Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    The Gender Dynamics of Dissent in Organizations
    (2012) Severance, Laura; Gelfand, Michele J.; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Contemporary approaches to organizational behavior tout dissent as critical to organizational success. However, dissenters often incur penalties for expressing opinions that differ from the majority. The current work examines dissent as a gendered phenomenon, taking into account how the social context (i.e., female-dominated, male-dominated, and mixed gender work groups) affects both backlash incurred by female dissenters as well as group performance. Study 1 demonstrated that female dissenters incurred more backlash than did male dissenters and that female participants reacted especially negatively to female dissenters. Study 3 demonstrated that female dissenters expected to receive the most backlash for speaking up in female-dominated groups relative to male-dominated and mixed gender groups. Study 4 demonstrated that women were actually most likely to dissent in female-dominated groups (relative to male-dominated and mixed gender groups), although this did not translate into differences in group performance. However, dissenter communication style emerged as a key moderator of objective (i.e., group performance) and subjective (i.e., backlash toward the dissenter) outcomes as a function of group composition. Specifically, in female-dominated groups, women's use of impolite communication tactics (e.g., interrupting) were related to decreased performance and increased backlash. Further, women were able to anticipate these backlash consequences. Overall, this work advances the understanding of gendered dissent dynamics in the workplace and how these influence not only female employees but also the organizations in which they are embedded.
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    THE UTILITY OF DETERRENCE-BASED SANCTIONS IN THE PREVENTION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST ABORTION PROVIDERS: TESTING A BLENDED MODEL OF DETERRENCE AND BACKLASH
    (2012) Bartholomew, Brad; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The American abortion debate has existed since the early 19th century; however, the previous four decades have born witness to fundamental changes within the abortion opposition movement. Beginning in the 1970s, activists started to focus more of their attention on abortion providers. Soon thereafter, the traditionally peaceful protest activities of the activist movement began to share space with acts of harassment, arson, bombings, assaults, and even assassination. Today, abortion provider-related crime has become an unwelcome staple within the broader pro-life movement. In an attempt to prevent future attacks, state and federal legislatures have enacted a series of protection laws designed to raise the penalties associated with crimes against abortion providers. Despite the recent proliferation of these laws, their impact on abortion provider-related crime has seldom been the subject of rigorous empirical research. In this dissertation, I aim to address this shortcoming by using zero-inflated negative binomial regression modeling to present the first longitudinal test of the relationship between protection laws and abortion provider-related crime using incident-level data from 1975 to 2008, collected during a year-long research project at The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). The results of this study offer considerable support for the backlash hypothesis and the notion that traditional deterrence-based policy is often demonstrably unsuccessful in the prevention of this particular type of crime. Additionally, the findings suggest that not all protection laws are created equal with respect to their impact on crime. While state laws prohibiting minor forms of anti-abortion crime are shown to produce a backlash effect for crimes of harassment and vandalism, other types of state protection laws were shown to have no effect on crime whatsoever. Furthermore, the presence of the highly visible FACE Act is shown to generate similar increases for both major and minor crime types.