Sociology Theses and Dissertations
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Item Juvenile Delinquency and the Negro in Charles County, Maryland(1966) Seaman, Thomas W.; Lejins, Peter P.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Are there differences between Negro and white juvenile delinquents? This was the question that constituted the basis for this exploratory study. The objectives of the project were to determine if Negro juveniles were proportionately overrepresented among juvenile delinquents and if there were differences in types of offenses committed by Negro and white delinquents. The differences found were analyzed in the light of socio-economic class differences between Negro and white delinquents. Previous research has tended to indicate that racial differences disappeared when socioeconomic class was held constant. The area selected for the project was Charles County, Maryland, because of the writer's access to court records and knowledge of the area. Delinquency rates were developed to determine if Negroes were proportionately overrepresented among delinquents and/or if lower class juveniles were overrepresented among delinquents. Delinquent offenses were divided into four types: offenses involving theft or attempted theft of property, offenses involving violence, offenses involving the destruction of property, and offenses injurious to the child himself. Delinquency rates were developed for Negro and white delinquents in each socio-economic class for each type of offense. A simple ecological investigation was conducted to determine if there were any significant patterns in the spatial distribution of the delinquents. The findings show that Negro juveniles were not significantly overrepresented among delinquents even though Negro delinquents were overrepresented among lower-lower class delinquents. White delinquents were found to be overrepresented among delinquents from the lower-middle and upper-lower classes. The analyses of types of offenses revealed that types of offenses could be identified with certain levels of the socio-economic structure regardless of race, but that differences existed between Negro and white delinquents within socio-economic classes. The ecological investigation indicated that there was no significant ecological pattern among county delinquents.Item Internal Migration to Osaka Prefecture, Japan(1956) Lewis, David Michael; Hoffsommer, Harold; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Item Interaction Patterns in the Neighborhood Tavern(1971) Bissonette, Raymond Peter; Lejins, Peter P.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This study was undertaken in order to develop a systematic description and analysis of the social reality of the public drinking establishment with special reference to the neighborhood workingman's tavern. The perspective adopted was a focus on the non-pathological aspects of behavior associated with the consumption of beverage alcohol. Underlying this point of departure was the recognition that most research on drinking behavior is related to alcoholism but most drinking is not. The study had two purposes: first to attempt a descriptive analysis of social interaction in the tavern setting by translating observed behavior into relatively standard sociological concepts of norm, role, ecology, and communication. Beyond the descriptive purpose of this approach was the expectation that the organization of observations into such a conceptual scheme would enhance the scientific utility of the effort by providing for assimilability and comparability of the data with other research and theory. The second purpose was to test a new theoretical focus for its adequacy as an explanatory model. The focus is on behavior in public and semi-public places - an area falling some where between group studies on the one hand and studies of collective behavior on the other. The major component of this theoretical framework is the mechanism of involvement allocation which refers to the ways in which actors regulate the duration and intensity of their involvement in interpersonal interaction. As was anticipated much of what is unique to sociability in the tavern setting was explainable in terms of involvement allocation. Principally responsible for this is the fact that a tavern, regardless of its official definition, has the dual functions of dispensary and social event. Although the tavern is a prototypic case for involvement allocation it was concluded that this explanatory model might have wide application in interpersonal and intergroup behavior. The data were collected over a three year period by means of participant observation in a wide variety of settings. The core data represent observations taken over a two year period in four selected neighborhood taverns. The synchronic observation of these case taverns were then supplemented by spot observations taken in over one hundred other establishments. The third source of data was the published findings of similar and related studies. The contrast and comparison provided by these additional data aid considerably in verifying the raw data and their interpretation - an inherent problem in this kind of approach. The findings demonstrate that the social reality of the tavern setting consists in patterned behavior amenable to systematic description and analysis. Drinking is a never-present variable but rarely an exclusive preoccupation. A more fruitful approach in understanding the role of drinking in such a setting is to focus on its social rather than physiological consequences. As a part of the definition of the tavern, drinking is always an accepted major involvement and as such affords the individual considerable flexibility in his involvement in the social activities occurring simultaneously. Throughout the study much of what is characteristic of tavern behavior is explained in terms of the involvement allocation options offered by the tavern's dual function as dispensary and social event.Item GROWING UP IN RURAL MALAWI: GENDERED ASPIRATIONS, TIME USE, AND SOCIALIZATION(2019) Zahra, Fatima; Madhavan, Sangeetha; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation focuses on three understudied dimensions of challenges among youth in Malawi, and is structured as three separate papers. The first is, the relationship between aspired and actual timing of transitions out of school, and the extent of the gender gap in this relationship. The second dimension is gender disparity in acquired skills and learning outcomes in primary school, and how demands for labor at the household level help explain differences in dropout and student performance on Math and Chichewa tests. The third dimension focuses on girls’ relationship power, and the gender socialization experiences at school and individual characteristics that are correlated with it. Using the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study (MSAS), I find that 1) a higher desired age for marriage is associated with a lower likelihood of school dropout, and marriage related school dropout, with this association significant mainly among girls, 2) a high work burden is associated with a greater likelihood of school dropout in the subsequent year, but is not associated with performance on Math and Chichewa reading comprehension tests, and there is no significant gender difference in these relationships, 3) attitudes form an important dimension of the measurement of girls’ relationship power, and earlier experiences of physical violence in school, and individual characteristics including self-esteem and attitudes against spousal violent predict power in relationships in later adolescence and early adulthood. Together, the three papers in this dissertation provide critical insights into individual mechanisms that allow adolescents to stay in school longer, structural constraints like household labor allocation that limit their educational attainment, and the contribution of early socialization experiences to girls’ power in later relationships.Item DARK MIRROR: HETEROTOPIA, UTOPIA, AND THE EXTERMINATION CAMPS OF OPERATION REINHARD(2019) Wanenchak, Sarah; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Michel Foucault's body of work, the notion of heterotopia stands out as both particularly intriguing and particularly underdeveloped. Introduced in the introduction of The Order of Things (first published 1966) and further described in the lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1967), heterotopia has been used by scholars in a variety of fields, from social theory to architecture. Of special interest is the way Foucault describes the relationship between heterotopia and utopia, one defined by its liminal nature and the other by its unreality. This work seeks to shed new light on that relationship, by focusing on heterotopias as threshold spaces between the real social world and the perfected but unreal world to come. I approach the concept of utopia with an eye toward its eliminationist implications, and use three extermination camps established as part of the Nazi regime’s Operation Reinhard as cases through which to explore significant features of a heterotopia, how those features manifest in these cases, and what connects these spaces to the world that can be glimpsed in the mirror they create. Although I primarily use historical cases as a way to expand existing theory, I aim to build upon that expansion by pointing the way toward the development of new theoretical tools for historical-comparative analysis of spaces of both extermination and detention. Finally, I suggest that work might be done focusing on embodied identities as themselves forms of heterotopia, which introduces possibilities for additional analysis of the roles of bodies and identity in cases of certain kinds of mass violence and death.Item The Fair Housing Movement: An Overview and a Case Study(1965) Noe, Kaye Sizer; Cussler, Margaret T.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)The fair housing movement is a recent development in the general civil rights movement. While subscribing to the ideology of the general movement, community fair housing groups concentrate upon making middle-income, and particularly suburban, housing available to financially qualified Negroes. Few fair housing groups are affiliated with Negro civil rights groups, and most are all-white in membership. Their methods utilize many of the concepts first developed in sociology and social psychology; their programs emphasize community relations when a Negro move-in is imminent, property listing services which bypass the practices of discrimination entrenched in the real estate industry, and subscription by community members to open covenants. They seldom try to "force" integration using test cases, attempting rather to prevent discrimination against Negroes seeking homes in their communities and to avoid violence. The major portion of the research was a case study of a fair housing group in Greenbelt, Maryland. The program of this group emphasized a "planning" approach to integration and publicly avoided the moral-ethical arguments which have been central in the general civil rights movement. Such resistance as they encountered was from individuals concerned about the possible effect of Negro occupancy on property values in the older, low-income section of the city. The leaders of the group were active in civic activities, representative of most religious faiths, tended to be college-educated, and many had a history of affiliation with other "liberal" groups. Few were active in other facets of the civil rights movement. It was concluded that the fair housing movement tends to be moderate rather than radical in its membership and strategy, and that its scope (some 600 groups in metropolitan areas across the United States) represents near-spontaneous action at the grass-roots level based on a conviction that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong.Item Riots as Disasters: An Exploratory Case Study of Selected Aspects of the Civil Disturbance in Washington, D.C., April, 1968(1973) Sedlack, Richard Guy; Janes, Robert W.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Following some of the more recent sociological literature which has been critical of research into riots, the topic of this thesis addresses itself to a hitherto neglected aspect of riots. It is an initial exploratory effort into the ecological dimensions of official statistics, utilizing the relevant temporal and spatial conceptualizations suggested by the sociological disaster literature. The data sources were the offense and arrest records of the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department and the fire data on the Daily Communication Log of the District of Columbia Fire Department. The offense and fire data were treated as partial indicators of the situation reported to the police with the arrest data as partial indicators of the response made by the police to the riot. The data were conceptually organized along three dimensions. First, the type of criminal violation was classified into six general categories: crimes against persons, crimes against property, traffic violations, crimes without victims, crimes related to fires, and miscellaneous crimes. For a more detailed analysis, the total crimes falling into any one of these general categories were subclassified into more detailed subcategories within each general category. Second, the spatial dimension was trichotomized into three locational specifications: the riot areas of major destruction, the corridor areas of sporadic destruction, and the non-riot areas of minimal or no riot destruction. Third, the temporal dimension was dichotomized into the total riot period of organized response and a representative normal time period, so that the latter could serve as a benchmark against which to compare the former. Two specific questions were posited: what degree of difference existed between the defined riot period and the representative normal time period in terms of crimes and spatial location as reflected by the official statistics and what kinds of differences were evident. Three specific hypotheses were evaluated: (1) the offense and fire data hypothesis which suggested that the degree of association between the offenses reported and the selected riot-normal time period varies directly with the degree of concentrated riot damage, (2) the arrest data hypothesis which suggested that the degree of association between the police's response and the selected riot-normal time period varies directly with the degree of concentrated riot damage, and (3) the comparative hypothesis which suggested that the degree of association between the police's response and the selected riot-normal time period is less than the degree of association between the offenses reported and the selected riot-normal time period . Utilizing the lambda proportionate reduction in error statistic, the data were inconclusive relative to the first hypothesis and generally failed to support the second and third hypotheses, although the magnitude of the data indicated that there were some differences. The nature of the differences indicated that the incidence of fires and burglary violations increased substantially, while larceny, false fire alarm reports, and the degree of violence in crimes against persons decreased in the reported offenses during the riot. The police response was dominated by arrests for disorderly conduct and curfew violations with burglary arrests ranking second. While there were decreases in larceny and traffic arrests, the latter were still substantially represented during the riot and no meaningful numbers of arson arrests were made. Further, it was concluded that substantial numbers of offenses reported and arrests made occurred in the non-riot areas. It was concluded that the disaster literature provided relevant conceptualizations for the analysis of the spatial and temporal dimensions of riots, that further analysis of these dimensions is warranted, and that other dimensions of the disaster approach appear to be useful when applied to riots.Item Adolescents' Attitudes Toward the Economic and Societal Responsibilities of Government in 24 Countries(2019) White, Gregory; Kahn, Joan; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Adolescents’ attitudes toward government responsibilities for economic and societal well-being are examined in 24 countries grouped within welfare regime types. Adolescents’ own sense of civic responsibility to participate in community service is also investigated. This study uses data from the IEA Civic Education Study (1999) in combination with macroeconomic indicator data employing descriptive statistics, multiple regression, and other techniques to compare results between regimes and countries. The adolescents surveyed in 1999 are now adult members of a millennial generation that is rising in political influence. Adolescents demonstrate well-established attitudes that are consistent with those of adults in certain welfare regime contexts. Attitudes toward economy-related government responsibilities are in the expected directions for regimes with a legacy of communism, which are above the international mean, as well as in the liberal regime, which is below the international mean. Adolescents in the United States (a liberal regime ideal-type country) hold the least favorable attitudes toward government-provided economic support. In addition, adolescents’ expectations of community participation are higher in the liberal and Southern Europe regimes. Female students are more likely to believe in government provision for economic needs in liberal, Southern Europe, and post-communist Central Europe regimes. Notably, no significant gender differences are found in the social democratic regime, where women face fewer social protection risks. Female students are also much more likely than males to anticipate future volunteer community participation across regimes. Contrary to expectations, variables measuring social class have few significant or meaningful associations. Volunteering has small negative effects with belief in government-provided economic support in most regimes, and small to moderate positive effects with adolescents’ anticipated community engagement in all regimes. In addition, studying community problems has small positive effects with support for economy-related government responsibilities in several regimes (including liberal) and small to moderate positive effects in all regimes for anticipated community engagement. Finally, collective student efficacy and support for ethnic minority group opportunities have positive associations with beliefs that both governments and individuals are responsible for economic and societal needs.Item MULTICULTURAL POLITICS AND NATIONAL BOUNDARY MAKING IN KOREA: Mapping the intersectional dimensions of nation, gender, class, and ethnicity in state policy and practice(2019) Yu, Sojin; Marsh, Kris; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the conception and implementation of state multicultural policy to analyze how migrants are received and incorporated within South Korea, a newly emergent migrant receiving country in Asia. To this end, I conducted ethnographic research at two Centers established to enact governmental multicultural policy, focusing on the separate accounts and experiences of ground-level policy practitioners (Koreans) and targeted recipients (migrants) in relation to the policy implementation and its ‘real world’ effects. The results show the varied and conflicting perspectives of those involved, and how they are informed by the intersecting social constructs of nation, ethnicity, gender, family, and class. These intersectional workings and effects also contribute to the unequal social relations between Koreans and migrants, especially in shaping a particular national form of ‘racism’ against migrants, and helping to maintain the previously unchallenged formation of national identity in Korea. Three thematically arranged analysis chapters discuss specifically how these social processes serve to form and naturalize social hierarchies and powers in Korea, with each chapter examining a specific intersectional circumstance: The intersection of gender inequality and nationalism; the intersection of class and nation(ality); and, the emphasis of joint Korean nationality and ethnicity in the multicultural policy. Each chapter illustrates the predominance of nationalism, as the critical mechanism and rationale behind Korea’s contested multicultural politics, and the central axis to connect with other dimensions of power including gender, class, and ethnicity. The combined research outcomes reveal the complex ways in which the inter-group relations and hierarchies are organized, through the state policy, bureaucratic practice and individual agency.Item Grandparent Wealth and the Well-Being of Black & White Young Adults(2019) Brown, Joey D; Cohen, Philip N; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social origins are important predictors of adult success, and parental resources, particularly parental wealth, are positively correlated with adult well-being. Meanwhile, the overall population is now healthier and living longer than previous generations. Therefore, families are experiencing increased opportunities for multigenerational relationship formation and investment. This dissertation extends social mobility and stratification research by considering how multigenerational resources are related to young adult well-being. I examine how grandparents’ accumulated wealth prior to individuals’ eighteenth birthday is related to young adults’ educational attainment, self-rated general health and mental health, and financial independence. Additionally, in light of large, enduring racial wealth gaps between Black and White identified people, I examine whether and to what extent racially disparate patterns of family wealth accumulation condition the relationship between grandparent wealth and young adult well-being. I perform this investigation with analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the PSID’s Transition to Adulthood Study (TAS). I employ multivariate longitudinal analysis techniques to perform interracial and intra-racial analyses of the relationship between grandparent wealth and young adult well-being. I decompose racial group gaps to see whether the results are attributable to family socioeconomic characteristics or the return to those characteristics. Lastly, I use marginal probabilities to examine and compare the absolute and relative consequences of racially disparate levels of grandparent wealth across well-being outcomes.