Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The European Union, Immigration And Inequality: “Albanian” Labor In The Political Economy Of Rural Greece, Christopher M. Lawrence

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many early studies of globalization hypothesized a withering away of thee nation-state as a significant arena for the production of identity and social regulation. From this perspective the persistence of nationalism and resurgence of neo-racism in Europe have often been seen as a futile rear-guard defense by downwardly mobile classes or class fractions. More recent studies have suggested that rather than fading away, the nation and state have been undergoing a process of re-articulation. However, exactly how the nation and state are being re-articulated, and the implications of this process for our understanding of nationalism and national identity formation, are …

Collaborating In Care: Developing A Model Of Dialogic Empathy In Nursing Education, Kimberlee Jean Trudeau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this exploratory study was to teach nursing students to perceive empathy as a dialogic process versus as a personal characteristic through narrative reflection. This required the development of a dialogic empathy model for nursing education; that is, a model that presents empathy as a reciprocal process shared by the nurse and client within their interactions. Given the increasing cultural diversity between providers and clients in stressful medical situations, awareness of the interaction of the characteristics of oneself and another (i.e., dialogism) could potentially enhance both the efficacy and experience of care.

This study included (a) narrative reflection …

Represent: The New York City Public Housing Resident Alliance And Its Struggle Against The Imposition Of The Neoliberal Agenda, Gretchen Susi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research has focused on four interconnected topics: the formation of a citywide group of public housing residents and advocates (The New York City Public Housing Resident Alliance); a collaboration between the Resident Alliance and building trade unions in New York City to gain jobs for public housing residents—The TRADES Coalition (Trade Unions and Residents for Apprenticeship Development and Economic Success); public housing activism in an era of neoliberal reform; and efforts on the part of the Resident Alliance to engage in what Henri Lefebvre refers to as the production of space. It has examined how The New York City …

"I Harbor No Hate": A Study Of Political Tolerance And Intolerance In Holocaust Survivors, Nancy Isserman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The political attitudes of tolerance or intolerance of victims towards their former perpetrators have not been thoroughly researched prior to this study. Through the data collected by the Transcending Trauma Project, a study looking at three generations of Holocaust survivor families, " I Harbor No Hate: A Study of Tolerance and Intolerance in Holocaust Survivors " examined this question. One expects that survivors will until their dying days hate the Germans and the Poles who destroyed their families, their livelihoods, their homes, and their communities. Yet, to a significant group of survivors interviewed for the Transcending Trauma project, this response …

Shades Of Dispossession: Neoliberalism And The Social Production Of Credibility, In Machu Picchu, Peru, Pellegrino A. Luciano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation ethnographically examines the inconsistencies experienced by district residents in the historic and nature Sanctuary of Machu Picchu, over the Peruvian government's drive to implement neoliberal policies. Heritage conservation in the southern Peruvian Andes is increasingly shaped by current neoliberal policies. The people who live in the district of Machu Picchu live in a protected area that gives the state expropriating powers to claim the land as a public good. The central problem is that under neoliberalism, a public asset is used for private gain at the expense of residents. Inhabitants experience changing juridical relationships as a contradiction between …

Naming The Future: How Salvadoran Community Radio Builds Civil Society And Popular Culture, Diana Elizabeth Agosta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the participatory community radios of post-war El Salvador through ethnographic research and analyses of their operations and programming. It explores the concrete local meanings of civil society and the ways this medium helped construct a vibrant popular culture.

Its core is an analysis of the relationships between the community radios and the activities of emerging civil society organizations as part of a post-war movement reflecting a Gramscian discourse of civil society. Examples show how their collaboratively produced programs sought to increase popular participation especially among the formerly marginalized rural and urban poor, as well as to deepen …

To Stand On Their Own: Women’S Higher Education In Contemporary Kerala, India, Alcira Forero-Pena

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a study of the significance for women of college education as it occurs in colleges administered by Christian nuns in Kerala, India. Particularly, it looks at the paradoxical effects of the dramatic social changes Kerala underwent during the twentieth century that guaranteed, among other things, formal education, including post-secondary, to a large proportion of women. On the other hand, it shows not only the persistence of blatant social inequalities fed by class, caste, and gender distinctions but also the increase in inequality due to the forces of globalization. On close examination, there is little correlation between the vast …

International Regime, Domestic Politics And Telecommunications Technology: Jamaica In The Information Age, Judith A. Duncker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In September of 1988, the government of Jamaica heralded its official entry into the information industry with the establishment of the US{dollar}2 million Jamaica Digiport International facility. The significance of this announcement was surpassed only by the state's decision to close the domestic telecommunications sector to competition as the global satellite regime and the global market embarked on its own course of liberalization. This decision spelt victory for one of two contending factions. On the one hand was Jamaica Promotions (Jampro), Jamaica's economic development agency, which attempted to liberalize the sector's use of satellite technology with the operation of the …

Risk Premiums On Government Bonds: A Cointegration Approach And Error Correction Model, Onisiforos Iordanou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis we investigated the long-run relationships among risk premiums for long-run government bonds of seventeen countries from four regions (East Europe, East Asia, Africa and Latin America). To do this I applied the cointegration test determining the long-run dynamics among the risk premiums, while also employing a vector error correction model that abstracts simultaneously the short-run and long-run information about the relationships. Causality tests were also performed to determine the influence of each risk premium on others.

The results indicated that there is a strong long-run relationship among the risk premiums for each region. In other words, the …

The Role Of Dopamine In Motivational And Receptive Aspects Of Female Mouse Sexual Behavior, Amber Bradshaw Hodges

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A pacing paradigm investigated the modulatory role of monoamines in the mesolimbic dopamine system on copulatory behavior in female mice. Specifically whether there is a distinction between the neural regulatory mechanisms of pacing behavior and receptive behavior was determined. Pacing measures motivational and rewarding components of copulation by the female's contacts and withdrawals from the male, while receptivity is the willingness to engage in copulations and is measured by the number of sexual stimulations received. A pacing paradigm was established and female mice were observed to pace in a similar manner, but at a lesser rate, than female rats.

Dopamine …

"Optimal” Inflation Under Dollarization, Kazutaka Kurasawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper analyzes the effects of dollarization, where a country (C) uses money produced by another country (M). We derive a general formula to determine the "optimal" rate of inflation, which maximizes M's welfare but does not take into account any loss to C. We show how this inflation varies with relative income size and output growth. Estimates of the "optimal" inflation rate are made for some countries. We also analyze a contract, under which M shares a fraction of total potential seignorage with C to induce M to inflate at a rate which leads to no seigniorage accruing to …

Clothes Talk: Youth Modernities And Commodity Consumption In Dakar, Senegal, Suzanne Scheld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on twelve months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal and funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, this thesis examines how in the context of contemporary globalization, increased volumes of luxury commodities shape the modern consciousness of individuals in a developing African city. This project specifically examines this phenomenon through a study of youth clothing consumption. Dakar is a consumer society with particular consumer dynamics. In addition to class, patron-clientage and kinship are central to understanding contemporary patterns of consumption in Dakar. Clothing is a commodity that has been radically altered by urbanization and the globalization of manufacturing processes and advertising. …

Implicit Prosody In Silent Reading: Relative Clause Attachment In Croatian, Nenad Lovric

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a relative clause (RC) follows two nouns (N1, N2) in a complex noun phrase such as that contained in the example English sentence below, the preferred interpretation has been found to differ across languages.

(1) Someone shot the servant [N1] of the actress [N2] who was on the balcony [RC].

In some languages (e.g., English), readers preferentially interpret the RC as attaching to (i.e., modifying) N2. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), there is a preference for attachment to N1. This cross-linguistic variation is the only known counterevidence to the claim that the human sentence processing routines are universal, and …

Women's Envy In The Workplace: Contexts And Consequences, Para Ambardar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a paucity of literature on women's subjective experience of being envious or being envied in the contemporary workplace. Yet envy, wanting what another possesses, is believed to thrive in a competitive interpersonal milieu, much like the modern workplace, where employees vie for limited organizational resources and rewards. Accordingly, there is a need to better understand envy's role in the workplace and move from an abstract, context-free conceptualization of workplace envy to one that is more differentiated and context-bound. Eighteen women were interviewed for this qualitative study, using semi-structured interviews. Results were analyzed using both psychoanalytic and social psychological …

Economic Convergence — The German 1990 Economic And Monetary Union, Mary Louise Costanza Lo Re

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

No Relief: The Politics Of Welfare Retrenchment, 1873-1898 And 1973-2002, Stephen Pimpare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No Relief compares the national repeal of AFDC in 1996 with the widespread campaigns against municipal poor relief that occurred throughout the United States some one hundred years earlier. In both eras businesses and the governments that depended upon them, threatened by growing labor power, civil unrest and the rising costs of poor relief, launched an attack against poor people and the limited benefits available to them. They did not do so directly but under cover of the Charity Organization Societies of the Gilded Age and conservative think tanks of the late twentieth century—"neutral" reform organizations that obscured the class-based …

The City Encomium In Medieval And Humanist Spain, Jeffrey Stephen Ruth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation narrates the history of city encomia in Spain from the genre's roots in the eighth-century De laude Spanie of Isidore through the humanist laudes urbium of ca. 1455 to 1506. Preliminary context for the Spanish tradition is provided in a survey of classical and medieval theoretical writings for the praise of place. The major European city encomia from those periods are also presented.

Ancient authors tended to write about Iberia as a unit—Hispania—rather than to focus on its regions or cities. Hence the establishment of the early laus Hispaniae tradition in passages of Pliny, Solinus, Claudian, and Pacatus. …

Vigilance Or Tolerance?: Ambivalence And Attitude Accessibility In Response To Terrorist Threats, Julie Tison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explored the cognitive processes underlying the Response Amplification Effect (RAE), which is ambivalent people's tendency to judge the object of their ambivalence (typically, a stigmatized other) more extremely than a comparable control target. Being in a state of ambivalence is known to be uncomfortable. This discomfort may be dealt with by implementing changes in the accessibility level of attitudinal elements. It is suggested that cognitions compatible with the side of the ambivalence made salient by the current situation will be super-activated and that incompatible elements will be sub-activated, thus leading to amplified reactions congruent with the current context. …

Urban Youth Reimagine Trauma: Making Meaning Of Experiences With Chronic Community Violence Through The Arts, Stephanie Urso Spina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The impact of participation in the "Creating Original Opera" (COO) program was investigated among two consecutive (1999 and 2000) cohorts of eighth grade inner-city students living in a context of chronic community violence. Four research questions were posed: (1) What are these students' experiences of violence? (2) What strategies, if any, do they employ to cope with violent events? (3) What, if any, of the above change over the duration of the project? (4) How might those changes relate (or not) to participation in the opera program?

Data collection included a series of three semi-structured interviews with randomly chosen students …

The Influence Of Family And Community Ties On The Demand For Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, Kenneth Allen Knapp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reverse mortgages are loans against home equity that do not have to be repaid until the borrower moves, sells the home, or dies. The loans generally are available only to older homeowners, usually aged 62 or over. This paper explores whether demand for reverse mortgages is influenced by the strength of area’s family and community ties. One type of reverse mortgage is analyzed: the FHA-insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM). Several researchers have estimated the potential demand for reverse mortgages. To my knowledge, this is the first study of how actual demand may be determined, and of how it may …

L1 Lexical, Morphological And Morphosyntactic Attrition In Greek-English Bilinguals, Linda Ann Pelc

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated first language attrition in Greek-English bilinguals. Three areas of attrition were identified and tested in grammaticality judgment tasks. They include the lexical, morpholexical and morphosyntactic domains of Greek. Rejection of Greek grammatical sentences and acceptance of English grammatical sentences characterize the attrited state of these bilinguals.

The first area of attrition involves metaphorical senses of perno, 'take,' and spazo, 'break.' These verbs were chosen for this study because of the wide range of senses or meanings associated with them. As predicted, metaphorical senses were found to be vulnerable to attrition.

Another form of lexical attrition comprises opaque …

Mothers Of Sexually Abused Children And The Concept Of Collusion, Patricia A. Joyce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study reports the perspectives of clinical social workers on the mothers of sexually abused children whom they saw for treatment. The subjects were 15 masters-level social workers in an urban child treatment program. The study used qualitative methods based on grounded theory to examine professionals' social constructions of mothers of sexually abused children. The child's disclosure of incest provided the study's conceptual focus, since historically professionals constructed the "collusive mother," even though prior empirical research never supported maternal collusion or culpability for incest.

Respondents were interviewed for approximately one hour using a semi-structured interview guide; nearly one hundred hours …

The Police Officer As Survivor: The Psychological Impact Of Exposure To Death In Contemporary Urban Policing, Vincent E. Henry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All human encounters with death, whether they involve a casual contact with the death of another person or the realistic threat of one's own demise, have important psychological consequences that result in new modes of adaptation, thought and feeling. In the course of their duties, contemporary urban police officers frequently encounter the deaths of others and some participate in mortal combat situations that credibly threaten their own lives. The psychological dimensions of police officers' professional exposures to the deaths of others are to a large extent shaped by the specific duties and responsibilities prescribed by their formal task environment, while …

Crime Legends In Old And New Media, Pamela Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the contemporary meanings and persistence of the "crime legend." A case study approach was used: three crime legends with a considerable history of public debunking were chosen. These cases were: the market in snuff films, the theft of vital organs for black-market transplant, and the abduction of children from theme park restrooms. Current versions circulating in Internet newsgroups and via electronic mail lists were collected. Discussions in Internet newsgroups were examined and twenty regular newsgroup participants were interviewed. The public newsgroup communication environment is such that salience is established by the interlocutors themselves, rather than by the …

The Emergence Of Dialogic Identities: Transforming Heteroglossia In The Marquesas, F.P., Kathleen C. Riley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Te 'Enana 'the people' of the Marquesas, French Polynesia, have been engaged for some time in the dialogic negotiation of their heteroglossic identity. Based on an ethnographic study of language socialization in the Marquesas, this dissertation examines how communicative forms are acquired within a changing socio-cultural matrix, as well as on how cultural habits and beliefs are produced and reproduced via verbal interaction.

My first two months of fieldwork were spent in Tahiti (the capital of French Polynesia), living and studying the language use and cultural patterns of an 'enana family. Subsequently, I spent ten months in a village in …

Clinical Process Related To Outcome In Psychodynamic Psychotherapy For Panic Disorder, Cara F. Klein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study identified psychotherapeutic processes that relate meaningfully to psychotherapeutic outcome for patients with panic disorder undergoing Panic-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy ([PFPP]; Milrod, Busch, Cooper, & Shapiro, 1997). Subjects were 21 patients who participated in an open clinical trial of PFPP (Milrod et al., in press; Milrod et al., 2000). Patients received 24 sessions over approximately 12 weeks. Each patient was diagnostically screened by an independent evaluator and completed a battery of outcome assessments at baseline, termination and 6-month follow up.

The present study utilized two process measures: the Interactive Process Assessment ([IPA]; Klein, Milrod, Busch, 1999), developed specifically to identify …

Bilingual Sentence Processing: Relative Clause Attachment In English And Spanish, Eva M. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Monolingual studies have shown that the relative clause attachment ambiguity, illustrated by the sample English sentence below, is ultimately interpreted in different ways by speakers of English and Spanish: (1) Someone shot the maid of the actress that was on the balcony. English speakers tend to attach the relative clause to the lower noun, actress, while in the comparable sentence in Spanish, Spanish speakers generally prefer the attachment to be to the higher noun, maid. This thesis compares the relative clause attachment preferences of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and Spanish. Data were collected using a speeded self-paced reading …

Redemption And Recovery: An Ethnographic Comparison Of Two Drug Rehabilitation Programs, A Faith Community And A Therapeutic Community, Daniel E. Hood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography of long-term residential programs for drug users compares a therapeutic community (TC) with an evangelical Christian "training program." Using participant observation and life history interviews, it pursues three themes. The first is comparative and descriptive. It poses a basic similarity between the ideologically disparate programs. Parallels in program process and personal experience of "identity transformation" (conversion) are described. Despite the religious/secular divide, important similarities in anthropological assumptions are also identified. Contrary to earlier research, the singularity of the clientele is demonstrated. Other parallels include the ritual function of prayer and encounter, the centrality of selective biographical reconstruction, and …

In The Face Of Violence: Rape Crisis Workers Talk About Their Lives, Shantih E. Clemans

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence as social problems have been studied extensively in the literature. However, the experiences of workers who counsel these clients have been given little written attention. The purpose of this study was to explore—in depth—how a group of 21 women rape crisis center workers experienced their jobs. What areas presented challenges and which offered particular satisfaction? Open-ended qualitative interviews were used to generate data on this phenomenon of rape crisis center employment.

Findings suggest that, although social work with clients affected by rape, incest, and domestic violence presented workers with a host of challenges, such …

The Structure And Procedures Of Hostage/Crisis Negotiation Units In United States Police Organizations, Robert Joseph Louden

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hostage/Crisis negotiation was formally developed as a police function in the United States by the New York City Police Department in 1972–1973. The procedure has saved countless fives. There have also been many hostage/barricade situations which ended in disaster.

This study is an analysis of the hostage/crisis negotiation practices of 276 local, county and state police agencies in the U.S. which employ at least 100 sworn officers and utilize some standard system of negotiation for response to hostage and barricade situations. A four-page questionnaire developed specifically for the project provided data about policy matters, organizational configurations, and about the selection …