UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item Core Values: American Ambivalence Towards Equality, Limited Government and Moral Traditionalism(2008-06-06) O'Rourke, Laurence Matthew; Gimpel, James; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role of core values in American public opinion, utilizing the closed-ended questions used to measure values in the National Election Studies (NES) survey. In-depth interviews were conducted with a non-random sample of 31 individuals recruited in the Washington D.C. area and in Rockingham County Virginia. These respondents were first asked to answer the NES value questions and then to elaborate on their detailed thoughts generated by answering these questions on limited government, equality and moral traditionalism. The results of this cognitive interviewing on how individuals interpret these widely used measures of values should be useful to researchers wishing to gain a better understanding of the sources of instability and error in these NES measures. In addition, quantitative analyses of NES data for the years between 1992 and 2004 were used to provide further insights from the in-depth interviews. The results of this research contribute to the broader political science literature on values. While the public is often uninformed about many issues of politics and policy, Feldman and other scholars have argued that values can serve to anchor public beliefs. By using values, the public is presumably able to take information shortcuts to substantive political decision making. Values are often conceptualized as stable and durable beliefs that can affect many specific attitudes. This study finds substantial public ambivalence towards limited government, equality and moral traditionalism. While some scholars, like Alvarez and Brehm, have argued that ambivalence is rare, this study finds that the public is torn about many of their core values. Ambivalence towards core values is often caused by feelings about specific social groups and social contexts. Conflicts between values and the different dimensions of each value also were a source of conflict for many of these respondents. The organization of the public's values into value systems thus appears weak. In some cases partisanship provides some of the glue that links different values together. These findings are important because they illustrate the complexity of the public's values. The public may hold a number of core values, but this study shows these beliefs to be intricate, nuanced and conflicted.Item The role of communication, life role commitments, and sexist ideologies in dual-earner marriages(2008-05-31) Sullivan, Catherine Mary; Hoffman, Mary Ann; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dual earner family is now the norm among married couples of all races; yet research has shown that even dual-earner couples are not generally able to attain marital equality. This study investigated inequality in marital relationships as it related to wives' psychological distress and marital satisfaction by examining variables that appear to correspond with invisible power, namely the gendered ways men and women commit to various life roles, how they communicate in times of conflict, and the sexist ideologies that serve to shape these roles and behaviors. Participants were 287 married women who worked full-time outside the home and whose oldest child was under the age of six. The sample was predominantly White, highly educated and had a relatively high income. Participants completed a web-based survey, which included measures of relationship satisfaction, psychological distress, life role commitments, ambivalent sexism, constructive communication, and social support. Participants responded to several measures twice - once from their own perspective and once based on their perceptions of their husband's perspective. Results suggested that while the variables of interest, particularly constructive communication, predicted a large among of variance in relationship satisfaction, they only predicted a small amount of variance in psychological distress. The three variables that were found to predict unique variance in wives' reported marital satisfaction were constructive communication, wives' perceptions of their husband's commitment to the parental role, and wives' own commitment to the marital role. Findings support the importance of these variables for predicting women's reported marital satisfaction and the importance of examining these variables together. Overall, it was found that wives' perceptions of their husbands' perspective were more strongly predictive of wives' marital satisfaction than wives' own ratings. Results suggest that constructive communication is a particularly important tool for women in dual-earner marriages, a way that they are empowered to make marriage more satisfying and possibly as a protective factor or way to cope with what would otherwise be distressing. These findings can be used to inform the development of interventions to help dual-earner couples with young children.