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.
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Item SEX, CRIME, AND SELF-CONTROL: COMPARING OUTCOMES OF LOW SELF-CONTROL FOR HETEROSEXUAL AND GAY/BISEXUAL MEN(2022) Scocca, Jacob; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Objective: The purpose of the current thesis is to further explore Gottfredson and Hirschi’s General Theory of Crime by examining adult outcomes of low self-control in a heterosexual and gay/bisexual sample. It argues that self-control in these populations is differentially related to outcomes of violent crime and analogous behaviors, which contradicts the general nature of the theory. Methods: The current study uses self-reported measures in the Adolescent Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) for self-control (Wave 3) to examine outcomes of violent crime and risky sexual behavior (Wave 4). Risky sexual behaviors in this study are conceptualized as number of different sexual partners, sex without prophylactics, or sex with more than one person around the same time. Men are the primary focus of this thesis due to the presence of culturally and socially specific factors in the heterosexual and gay male community that could differentially affect the outcomes of interest. Hypothesis: I hypothesize that both the relationship between low self-control and violent crime and low self-control and risky sexual behavior will differ based on the sexual orientation of the respondent. To frame this hypothesis, I argue that the gay male subculture is more openly accepting of risky sexual behaviors, and therefore that this analogous behavior will be less related to self-control in gay populations. I also argue that heterosexual masculinity facilitates violent behavior/crime within heterosexual men, meaning that self-control plays a larger role in controlling urges in this group. Results: Differences in the association between self-control and risky sexual behaviors were found between heterosexual and gay/bisexual men indicating support for the hypothesis. Differences in the relationship between self-control and violent criminal activity in the two groups were not found in the tested samples. These findings provide evidence that Gottfredson & Hirschi's theory may not be generalizable for analogous behaviors in all populations, but that it still may hold for violent crime.Item Essays on Female Empowerment and Its Health Consequences in West Africa(2012) Orfei, Alessandro Emilio; Cropper, Maureen L; Lafortune, Jeanne; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Part 1: The Impact of Female Empowerment on Men's Extramarital Sexual Behavior: Evidence from West Africa Improving women's bargaining power to negotiate safer sex with their partner is widely seen as fundamental to reducing women's vulnerability to HIV infection, although little causal evidence has been provided. This paper uses exogenous variation in a determinant of female bargaining power, women's kin support, to identify the causal effect of women's empowerment on men's extramarital sexual behavior. I establish the relevance of kin support shocks for measures of bargaining power such as women's reported decision-making authority over major and daily household purchases, women's healthcare, and household cooking decisions. Reduced form estimates indicate that having one more adult male sibling alive leads to a decrease of 1.3 percent in the probability of her husband's extramarital behavior. However, the number of living adult female siblings does not influence her husband's behavior. A measure of shocks to kin support, captured by the death of a woman's young siblings, is shown to increase her husband's extramarital behavior. The kin support measures are balanced across observables and results are robust to excluding households in which women's relatives reside, as well as alternate definitions of the kin support measures. This suggests that a woman's bargaining power within the household does influence the likelihood of her husband's extramarital sexual behavior, and thus her risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. Part 2: Kin Support, Female Bargaining Power, and Fertility Do decreases in a woman's bargaining power relative to her husband lead to higher fertility? This paper attempts to answer this question in the context of West Africa using shocks over time to a determinant of a woman's bargaining power, her kin support, to identify the causal effect. Kin support shocks are captured by deaths of a woman's young siblings, which are argued to be an indication that the woman's natal family has suffered a negative shock. The shocks are shown to be relevant across couples for women's reported household decision-making authority. I exploit differences in the timing of the shocks across couples over time to estimate how changes in a woman's bargaining power impact a couple's fertility. A couple is on average 2.5 percentage points more likely to have a child in any given year after the woman has experienced an additional post-marriage young sibling death. The effect is robust to removing village-year and country-cohort-year effects among other controls. Analysis of the dynamics of fertility changes relative to the timing of the shocks support the validity of the findings.