UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item RACIAL DIFFERENCES IN PROTECTIONS AGAINST PREGNANCY: COMPETING GOALS AND DECISIONS(2018) Young Harrison, Eowna; Kahn, Joan; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Racial disparities in unintended pregnancy are largely related to differences in contraceptive practices. Black women are less likely to use an effective contraceptive and more likely to discontinue a method compared to their White counterparts. More concerning is that the Black-White gap in these protections against unintended pregnancy may have widened over time. Reasons for these racial disparities and the pathways to contraceptive practices that leave at-risk women vulnerable to unintended pregnancy are unexplained This project addresses some of the existing gaps in the literature by using a mixed-methods approach to 1) investigate the various factors contributing to Black-White differences in contraceptive practices over time and 2) explore the contraceptive decision-making of women at high risk of unintended pregnancy. Using multinomial logistic regression and a Fairlie decomposition on data from the National Survey of Family Growth 1988 and 2011-2015 survey cycles, I analyze contraceptive use and effective method choice of young adult women. Results reveal that the Black-White gap in contraceptive practices in 2011-2015 are 2-3 times larger than in 1988. Very few factors were statistically significant at explaining the 13% Black-White difference in 2011-2015. Interviews with Black women in Philadelphia were used to improve our understanding of contraceptive practices that are less effective at protecting against pregnancy. Findings highlight criteria for method selection, concern for STDs, and partner trust as key factors guiding contraceptive practices.Item Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984(2010) Parry, Manon; Michel, Sonya; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The history of the birth control movement in the United States is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that campaigned to legalize the distribution of contraception. Only recently have historians begun to examine the "cultural work" of printed media including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. This dissertation builds on this scholarship, to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by birth control advocates, and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance, over the course of the twentieth century. As advocates tried to mimic the efforts of commercial advertisers to "sell" health-related behaviors to a wide audience, they crafted the new academic specialty of health communication. I argue that mass media was central to the campaign to transform the private subject of fertility control into one fit for public discussion in the United States. Moreover, the international family planning movement played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding health communication in the promotion of contraception around the globe. As they negotiated for access to cinema and radio platforms from which to promote their cause, birth control advocates toned down their feminist rhetoric of sexual liberation. After the legalization of contraception, censorship and broadcasting conventions affecting educational messages further diluted the kinds of representations they could promote over the radio and on the nation's television sets. As commercial media became increasingly explicit in the 1960s and `70s, family planning promoters conversely expunged sex from their broadcasts for domestic and foreign audiences. In this way, media helped to shape the messages of the movement. Seeking greater creative freedom, some of the family planning community began to cultivate informal partnerships with entertainment media producers, perfecting a strategy abroad that would be brought home to the U.S. The Mexican "education-entertainment" approach has since become the most influential model of family planning communication, replicated around the world in efforts to reintroduce the context of sex and relationships to the promotion of contraceptive use. This history is thus a transnational narrative of the dissemination of messages and the technologies and techniques that delivered them.