at firms characterized by high uncertainty. Further, the evidence …

Suspicion, Suspicion: Police Perceptions Of Juveniles As The “Symbolic Assailant”, Andrea R. Coleman

School of Criminal Justice Theses and Dissertations

Jerome Skolnick’s (2011) "symbolic assailant" is a result of police attributing particular demeanor, gestures, language, and a style of dress to people they believed were most likely to commit violent crimes. The challenge became when police applied these characteristics to specific groups such as juveniles. Literature published before and after Skolnick (2011) indicated police were more likely to stop, arrest, interrogate, or surveille juveniles based on their demeanor, gestures, style of dress, lack of respect, deference to authority, the severity, and remorse for their offenses in addition to race. However, current research indicated race, gender, and Socioeconomic Status (SES) determined …

"Hear Us, See Us!": How Mothers Of Color Transform Family And Community Relationships Through Grassroots Collective Action, Jennifer Elena Cossyleon

Dissertations

This dissertation illuminates the local grassroots collective action of women of color and the transformative effects their community organizing efforts have on community and family relationships. Prior research highlights the reciprocal relationship between identity formation and collective action (Moore 2008; Gravante and Poma 2016; Polletta 2001; Whittier 2013; White 1999). Analysts have studied how the intersecting identities of participants motivate and contour collective action (Crenshaw 1991; Law 2012; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, 2015) and how collective action processes influence participants’ gendered lives and biographies (McAdam 1999; Perry 2013; Warren, Mapp and Kuttner 2015). Less understood however, are how participation in …

Motivations, Expectations And Experiences Of Genital Piercings In The Transgender Community: An Exploratory Study, Haley Peterson

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Purpose. Motivations and experiences of people who have body modifications has been studied over the past several decades. However, the majority of these studies may include, but do not exclusively, study the motivations and experiences of genital piercings in the transgender community. This study uses a qualitative design to explore the motivations, expectations, and experiences of getting a genital piercing within the transgender community, as well as how genital piercings relate to transgender identities. Methods. Participants were required to be at least 18, have a genital piercing, and identify as transgender. Recruitment was conducted through Facebook and a professional piercer. …

Rape Myths And Hookup Culture: An Exploratory Study Of U.S. College Students' Perceptions, Timothy T. Reling, Michael S. Barton, Sarah Anna Becker, Matthew A. Valasik

Faculty Publications

The present study provides the first known systematic examination of the association of hookup culture endorsement and rape myth acceptance. Multivariate regression analysis was conducted to test the primary hypothesis that hookup culture endorsement would be the primary predictor of rape myth acceptance levels among a sample of 422 U.S. college students. Findings indicated the existence of a complex relationship in which rape myth acceptance increases or decreases based upon the form of hookup culture endorsement examined. Beliefs that hookups are harmless and elevate social status increased rape myth acceptance, whereas beliefs that hookups express sexual freedom decreased rape myth …

‘There Must Be More Than This Provincial Life:’ An Analysis Of The Construction Of Femininity Of Princesses In Disney Animated Films, Kelsey Grace Mcdougall

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

"In this thesis, I analyze three eras of princesses in Disney animated films in terms of how gender and femininity are portrayed in each era, and investigate whether each era parallels the goals/issues addressed by the first, second, third, and/or fourth-wave feminism movements. I also investigate how increasing numbers of women in filmmaking roles have changed the ways female characters are portrayed in Disney films. I analyze Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959) for the first era; The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992) for the second era; …