The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between frequent childhood mobility and perceived social support, education level, and economic well-being in a sample of former Even Start parents. Theoretically the mechanisms for the disruption of frequent mobility are studied through both social capital theory and an ecological...
The purpose of this study was to identify and examine risk and protective factors associated with residential instability within a sample of rural low-income mothers. Residential instability was defined as two or more residential moves within the course of a year. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to compare residentially...
The purpose of this study was to determine what levels of community satisfaction
and personal and household characteristics would result in a model of retirees and pre-retirees
and their propensity to move. This study assessed the relationship between certain
socio-demographic variables and feelings of overall satisfaction as well as satisfaction...
Decreasing mortality rates and increasing life
expectancy are contributing factors in a trend currently
referred to as the "graying" of America. Some members of
this aging population will require caregiving support from
their families. Because women tend to outlive men, adult
daughters generally assume this important role for their
widowed...
The contemporary student veteran population is growing rapidly as service members who served in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts take advantage of the Post 9/11 Veteran Educational Assistance Act of 2008 to receive educational benefits to attend college (Cook & Kim, 2009). However, student veterans entering college today have a...
The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of dress and queer women and how their sexual identity influences their appearance management behaviors. I answered the following research questions: (1) How is gender identity constructed and negotiated in different spaces for queer? (2) Does sexual identity influence dress...
In 1952, at the height of the McCarthy era, Franz Kallmann, a Jewish psychiatrist and eugenicist who fled the National Socialist regime in Germany, published a study, in which he claimed to have found a one hundred percent concordance rate for homosexuality among forty pairs of identical twins. From this...
This thesis is a study of the clothing behavior of disadvantaged
adolescents in a rural community as it relates to the factors of social class, security level, peer acceptance and self-selection of clothing.
This study was selected because very little research in clothing
behavior has been done in disadvantaged rural...
Adolescent pregnancy is a major social problem which results in negative psychological, medical, developmental,
economic and educational consequences for both mother and child. A review of the literature examined psychological and sociocultural factors and negative consequences associated with adolescent pregnancy. There has been little research on age specific differences between...
In order to develop effective interventions designed to encourage more
middle-aged individuals to engage in regular exercise, there is a need to
further understand the mechanisms involved in the decision to exercise.
One appropriate conceptual framework involves future-oriented self-conceptions,
or possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Possible selves, both
hoped-for...
How do organizational members socially construct the shared meaning of a mandated change in the external environment? The opportunity to address this question presented itself when President Barack Obama set forth a goal for American community colleges to increase the number of students completing certificates and degrees by 5 million...
This exploratory study posited that being in an insecure marriage would increase marital conflict and perceived relational aggression when the couple is experiencing economic constraints. The cross-sectional design assessed two groups of marriages: secure and insecure. A structural equation model using multiple group comparison tested the effect of each type...
According to Blackwell, Miniard, and Engel (2001), "[c]ulture has a profound effect on why and how people buy and consume products and services" (p. 320). In the present study, Hofstede's classifications of national culture are used as a framework to examine the relationships among long-term orientation national culture (Taiwan and...
Health officials have recently been sounding the alarm that depression will soon
surpass many of the major medical conditions in causing disability among adults. Recent
demographic and health trends are generating public health concern about depression.
First, the prevalence of chronic conditions has dramatically increased over the last several
generations....
This research focused on the experiences of 15 low income Mexican women immigrants participating in MAS and Superando, two family literacy programs at the center of these women's sociocultural change. This research sought to understand the extent to which participation in these two programs empowers women to create change in...
The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in students' drinking patterns and the resultant negative consequences based on gender role identity,
gender role ideology and self-reported drinking motivations on a college campus. A
questionnaire was administered to a sample of 735 university students. Gender...
The thesis analyzes the demographic, attitudinal and
behavioral characteristics of animal rights activists,
placing them in the context of resource policy. It is
argued that the animal rights movement combined the
Victorian critique of empiricism with a reaction to
modernity that was characteristic of other contemporary mass
movements. Animal rights...
Over the past ten years there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of drug addicted teens in this
country. Accompanying this increase in drug usage of
adolescents has been an rise in the number of treatment and
evaluation centers to serve the adolescent drug abusing
population. Comprehensive and...
The purpose of the study is to explore the life experiences, identities, and self-esteem of a group of Mexican women who attend Even Start, a family literacy program. The study also focuses on the effect that the program has on the women's self-identities. I chose qualitative research considering I was...
We examined how the experiences of World War II and Korean War veterans,
including prewar, warzone, and postwar factors, affected PTSD symptoms in later life.
This dissertation consists of two studies. In Study 1, four different hypotheses from a
lifespan approach were examined (King et al., 1996): stress evaporation (only...
Most aging individuals prefer to remain in a self-determined home environment, and generally aging adults want to remain in the same home or same community. The benefits of remaining in a self-determined private home environment while aging have been established. Because individuals present a diversity of needs, it takes interdisciplinary...