Sociology Commons^™

The Effect Of Humor On Elderly Well-Being, Mary M. Boone

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The main objectives of this study were to identify the connections between the sense of humor and well-being in the elderly population, examine the benefits of humor as a coping mechanism, explore the role of humor as a preventative and therapeutic measure, and to attempt to gain a greater understanding of these connections. Humor has been the focus of study within many different domains, including psychology and medical research (immunology, pain management, cardiology, and psychoneuroimmunology), but there is a distinct lack of theory and research within the sociological realm on this topic (except in social psychology), especially involving the aging …

The Smugglers' Landscape: Geography, Route Selection And The Global Heroin Trade, James Dallis Medler

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This study focuses on transnational smuggling, and puts forth an analytical framework from the smugglers' perspective with respect to route selection, focusing primarily on aspects of economic, political, and human geography. It is predicated on three interconnected decision-making domains that constitute the smuggler's operational landscape, namely access, risk and connectivity, which interact to drive the smugglers' perceptions of route attractiveness. The first two domains operate reciprocally, primarily at the national level of analysis, and together both shape and are shaped by the third at the transnational level to form a feedback loop. With respect to connectivity, the convention of the …

Racial Discourse In Planet Of The Apes, Mandy Sheidah Allen

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to explore the racial discourse in the six Planet of the Apes films. The films range from 1968 to 2001 and portray the radical advances and the slow progression of race relations during this time frame. The racial discourse will be examined using themes of race and devolution, looking at the race class hierarchies of the ape society (a subversive metaphor for human society) and race as it is associated with power and political movements. The earlier films will be contrasted with Burton's 2001 version to explore how the concept race has shifted its …

The Effects Of Firearm Use On Police Officers, Quinn M. Beers

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The use of firearms by police officers is a subject that has not received much attention in past research. It is a rare occurrence for police officers to have fire their weapon in the line duty, which has also made this area of law enforcement difficult to study. In addition, little data is kept on the extent of firearm use by police officers. Several theories have been proposed to explain firearm use by police officers as well as how officers decide to use their weapon or not.

Ninety-two police officers from the city of Newport News, Virginia completed a survey …

Business Crime: The Perception And Experience Of Victimization And Corresponding Use Of Crime Prevention Measures, John A. Casten

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study uses the concepts of routine activities theory and social disorganization theory to examine some of the factors that influence a business owner's use of crime prevention measures. I predicted that neighborhood conditions as well as personal experience with crime would influence a business owner's decision to use crime prevention measures. In addition, I controlled for sex, race, age, education level, and police presence.

The results of the study were fairly consistent with the hypothesis except for two of the variables. In this particular study, age was not a significant factor in predicting the use of crime prevention measures, …

A Cross-National Analysis Of The Impact Of Conscription On Crime Rates, Nicolette G. Rose

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Research has repeatedly shown that males in the age range of 16 to 24 years account for a disproportionately large volume of crime (Sampson and Laub 1993 ). The armed forces are major employers of young males in this crime-prone age range and could thus play an important role in crime prevention. The military provides many varied opportunities including a highly structured and regimented institution in which rigid behavioral norms and close monitoring are imposed. Some other incentives that service provides include educational opportunities through the" Advanced Individual Training", the GI Bill, in-service tuition assistance, and world-wide travel. All these …

Gender And Hiv Risk Behavior In China, Yelan Guo

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Gender differences in prevalence of HIV risk behaviors are well established. Gender differences in major causes leading to HN risk behaviors are much less researched in China. Using data from a large and population-based survey conducted in 2003, in southwestern China, this paper examined gender-specific correlates of HIV risky drug using and sexual behaviors in the general population. Both bivariate and multivariate analyses were conducted for males and females separately. The results suggest that men are more likely to inject drugs and share needles than women while women are more likely to exhibit RN risk sexual behaviors than men. Socio-economic …

Is Feminist Humor An Oxymoron?, Janet M. Bing

English Faculty Publications

Is the subject of feminist humor male oppression or a celebration of the female experience? This paper argues for the latter and suggests that inclusive jokes can be more effectively subversive than divisive ones. As long as women's jokes focus on men, male definitions, and male behavior, women are marginalizing females, even if their jokes target males. In addition, divisive jokes can strengthen prevailing beliefs about essential female-male differences. However, when straight feminists make jokes and laugh about the shared experiences of females rather than on oppressive male behavior, then feminist humor, like lesbian humor, becomes an agent for change.

Review Of Jennifer Government, By Berry Max, David Banash

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Culture Of Growth: Teacher Collaboration For The Empowerment Of All Students, Kamilla Bahbahani

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Studies

This dissertation documents an in-depth year long qualitative case study of three elementary school teachers to address the following research question: what characterizes, and what are the major influences on, an integrated, constructivist-oriented approach to elementary math instruction? The researcher, working collaboratively with the teachers, used a combination of interviews, observations, journaling, and informal discourse to learn about what they want to do in their classes, the various pressures they feel for performance and student learning, the forces they balance in making their instructional choices, and the ways in which they make instructional choices and change their approaches over time. …

The Effects Of An Autobiographical Dialogue Journaling Activity On Student Teachers' Levels Of Cultural Sensitivity And Reflective Skills, Wanda G. Lastrapes

Theses and Dissertations in Urban Services - Urban Education

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of a researcher-designed autobiographical dialogue journaling activity on student teachers' levels of cultural sensitivity and levels of reflection. Written feedback from the university supervisors and cooperating teachers was analyzed to identify differences and similarities in the structure and focus of their responses.

Data was collected from 30 student teachers assigned to urban elementary field placements following a six-week structured journaling activity. Student teachers were randomly assigned to one of three journaling conditions: autobiographical dialogue journaling with their cooperating teacher, autobiographical dialogue journaling with their university supervisor, or the traditional student …

Reconstructing The Fables: Women On The Educational Cyberfrontier, Jim Dwight

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Computer technology and the Internet inspire narratives based upon modernist tropes. The frontier narrative stands out as one of the most intriguing tropes. Often the language for the Internet regulation and administration of computers, particularly in education, plays on tropes of the Wild, Wild West. Sojourners brave the untamed expanses of cyberspace laying claim to virgin territories. Often, writers represent the frontier as a pure form of woman, the object of masculine desires for conquest such as Natty Bumppo's symbolic marriage to the disappearing frontier in James Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1981 [1826]), Odysseus' conquest of …

Of Technology And Apocalypse, Or Whose Independence Day?, Christopher Keep

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. In less than one hour, he announces, aircraft from here will join …

On Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Andrew Miles Jacobsen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

No book since American Psycho has created as much of a scandal. And few books have been as misunderstood. In 1990, months before it was set to be released, certain violent passages were leaked to the press that, taken out of context, made the book seem like a depth-less celebration of sexual violence. Right after Simon & Schuster canceled the book, an employee of the publishing house said, The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of shit. It's hard when something like this becomes an issue of censorship, because you …

Review Of Free Schools, Free People: Education And Democracy After The 1960s, By Ron Miller, Kathleen Mcconnell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Neighborhood Characteristics And Crime: A Test Of Sampson And Groves' Model Of Social Disorganization, Ivan Y. Sun, Ruth A. Triplett, Randy R. Gainey

Sociology & Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

In 1989 Sampson and Groves proposed a model of social disorganization. In this model, neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status, high residential mobility, racial heterogeneity, and family disruption were predicted to have sparse local friendship networks', low organizational participation, and unsupervised youth groups. These, in turn, were predicted to increase neighborhood crime rates. Although Sampson and Groves' work represents the most complete model of social disorganization to date, it has only been tested twice and then on the same data set. Using data from 36 neighborhoods from 7 U.S. cities, this study examines extensions of Sampson and Groves' model suggested by …

Cultural Adaptability Of Dental Hygiene Students In The United States: A Pilot Study, Katrina W. Magee, Michele L. Darby, Irene M. Connolly, Evelyn Thomson

Dental Hygiene Faculty Publications

Dental hygiene students should prepare to competently provide services to culturally diverse patients; therefore, this study was conducted as a baseline to determine the cross-cultural adaptability of dental hygiene students. The sample consisted of 188 dental hygiene students attending four culturally diverse dental hygiene programs (N=108) and four non-culturally diverse dental hygiene programs (N=80). The culturally diverse programs randomly selected were located in the southwest, southeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S., and the non-diverse programs were located in the northwest, northcentral, central, and southern regions of the U.S. Any dental hygiene program with students representing four of the five …

"Sturdy Black Bridges": Discussing Race, Class, And Gender, Kaavonia Hinton

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

Black feminist literary theory offers tools that teachers can use to initiate discussions on the issues of race, gender and class to analyze the works of adolescent literature. This feminist theory helps in reading and teaching literature about parallel cultures, like African-Americans and their love for self and community and their recognition of multiple oppressions in a way that differs from feminism.

The Anunnaki, The Vampire, And The Structure Of Dissent, Marcus Librizzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The latest incarnation of the vampire - in the conspiracy theories of David Icke - reveals the critical, revolutionary heart of the vampire legend. Discourse on the vampire appears above all to provide a structure of dissent, a metaphorical means of representing and soliciting critiques of the social order. The Anunnaki form of the vampire - in its immersion in the constellation of contemporary conspiracy theories, in its reflection on global capitalism, and in its blurring of historical and fictional narratives - has moved this structure of dissent from the cloak of darkness to the light of day.

Multi-Player Computer Gaming: 'Better Than Playing (Pc Games) With Yourself', Melanie Swalwell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the August 2002 issue of Business 2.0, Geoff Keighley sketches the profits that companies such as Sony, Disney, Microsoft and others hope to make, as they enter into, or expand their existing, online multiplayer gaming ventures. With Everquest attracting some 150,000 players within six months of launching, each of whom was prepared to pay $10 a month to participate in online multiplay, it is easy to see why those in the industry are excited at having discovered such an apparently reliable revenue stream, with Keighley citing Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment President, Yair Landau's claim that This is …

On Linzer, Schnall, And Chanes' A Portrait Of The American Jewish Community, Rob K. Baum

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

A Portrait of the American Jewish Community seems at first a contemporary, informed attempt to answer the old-and, for Jews, imperative-question, What is a Jew? And in the leading chapter Norman Linzer does project the changing nature of Jewish identity, with what he calls the postmodern decline of dissonance, a euphemism for the experience of Jewish difference. The beginning is suggestive of the philosophical treatise on the collapse of modern Jewish identity formulated in such work as Rabbi Michael Goldberg's Why Should Jews Survive? (NY: Oxford, 1998). But the book's carefully detailed chapters on Jewish American federations, social …

On Nancy Ordover's American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, And The Science Of Nationalism, Markus Rheindorf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Nancy Ordover's American Eugenics is a very personal book, not so much in terms of its content, but because of the convictions and a deep-felt sense of injustice that have inspired it. And while the author is straightforward in acknowledging her personal motivations, this is not to suggest that American Eugenics ever lapses into personal anecdote or polemic; far from it, the book is a serious and tightly argued attempt to grasp, in Ordover's words the resiliency of this often discredited but never dormant philosophy (xvi). In order to do this, Ordover goes on to argue in her …

Review Of Tourism: Between Place And Performance, Edited By Simon Coleman And Mike Crang, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

On Katherine Frank's G-Strings And Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars And Male Desire, Kristen Schilt

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Katherine Frank's book, G-Strings and Sympathy, provides an anthropological look into the fantasies of male strip club regulars in a Southern City she calls Laurelton. Turning the gaze onto the gazers, a group left unstudied in the majority of literature on sex work, Frank unpacks how trips to the strip club are closely linked with discourses about sexuality, consumption and masculinity. Through six years of participant observation at a variety of clubs in Laurelton and in-depth interviews with thirty self-professed strip club regulars, Frank delves into not only why these men attend strip clubs but how these visits …

Police Response To Domestic Violence: Does Officer Gender Make A Difference?, Amy Leighann Whitmore

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

With domestic violence an increasing problem within the United States, police response to domestic violence has emerged as an important issue in its prevention and treatment. Recent research on police response to domestic violence has yielded conflicting results, with some studies showing that officer gender affects responses. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect that officer gender has on both formal and informal police responses to domestic violence. Incident reports were collected from a police agency to examine responses to domestic violence.

Results indicated that officer gender does have a significant effect upon both formal and informal …

Social Disorganization Theory: Examining The Mediating Effects Of Social Ties And Disorder On Crime, Matasha L. Harris

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

Using study data collected for a larger research project entitled Project on Policing Neighborhoods in Indianapolis, Indiana, 1996, the relationship between social ties and disorder on neighborhood structural characteristics and crime rates was tested. Using two Structural Equation Models the mediating effects of social ties and disorder on neighborhood structural characteristics and crime received partial support from the analysis of Indianapolis data.

The results revealed that poverty and family disruption exerts a positive impact on crime rates. The results also revealed that neighborhoods with high levels of racial heterogeneity have a negative effect on social ties. As well, the study …

Effects Of Race And Prosecutor's Perceptions Of Victim's Behaviors On Domestic Violence Case Outcomes, Angel K. Williams

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of race and prosecutor's perceptions of victim's behavior on domestic violence case outcomes. This research utilizes data collected by Belknap and Graham (2000) in a large Midwestern Urban area during 1997-1998. Past literature supports the predictions that race and victim's behaviors affect case outcomes. However, there are no studies that examine either race and victim's behavior or the connection between them.

Analyses revealed that victim's race is not significantly related to case outcome. Perceptions of victim's behavior, however, were significantly related to case outcomes. Additionally, prosecutor's race and level of …

Solutions/Fixations: A Transformation, Davin Heckman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First two paragraphs]

As I write from the heartland, in a small rural town in Northwest Ohio, the world, with the help of my government, is undergoing a process of reorganization.

This has been going on for some time. Media and its various material incarnations have stumbled around the world and back, layering it with new meanings, creating new sites of production. Rays of feedback, echoes, have coated the world with a many-layered web of meaning.

The Electronic Polis: Media Democracy And The Invasion Of Iraq, Jeff Lewis, Kirsty Best

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The American-led victory in Baghdad was announced to the world with scenes of Iraqi citizens dragging down the statues of the deposed tyrant. Like the spectacle of World Cup Soccer or the Olympic Games, the image was transmitted live through the global media network to the billions of people who had been closely watching the three week invasion. President Bush shared in the celebration, announcing the dawn of a new age for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. This new democracy, the president proclaimed, would bring stability and prosperity to the region through the obliteration of terrorism …

Stuffed Animals And The Predicament Of Culture: Lost In The Bedroom Jungle, Walter Putnam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

These preachings are from the gospel according to Reverend Billy, spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping (qtd. in Kalb). For several years, Reverend Billy has been waging a guerilla war in Lower Manhattan against the likes of Starbucks and Disney, including agit-prop performances where he brandishes stuffed animals atop tall poles like skulls adorning savage palisades. His inversion and subversion of these multivalent emblems of consumer culture reinforce the anti-consumer message he delivers in our era of late capitalism and globalization. His conspicuous utilization of stuffed animals highlights the manner in which these ubiquitous and inconspicuous …