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.
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Item “I THINK I WAS MISINFORMED”: UNDERSTANDING GHANAIAN MOTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON, AND EXPERIENCES WITH, MATERNAL HEALTH MISINFORMATION(2024) Agboada, Delight Jessica; Khamis, Sahar; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many women in sub-Saharan Africa have died because of unmet maternal health information needs (Mulauzi & Daka, 2018). Existing research has established that access to, and use of, accurate maternal health information can optimize maternal health (Mwangakala, 2016). To the contrary, the reliance on, and use of, inaccurate information can result in susceptibility to maternal health complications (Arzoaquoi et al., 2015). Despite the negative impact of maternal health misinformation on mothers’ maternal health behaviors, it has not received substantial scholarly attention, including in the areas of health communication and public relations. Given the scarcity of studies in these areas, this dissertation utilized the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS) and the culture-centered approach (CCA) to investigate how Ghanaian mothers understand, relate to, and experience maternal health misinformation. Specifically, the study posed four research questions based on the independent variables of the STOPS. These questions examined (1) How the mothers identified maternal health misinformation, (2) The extent of their involvement with misinformation, (3) The challenges they encountered when attempting to correct misinformation, and (4) How their prior experiences with, and knowledge of, pregnancy, birth and postpartum enabled them to unpack misinformation. The women who participated in this study were mothers who had either experienced pregnancy, birth, and postpartum in Ghana with children five years or younger or were pregnant. Twenty of these mothers were purposively sampled and participated in semi-structured interviews via WhatsApp voice calls and chat. The findings demonstrate the applicability of STOPS to health communication and to a different sociocultural environment. The study revealed that the participants’ high problem and involvement recognition coupled with low constraint recognition shaped their information acquisition, selection, and transmission. The study also showed that referent criterion significantly shaped problem recognition. Additionally, the study demonstrated how the constructs of the CCA, namely culture, structure, and agency, intersected with the independent variables of the STOPS to inform the mothers’ communicative action. Specifically, it showed how the participants’ culture shaped their problem and constraint recognition, how the mothers’ agency shaped their involvement recognition and enhanced problem-solving, and how structure shaped problem recognition and referent criterion. The study concludes that maternal health interventions targeted at curbing misinformation must be culture centered. Also, the STOPS should be used in segmenting maternal health publics. This approach will help leverage the agency of active mothers for social correction of misinformation.Item Seeds of Contestation: Genetically Modified Crops and the Politics of Agricultural Modernization in Ghana(2015) Ignatova, Jacqueline Alyce; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What actors, expertise, and models of development are advanced by the ‘new Green Revolution in Africa’? This dissertation addresses this question through a blend of discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork during a period of agricultural transition in Northern Ghana. What struggles over authority, knowledge, identity, and property define this contemporary political economy of agricultural modernization in Ghana? I argue that legal, techno-scientific expertise and agribusiness work together to advance a model of agricultural development based on new forms of capital, governance structures, and technology. This model of agricultural development is mobilized and legitimated through discourses of emergency, salvation, entrepreneurship, and humanitarianism. In this new Green Revolution in Africa, regions like Northern Ghana are seen by development planners as ‘backwards,’ with growing ‘yield gaps’ that undermine food security. What is needed, from this perspective, is capital investment, entrepreneurship, and access to yield-enhancing technologies, such as ‘pro-poor biotechnology.’ Deficiency frames, the combined use of hype and science, and donations become critical mechanisms to facilitate—or resist—the entry of contested agricultural technologies and models of agricultural development. At the center of these discursive strategies is the figure of the farmer, who is seen as an agent and object of salvation by proponents and opponents alike. I complement discourse analysis with ethnography to show that these grand plans to transform farming from a way of life to a business are constantly challenged by the existing complexity of Africans’ multiple, coexisting roles, risk reduction practices, and notions of entrepreneurship.Item Towards Adequate Analysis and Modeling of Structural Adjustment Programs: An Analytical Framework with Application to Ghana(2004-11-22) Kraev, Egor; Daly, Herman; Public Affairs; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When a country experiences a balance of payments problem, the typical remedy mix proposed by the International Monetary Fund consists of fiscal austerity, tight monetary policies, devaluation, privatization, elimination of subsidies and trade liberalization, combined with low interest rate loans. Throughout the late 1980s, Ghana has been hailed as a success story for that policy mix. However, Ghana's performance has been increasingly disappointing during the 1990s. This thesis explores the reasons for that slowdown, its distributional implications, and the extent to which the behavior of the Ghanaian economy validates commonly used assumptions in economic models of developing countries. We compile a complete consistent yearly dataset of financial stocks, nominal money flows (arranged in Social Accounting Matrices) and real product flows for Ghana in 1990-2001. The real-side data, available yearly, are then examined using fit optimization with alternative functional forms, while nominal time series (Consumer Price Index, the broad money supply and the exchange rate), available on a monthly basis, are analyzed using ARIMA-X regressions. We find that industrial production, as well as investment, has been demand-constrained during our period, while agriculture has hit an aggregate supply constraint around year 1995. The relative price elasticity of substitution between imports and non-traded goods (in volume terms) is around minus one. The government was the only net source of demand during the period. Inflation could be predicted extremely well using only broad money supply, wholesale price of food crops and price of fuel, and formed a weak positive feedback loop with money supply growth. The main channel through which exchange rate depreciation impacted the price level was revaluation of the foreign currency-denominated money supply component. The response of broad money supply to interest rate increases was significant but small. We also formulate a novel matrix formalism for a more compact description and analysis of financial stock dynamics, cleanly separating structural and accounting constraints from behavioral descriptions. We conclude that the major reasons for the economic slowdown of the 1990s were excessive liberalization of commodity imports and strangulation of industry through lack of demand and volatile real interest rates, and of agriculture through withdrawal of government support programs.