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
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Item Navigating a Relational Bind: Black and Latino Emergent Adult Men’s Negotiation of their Relational Needs in a Masculine Context(2024) Hedelund, Adam Jens; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emergent adulthood is a period of discovery and transition for humans aged 18 to 29 that often requires many practical as well as relational resources. Black and Latino emergent adult men from low socioeconomic backgrounds often navigated through this time period through alternate pathways because of a lack of resources. They may have also experienced substantial stress in childhood that prompted the reliance on hegemonic masculinity as a guide for how to cope with these stressors. This study sought to examine how Black and Latino emergent adult men negotiated their relational needs and abilities within the context of their masculine identities. Using semi-structured life history interviews, Black and Latino young men were interviewed from two youth development centers in the Washington DC/Baltimore area. Findings suggested that the impact of the provider role as adultified children, as well as exposure to violence, increased the participant’s likelihood of hegemonic masculine disconnection from family and friends in emergent adulthood. However, this disconnection was often complicated given their human desire for closeness and support as well as obligations to family members. This complexity was conceptualized as a type of relational bind. Participants used a variety of strategies to resolve this bind that often left them more isolated.Item African American Couples' Provider Role Attitudes as a Function of Income, Relative Income, Education, and Age(2018) Walton, Tariiq Omari; Epstein, Norman B.; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study investigated characteristics that are associated with the provider role attitudes of African Americans being seen for couple therapy at a university-based family therapy clinic in a major metropolitan region, the Center for Healthy Families at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was predicted that income, relative income, education, age, and gender would be associated with the degree of traditional provider role attitudes of members of African American couples being treated at the CHF between 2000 and 2015. Contrary to the predictions, no relationship between education, age, and relative income and the provider role attitudes of the study’s participants was found. However, the results did show a significant relationship between gender and income and provider role attitudes. The implications for future research and clinical applications are discussed.Item Structured Approaches for Exploring Interpersonal Relationships in Natural Language Text(2016) Chaturvedi, Snigdha; Daume III, Hal; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Human relationships have long been studied by scientists from domains like sociology, psychology, literature, etc. for understanding people's desires, goals, actions and expected behaviors. In this dissertation we study inter-personal relationships as expressed in natural language text. Modeling inter-personal relationships from text finds application in general natural language understanding, as well as real-world domains such as social networks, discussion forums, intelligent virtual agents, etc. We propose that the study of relationships should incorporate not only linguistic cues in text, but also the contexts in which these cues appear. Our investigations, backed by empirical evaluation, support this thesis, and demonstrate that the task benefits from using structured models that incorporate both types of information. We present such structured models to address the task of modeling the nature of relationships between any two given characters from a narrative. To begin with, we assume that relationships are of two types: cooperative and non-cooperative. We first describe an approach to jointly infer relationships between all characters in the narrative, and demonstrate how the task of characterizing the relationship between two characters can benefit from including information about their relationships with other characters in the narrative. We next formulate the relationship-modeling problem as a sequence prediction task to acknowledge the evolving nature of human relationships, and demonstrate the need to model the history of a relationship in predicting its evolution. Thereafter, we present a data-driven method to automatically discover various types of relationships such as familial, romantic, hostile, etc. Like before, we address the task of modeling evolving relationships but don't restrict ourselves to two types of relationships. We also demonstrate the need to incorporate not only local historical but also global context while solving this problem. Lastly, we demonstrate a practical application of modeling inter-personal relationships in the domain of online educational discussion forums. Such forums offer opportunities for its users to interact and form deeper relationships. With this view, we address the task of identifying initiation of such deeper relationships between a student and the instructor. Specifically, we analyze contents of the forums to automatically suggest threads to the instructors that require their intervention. By highlighting scenarios that need direct instructor-student interactions, we alleviate the need for the instructor to manually peruse all threads of the forum and also assist students who have limited avenues for communicating with instructors. We do this by incorporating the discourse structure of the thread through latent variables that abstractly represent contents of individual posts and model the flow of information in the thread. Such latent structured models that incorporate the linguistic cues without losing their context can be helpful in other related natural language understanding tasks as well. We demonstrate this by using the model for a very different task: identifying if a stated desire has been fulfilled by the end of a story.Item I get High with a Little Help from my Friends (and Family): Close Relationships, Distress Tolerance, and Risk-Taking in Adolescence(2012) Ehrlich, Katherine Babcock; Cassidy, Jude A; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite substantial efforts to educate adolescents about the consequences of their risky decisions, adolescent risk behavior remains a significant social and public health problem. The goal of this research was to examine the role of individual and contextual predictors of adolescent health risk behavior and risk-taking measured in the laboratory. Specifically, I examined parent-adolescent relationships and friendships as two contextual predictors of risk, and I measured adolescent distress tolerance as an individual predictor of risk behavior in a longitudinal study of adolescents and their families. In Aim 1, I used a variable-centered approach to examine concurrent and prospective predictors of adolescent risk-taking. In Aim 2, I took a person-oriented statistical approach to the study of adolescent risk-taking by examining whether there are particular groups of adolescents with particular relationship characteristics who were most likely to engage in risky behavior, and whether these groups of adolescents would be more likely to take risks if they had low distress tolerance. Aim 1 analyses revealed that adolescents were most likely to engage in health risk behaviors when they had negative parent-adolescent relationships or positive friendships, but distress tolerance was unrelated to risk-taking. None of the predictors was related to laboratory risk behavior. Aim 2 analyses revealed that the influence of adolescents' relationships on their risk-taking behaviors depended on their ability to tolerate and manage their emotions. Among adolescents with high levels of friendship conflict, distress tolerance served as a protective factor against health risk behavior. Among high distress tolerant adolescents, those who had high parent-adolescent conflict engaged in greater risk-taking than adolescents who had high friendship conflict. Across all analyses, none of the predictors accounted for Time 2 risk behavior after accounting for Time 1 risk-taking in the models. Overall, these findings suggest that adolescents' relationship experiences and distress tolerance relate to risk-taking behaviors, even at an age when adolescents are engaging in relatively low levels of risk behavior. Future research should continue investigating predictors of risk behavior across multiple levels of analysis, with an emphasis on biological, individual, relational, and environmental factors that contribute to risk-taking.Item The Effect of Rejection on Previously Established Relationships: Similarity Plays a Role(2010) Curtis, Ryan Dean; Sigall, Harold; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous research has found that people who are rejected will sometimes seek to affiliate with strangers after a rejection episode (Maner et al. 2007; Williams & Sommer, 1997). This effect is theorized to reflect seeking for belonging (Smart Richman & Leary, 2009). Research testing how rejection affects relationships with previously established relationship partners, (who were not a party to the rejection) is lacking. Three hypotheses were tested. Hypothesis 1 was that people seek to bolster belonging with established relationship partners following a rejection episode. Study 1 found that female participants indicated bolstering of belonging with a trustworthy friend after recalling a rejection experience. Hypothesis 2 was that people would bolster belonging first with relationship others who share relationship criteria with the rejecter. Study 2a found that the betrayal experienced by heterosexual participants during their most recent breakup predicted their bolstering toward an opposite-sex, but not a same-sex, friend. Study 2b used a measure of rejection instead of betrayal but did not replicate the results of Study 2a. Study 3 manipulated rejection and found that heterosexual participants rejected by a physically attractive other indicated bolstering of belonging toward an opposite-sex, but not a same-sex, friend. Hypothesis 3 was that people would bolster belonging with relationship others who shared idiosyncratic similarities with the rejecter. Rejection and idiosyncratic similarity of a friend to the rejecter were manipulated in Study 4. The results did not support the hypothesis. Potential explanations for these results as well as possible future research are discussed.Item Effects on Communal Relationships of the Presence of Need, Responsibility for the Need, and the Ability to Satisfy the Need.(2008-12-08) Buzinski, Steven G.; Sigall, Harold; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The relationship between a communal other's needs and one's communal strength toward that other, and general communal orientation were examined. Three variables were examined in a 2 x 2 x 2 experimental design: a communal other's need (need-unmet vs. need-met), the other's responsibility for creating the need (yes vs. no), and the other's ability to satisfy the need (yes vs. no). Participants (N = 48) completed pre- and post-test measures of communal strength toward the other and communal orientation. Results showed that the presence of need and the other's responsibility affected communal orientation. An interaction between these variables was observed as well: communal orientation was lower when the need was met and the other was not responsible for creating it than in the other conditions. There were no effects on communal strength. The relationship between the needs of a communal other and both communal strength and communal orientation are discussed.