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 CULTURAL DEPENDENCE OF EMOTION-REGULATION STRATEGIES(2022) Hundal, Savreen; Fink, Edward L.; Waks, Leah; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotion-regulation strategies are attempts to impact emotions within oneself or others (McRae & Gross, 2020). Strategies such as mindfulness and reappraisal are associated with benefits to well-being and mental health. However, the influence of culture on mindfulness and reappraisal has not been established. Emotion-regulation strategies are culturally dependent. It is through cultural socialization that cultural values are transmitted. Cultural values give meaning to emotion and emotion-regulation strategies. This dissertation proposes a theoretical model in which (1) cultural values predict mindfulness and reappraisal emotion-regulation strategies, and (2) the effectiveness of both strategies is assessed using the emotional dimensions of valence, arousal, power, and surprise. Three pilot studies were conducted to test the validity of emotion-regulation instructional messaging, to create a negatively valenced emotion-eliciting video stimulus, and to assess the differences in mindfulness between American and Chinese students. For the main study, American and Chinese students completed an online experiment that tested the effects of emotion-regulation strategies. The findings suggest that emotion-regulation strategies differ both culturally and in their effects, either altering the emotions individuals feel (in the case of the reappraisal strategy) or the experience individuals associate with the emotions they feel (in the case of the mindfulness strategy). This study supports the need for further investigation into the relationship between cultural socialization’s impact on emotion-regulation strategies.Item Mental Health Advocates as Cultural Intermediaries: A Sociocultural Perspective of Advocacy and Legitimacy(2021) Aghazadeh, Sarah Abigail; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study sought to understand how advocacy as a public relations activity can give voice to marginalized publics and how/if mental health advocates perceive their advocacy work as influencing culture as it relates to mental health. This study incorporated the theoretical frameworks of fully functioning society theory (FFST) and the circuit of culture. Additionally, this study investigated the concepts of advocacy, legitimacy, cultural intermediation and discourses as they entangle with and within FFST and the circuit of culture. The juxtaposition of these theories helped to uncover both culturally situated best practices of advocacy and interrogate the frames that underpin the rhetorical ideals of a fully functioning society. This study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews with 38 mental health advocates who communicated a variety of perspectives about mental health and illness. Some themes that emerged include: advocacy as both education and empowerment, legitimacy as authority that can derive from both lived and learned experience, the multiple subcultures within the field of mental health advocacy, and the variety of mental health discourses. Furthermore, two overlapping, but distinct missions of advocacy exist including 1) general mental health for all of society and 2) advocacy for people who have experienced significant challenges to daily life and/or harm (e.g., prejudice, discrimination) because of a psychiatric diagnosis. This dissertation extended FFST and the circuit of culture to present a culturally embedded conceptual model of advocacy and theoretical propositions to help guide future theory building. The theoretical propositions outline how advocacy is a vehicle for voice to change status quos, how dysfunction and marginality are parallel within FFST, and how legitimation and cultural intermediation align in the context of culturally situated responsible advocacy. The findings also contributed to the existing theories by applying those theories to a specific context of mental health advocacy, which illuminated the importance of questioning normalized values within FFST and approaching intermediation with reflectiveness. This research considers the consequences of advocacy for people with lived experiences and situates advocacy within social justice contexts to inch closer towards the ideals of FFST.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.Item INEQUALITY AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY(2018) Pepin, Joanna; Sayer, Liana; Cohen, Philip; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrahousehold finances offer a window into the crossroads between the market domain’s emphasis on self-reliance and the family domain’s emphasis on interdependence. Modern couples confront tensions between ideals of mutual family interests and values of individualism, a departure from fitting themselves into culturally expected family arrangements of the past. How these social changes impact progress towards gender equality is not well understood. The dissertation aims are to: (1) identify mechanisms associated with different types of money arrangements in families, and (2) examine the association between financial arrangements and gender inequality in families. To meet these aims, I used data from two sources. First, I used multinomial modeling of 2012 International Social Survey Programme data to show cohabiting couples in countries with greater gender equality partially integrated their money instead of keeping it separate. Married couples pooled money regardless of country-level gender equality. Findings suggest that different cultural logics operate in married and cohabiting partnerships across gendered contexts, rather than cohabitation functioning as a weaker form of marriage. Second, I devised a novel survey experiment to collect the first nationally representative sample of U.S. adults’ attitudes about income sharing in families. Results challenge the notion that marriage distinctively encourages support for financial integration in families. Findings also revealed that respondents believed higher-earning partners ought to hold back a greater absolute value of their earnings for personal use, allowing inequality in labor market rewards to perpetuate unequal conditions within families. I also used this data to disentangle the mechanisms associated with perceptions of decision-making authority. Findings indicated higher relative-earners within families were not regarded as entitled to the final word in decisions. Whether respondents considered earnings individually or community owned did not explain the lack of association between relative earnings and decision-making clout. Instead, findings showed a significant association between the fictional decider’s gender and respondents’ perceptions of fairness. Specifically, when women were presented as the decider over monetary family choices, unilateral decision making about monetary items was viewed more favorably. Collectively, these findings suggest gender socialization theories are essential to explaining persistent gender inequality in families.Item STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT EMOTIONS IN CHINESE CHEMISTRY CLASSROOMS(2017) Gong, Xiaoyang; Ketelhut, Diane Jass; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Achievement emotions are critical for students’ academic performance and career choices. The previous literature has focused on one specific type of achievement emotions – test anxiety – in Western contexts and neglected other various emotions experienced in different occasions such as attending classes. The present study aims to address the research gap by examining students’ achievement emotions in a specific cultural and subject context – Chinese high school chemistry classrooms. Subjects were 103 16 or 17-year-old eleventh-grade students (45 female and 58 male) from two chemistry classes in the same high school in China. The qualitative and quantitative data was collected from four sources: pre- and post- surveys, open-response questions, classroom observations and teacher/student interviews. This dissertation examined Chinese students’ achievement emotions from both theoretical and practical perspectives. First, it theoretically investigated the dimensions of Chinese students’ achievement emotions in traditional chemistry classrooms and how these dimensions were related to its antecedent (i.e., chemistry self-efficacy) and effect (i.e., classroom engagement). The factor analysis indicated two distinct factors emerged from Chinese students’ emotions: positive emotions and shame (one specific type of negative emotions). The structural equation modeling showed that both chemistry self-efficacy and positive emotions were significant and positive predictors of students’ classroom engagement. Chemistry self-efficacy also significantly and positively predicted students’ positive emotions while predicting students’ perceptions of shame negatively. However, the path from shame to classroom engagement was not significant after controlling for positive emotions. Second, it practically explored how one specific pedagogical strategy of integrating the computer simulation – a visualization tool to review content knowledge – influenced students’ perceptions of achievement emotions and related affective variables (i.e., chemistry self-efficacy and engagement). Independent sample t-tests showed that the computer simulation significantly increased students’ chemistry self-efficacy beliefs and positive emotions. In contrast, its effects on negative emotions and classroom engagement were not significant. By scrutinizing qualitative data from different sources, I provided explanations for the computer simulation’s role in influencing the above four affective variables.Item EFFECTS OF THREATS TO GROUPS ON INGROUP-PROSOCIAL BEHAVIORS AND ORIENTATIONS(2017) Kerns, Kristin; Lucas, Jeffrey W; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research investigates how threats to people’s ingroups promote ways of thinking and behaving that benefit these groups (ingroup prosociality). Drawing on terror management theory and other relevant literature, I propose that threats promote ingroup prosociality, and that threats play an important role in explaining why members of collectivistic societies (e.g., Eastern) tend to exhibit more ingroup prosociality than members of individualistic societies (e.g., Western). Three experimental studies isolated effects of threats on outcomes I propose reflect ingroup prosociality: holistic versus analytic types of cognitive and social orientations (Study 1), upholding status orders in groups (Study 2), and promoting the legitimacy of power in groups (Study 3). To experimentally manipulate threat, participants wrote about either a threatening or non-threatening situation. In the group studies (2 and 3), the threat situation was also part of the task itself. Study 1 provides some support for increased ingroup prosociality when threatened, and some evidence for differences by culture and type of threat. Though results generally suggest that Americans respond more ingroup prosocially than Indians, they do not provide compelling evidence of consistent cross-cultural patterns as predicted. Study 2 provides only minimal support for threat increasing adherence to status orders. Study 3 provides a great deal of support for threat increasing promotion of the legitimacy of power structures, and results suggest especially strong responses among high-status participants with low-status partners. For each study, I also address some results in the opposite direction predicted. Taken together, the results only somewhat support my proposed ingroup prosociality worldview theory. Alternatively, patterns in results suggest that threatened ingroup members may be motivated to preserve their self-esteem and reduce their anxiety. Though this self-serving explanation is consistent with terror management theory, it is not consistent with the ingroup prosociality worldview initially proposed. Overall, the results provide evidence that threat (1) affects both behaviors and orientations (many proposed to reflect ingroup prosociality), which warrant consideration together as defensive responses to threats, and (2) increases promoting the legitimacy of power based on status in some situations. I discuss limitations, implications for theory and potential leadership interventions, and directions for future work.Item SPINNING NARRATIVES ACROSS POLITICAL DIVIDES: HARNESSING THE CULTURAL POWER OF A STORY WELL-TOLD(2016) Glacel, Ashley; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how two American storytellers, considered by many in their to be exemplary in their craft, rely on narrative strategies to communicate to their audiences on divisive political topics in a way that both invokes feelings of pleasure and connection and transcends party identification and ideological divides. Anna Quindlen, through her political columns and op-eds, and Aaron Sorkin, through his television show The West Wing, have won over a politically diverse fan base in spite of the fact that their writing espouses liberal political viewpoints. By telling stories that entertain, first and foremost, Quindlen and Sorkin are able to have a material impact on their audiences on both dry and controversial topics, accomplishing that which 19th Century writer and activist Harriet Farley made her practice: writing in such a way to gain the access necessary to “do good by stealth.” This dissertation will argue that it is their skilled use of storytelling elements, which capitalize on the cultural relationship humans have with storytelling, that enables Quindlen and Sorkin to achieve this. The dissertation asks: How do stories shape the beliefs, perspectives, and cognitive functions of humans? How do stories construct culture and interact with cultural values? What is the media’s role in shaping society? What gives stories their power to unite as a medium? What is the significance of the experience of reading or hearing a well-told story, of how it feels? What are the effects of Quindlen’s and Sorkin’s writing on audience members and the political world at large? What is lost when a simplistic narrative structure is followed? Who is left out and what is overlooked? The literature that informs the answers to these questions will cross over and through several academic disciplines: American Studies, British Cultural Studies, Communication, Folklore, Journalism, Literature, Media Studies, Popular Culture, and Social Psychology. The chapters will also explore scholarship on the subjects of narratology and schema theory.Item Tightness-Looseness in the United States: Ecological Predictors and State Level Outcomes(2014) Harrington, Jesse Ryan; Gelfand, Michele J; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness-looseness (strength of punishment and degree of permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, and its association with various ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological and man-made threats--more natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater external threat--predict increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness. Compared with loose states, tight states have more social stability, indicated by lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have relatively higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness. In all, tightness-looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation seen across the 50 states of the United States of America.Item PREFERENCE-FOR-SOLITUDE, FRIENDSHIP SUPPORT, AND INTERNALIZING DIFFICULTIES DURING EARLY ADOLESCENCE IN THE U.S.A. AND CHINA(2014) Wang, Jennifer M.; Rubin, Kenneth H.; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social withdrawal has been associated with adjustment difficulties across development. Although much is known about shyness, little is known about preference-for-solitude; even less is known about how friendship might influence its relations with adolescent adjustment across different cultures. In particular, despite the significance of friendship for youth adjustment, not much is known about the ways in which friendship quality might lead to different adjustment outcomes for youth who prefer solitude; even less is known about these relations across different cultures. Accordingly, the overall goal of this research was to examine the relations between preference-for-solitude, friendship support, and internalizing difficulties during early adolescence in the U.S.A. and China. Specifically, this research examined the moderating role of friendship support in the relations between preference-for-solitude and internalizing difficulties (negative affect, negative self-esteem) in early adolescence across the U.S.A. and China. The U.S.A sample comprised 300 American youth (121 boys; M age = 14.28 years, SD = .51) from the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. The China sample comprised 201 youth living in Beijing, China (86 boys; M age = 14.21 years, SD = .62). Participants across both samples completed self- reports of social withdrawal (shyness; preference-for-solitude), friendship support, and internalizing difficulties (negative affect; negative self-esteem). Results from structural equation modeling demonstrated that preference-for-solitude and shyness emerged as related but unique dimensions of withdrawal across both the U.S.A. and China. Consistent with previous research, preference-for-solitude was positively associated with negative affect and negative self-esteem across both samples. In the U.S.A., friendship support significantly moderated the link between preference-for-solitude and negative self-esteem: preference-for-solitude was most associated with negative self-esteem beyond shyness for American youth with low friendship support. This was not found for negative affect; friendship support did not significantly moderate the effect of preference-for-solitude on negative affect in American youth. In China, friendship support did not significantly moderate any of the relations between preference-for-solitude and internalizing difficulties. Rather, for Chinese youth, preference-for-solitude and friendship support contributed independently beyond the effects of shyness to negative affect and negative self-esteem. In summary, preference-for-solitude was positively associated with negative affect and negative self-esteem in early adolescence across the U.S.A. and China. In the U.S.A., preference-for-solitude was most associated with negative self-esteem for youth with low friendship support. In addition to contributing to the developmental literature on preference-for-solitude, findings highlight the role of close interpersonal relationships for understanding the heterogeneity of withdrawal in development and across different cultures.Item The Rebel Cafe: America's Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934-1963(2014) Duncan, Stephen Riley; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From 1934 through 1963, New York and San Francisco nightspots were community institutions and public forums for radical cultural producers, intellectuals, and political dissidents. This dissertation explores bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses in bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach as nodal points in alternative social networks connecting patrons and performers marginalized by their Left politics, race, gender, or sexual orientation. It traces unconventional ideas from subterranean domains through their dissemination by the mass media, examining how local political discourse and cultural diffusion informed social change in the twentieth-century United States. This study illuminates nightclubs' cultural function, shedding new light on familiar subjects such as the Beat Generation, jazz, civil rights, and social satire, and linking the Left's Cultural Front of the 1930s to 1950s dissident culture. Nightspots provide useful models to study identity formation and oppositional political consciousness, as patrons and performers challenged dominant social norms through cultural avant-gardism, explorations of sexuality and gender, and interracial alliances. Tourism, meanwhile, contributed to the extension of new social norms into the mainstream. Moreover, drinking establishments served a vital function within the public sphere as spaces of discussion and debate which both critiqued and contributed to mass-media content. As outspoken nonconformists clashed with conservative critics, the result was sometimes legal woes for oppositional figures, from the anarchist libertarians who met in urban cafes in the 1930s to gay-rights activists and the controversial comic Lenny Bruce. Yet the art, literature, music, and satire that emerged from the nightclub underground of the 1950s proved to be forces for social liberation, showing the relation between culture and politics. Subcultural networks provided psychological and material support to the budding gay liberation and feminist movements, as well as the Black Freedom Struggle. By examining the use of public space and built environments, and charting the confluence of culture, politics, and urban geography, "The Rebel Cafe" demonstrates how historical subjects transformed American society by investing nightspots with significance as sites of public discourse.
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