Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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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    PUTTING PARENTHOOD IN PERSPECTIVE: THE TRANSITION TO ADULTHOOD, PARENTHOOD, AND CRIME FOR FORMERLY SANCTIONED AT-RISK YOUNG ADULTS
    (2014) Boonstoppel, Sarah; Paternoster, Raymond; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Qualitative research suggests that becoming a parent contributes to desisting patterns of crime for male and female offenders (Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph, 2002; Moloney et al., 2009), yet quantitative analysis provides less support for a relationship, especially for male offenders (Siennick and Osgood, 2008). This paper addresses this apparent disagreement by examining whether and how parenthood relates to involvement in crime among formerly sanctioned at-risk young adults. I analyze in-depth, semi-structured interviews from an ethnically diverse sample of men and women, parents and non-parents, ages 20 to 25, who participated in the Research on Pathways to Desistance study in Philadelphia. The accounts of parents and non-parents allowed me to explore the underlying social and subjective mechanisms in desisting and persisting patterns of crime. I found that many of the informants, persisters and desisters, engaged in intermittent offending and described qualitative changes in offending during the transition to adulthood. Informants associated movement in and out of crime with cognitive shifts, supervision and monitoring from others, and restructured routine activities, many of which were related to markers of adulthood, including parenthood. When informants persisted or returned to crime after periods of abstinence, it was often because these mechanisms and processes failed or were discarded. With respect to parenthood, many parents initially met the challenges of parenthood by selling drugs and other crime. Desisting patterns of crime were related to parents recognizing the consequences of their involvement in crime for their children and to an interdependent "package deal" that included employment and a co-parent. By contrast, persisting patterns were associated with informants seeing themselves as bad parents and with living apart from their children. Implications of these findings for theories of continuity and change in crime, future research, and policy are discussed.
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    Psychosocial Dimensions of Fatherhood Readiness in Low-Income Young Men
    (2009) Waters, Damian M; Roy, Kevin; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Researchers have a limited understanding of how men become ready for fatherhood, especially among young, low-income men in the transition to fatherhood. The present study draws a diverse sample (n = 53) enrolled in fatherhood programs in Midwestern cities. Life history interviews were conducted with the participants and grounded theory was employed to identify common themes among the narratives. Four cognitive dimensions of fatherhood readiness were identified by the current investigation: presumptive paternity and acknowledged paternity that one is a father, fatherhood vision, maturity, and men's perceptions of their provisional capacity. These contributed to the construction of narratives that describe fatherhood--trial readiness and decided readiness. Implications for social policies and programming are discussed.