Haiti's political and economy history has led to a maternity care system that lies out of reach, geographically and financially, of most Haitians, resulting in excessively high maternal and infant mortality. The most common birth practitioners are homebirth midwives (matwòns), who attend roughly three-fourths of all births in Haiti (UNICEF),...
The sudden and unexpected death of a seemingly healthy infant sets in motion a number of linked processes with potentially complex and far-reaching ramifications. While individuals, families and communities grapple with the shock and heartbreak associated with the loss of a young life, a chain of multidisciplinary investigative responsibilities is...
Behavioral self-regulation has emerged as an important predictor of academic success as early as preschool. Few studies, however, have examined ways to improve children's behavioral self-regulation in preschool, prior to formal school entry. This dissertation includes two studies examining a pilot intervention using classroom games to improve behavioral self-regulation with...
Recent scientific studies show that framing climate change as a health issue rather than an environmental issue were more persuasive with American audience members (Maibach et. al., 2010; Maibach et. al. 2014). Also in 2014, a survey on respiratory healthcare providers and found that a large percentage believed that climate...
This thesis examines the characterization of the femme fatale and the implications of this trope for late-Victorian gender and sexuality in the ghost stories of female aesthete Vernon Lee. In her treatment of the femme fatale figure, Lee both reinforces and complicates the image of the sexualized, often bestialized woman...
Play with Barbie dolls is an understudied source of gendered socialization that may convey a sexualized adult world to young girls. Early exposure to sexualized images may have unintended consequences in the form of perceived limitations on future selves. We investigated perceptions of careers girls felt they could do in...
Entrepreneurship is regarded as a viable way for women to enter the economy and improve their quality of life (Morris et al., 2018). However, little attention has been paid to understanding how women, and specifically women of color, utilize their ways of knowing to learn entrepreneurship. Grounded in Chicana/Latina feminism...
School is a hostile environment for many LGBTQ youth. Teachers participate, consciously or unconsciously, in perpetuating oppressive heteronormative expectations in the classroom both through the overt and covert curriculum. Yet, pre-service teachers are under-trained about questions related to gender and sexuality during their teacher preparation. This qualitative study explores the...
Critical consciousness (CC) and hopeful future expectations (HFE) are believed to promote positive development in youth who face structural inequalities (Callina et al., 2014; Heberle et al., 2020; Mcwhirter & McWhirter, 2008). Although both CC and HFE hold promise for enhancing the positive development of oppressed youth, gaps in the...
Community engaged scholarship has gained attention as public universities begin to answer calls to return to their roots of serving the public good. The scholars at the heart of community engagement play an important role in this mission, but their experiences in the academy are not well understood. As institutional...
This research is an exploration of empathy in the classroom from the standpoint of how instructors experience it and understand themselves to communicate it to their students, particularly students from different cultural backgrounds. The research method used was ethnographic analysis of a classroom observation and a one-hour semi-structured interview with...
This dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive portrayal of doula care in the lives of pregnant and parenting adolescent mothers. The purpose of this research was to examine the relationships between psychosocial stress, social support, institutionalized constraints, and their impacts on health and well-being among adolescent mothers in the Northwestern...
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4.3 Birth outcomes for 1,896 neonates born to adolescent women in the DONA
International
This study examined the social and contextual factors that lead to differences in
the way biracial adolescents interpret their racial identity. Using 11 interviews with a sample of biracial youth between the ages of 14 and 17-years-old, this study also explores
the strategies these individuals use to achieve social validation...
Human development researchers consider adolescence a rich time for interest development and identity exploration. A relatively new movement in the Free-Choice Learning (FCL) arena, the Maker movement, offers learners interest-driven, experiential, often collaborative, and process-oriented activities ranging from game design (computer-based and otherwise) and robotics, to sewing LEDs into clothing...
This project examines the portrayal of the life and times of Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) in the popular Austrian musical "Elisabeth das Musical" (Elisabeth the Musical), written by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay. "Elisabeth" was first performed in Vienna in 1992 and has since become the...
This dissertation draws on ethnographic data and political ecological theory to analyze the experience of residents living in the IBM-Endicott Superfund site in Endicott, New York. Combining in-depth narratives and quantitative measures from a household survey, it highlights residents' perceptions of 1) environmental health risk, 2) risk mitigation, 3) deindustrialization...
The purpose of this thesis is to engage in a linguistic-conceptual inquiry into what it
proposes might for analytical purposes be conceived—and which it hence stipulatively
defines—as Applied Value Words. After constructing the conceptual framework through
which to identify, and within which to characterize Applied Value Words, this thesis then...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
Recent conflicts in America concerning the environment (the harvesting of old growth timber in the Pacific Northwest, or the proposed opening of public lands in southern Utah to mining interests, for instance) have precipitated a personal examination of "historical others" (Jensen 64), individuals that possess very different sensibilities from a...