College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item Family Reputation in Asian Indian American Women: An Exploration of Its Implications and Emotional Consequences(2023) Sheth, Anjali; O'Neal, Colleen R; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Asian Indian American young women are often torn between two incompatible cultures, Eastern and Western. The former promotes collectivism while the latter promotes individualism. In addition to this internal cultural conflict, there is the added obligation of maintaining one’s family reputation which can create challenges for young women who are navigating these opposing cultures. The specific goal of this study was to understand how Asian Indian American undergraduate women experience and perceive family reputation, in addition to its impacts on their emotional experience, emotional coping, and mental health. The method involved semi-structured interviews with ten participants who identified as (a) Asian Indian American, (b) cis-gendered woman, (c) second-generation immigrant, (d) the child of two parents born in India, and (e) an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland. For analyses, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was used to code and develop themes that emerged from the interview narratives. Results yielded six superordinate themes that defined family reputation through the perspective of the participants as well as their conceptualization of the various factors that are related to the construct (e.g., gender). The discussion addresses the importance of understanding this construct as it shows up for this sample given its relevance in various aspects of their lives.Item Inequality of suicide in South Korea: Unequal distribution of completed suicide and suicidal ideation(2020) Lee, Jaein; Cohen, Philip N.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Suicide in South Korea, considered a serious social issue, has been investigated by a number of scholars in multidisciplinary fields. However, suicide continues to be framed and focused only on limited aspects, such as having an individual-level focus on problems they face in only biomedical and psychiatric factors or only macro-level social contextual factors. Those one-sided approaches contain flaws from paying little attention, which results in an incomprehensive understanding of suicide occurring in society. This dissertation has three primary aims to examine: (1) major influential factors of suicide rates in South Korea counties from 2005–2013, (2) gender, age group-specific influential factors of suicide rate of South Korea in 2005 and 2010, and (3) individual level inequality of suicidal ideation in South Korea from 2007–2017 controlling province level regional predictors. County-level suicide rates were lower in the counties with higher population density and crude birth rate. In contrast, counties with higher crude divorce rates had higher expected suicide rates. For age group- and gender-specific suicide rates, all age groups had higher suicide rates in 2010 than 2005 after holding all other variables constant. Especially for the elderly suicide rate, counties with a higher proportion of the elderly were associated with a lower suicide rate, indicating the social network effect. The risk of suicidal ideation was higher for females, older age groups, lower-income, unemployed, not currently married, negative health status (stressed, bad health, depression without care).Item HAVE THE LOCAL PEOPLE BECOME INVISIBLE? A CASE STUDY OF A MILITARY INSTALLATION ON JEJU ISLAND, SOUTH KOREA.(2018) Jo, Nayoung; Geores, Martha; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the effects of the construction of a military base on local communities on Jeju Island, South Korea. The South Korean military's intent in building these facilities is to demonstrate military sovereignty to neighboring countries while also providing socio-economic benefits to the local population (Korean Navy, Ministry of National Defense of Korea). However, local communities and NGOs continue to resist contemporary military construction policies due to the ecological, social and economic impacts of this process, which are exacerbated by the government’s unilateral approach and its failure to implement a system where the surrounding localities can influence construction policies (Sze et al., 2009). While resistance to military facilities is widely documented, this research highlights the disconnect between the different political scales represented by the military and the local community, or those who are empowered and the average local citizen, whose voice has been marginalized. This study focuses on the local people’s experience through the theoretical frame of environmental justice, and the concepts of scale and political ecology while using phenomenology to analyze open-ended interview data. This research concluded that 1) the local people were made voiceless and invisible through marginalization by the government; 2) this case is an environmental injustice case by identifying how the current process marginalizes local communities and environmental impacts through the analytical frames of environmental justice and the concept of scale; and 3) the combination of environmental justice theory and the concept of scale from political ecology is a more effective application of this study and can contribute to future related studies.Item PLACE AND CASTE IDENTIFICATION: DISTANCIATION AND SPATIAL IMAGINARIES ON A CASTE-BASED SOCIAL NETWORK(2014) Sam, Jillet Sarah; Ritzer, George; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis studies the potency of place in mobilizing social categories, and its implications for both social categories and places. I use the theory of distanciation to study associations between caste identity and place. I conducted an ethnographic study of a caste-based digital group, the Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar, to understand the connections and disconnections between the Thiyya caste and Malabar from the perspectives of different sets of actors involved in the identification of caste, namely the nation-state and members of this caste-based network. The nation-state knows the Thiyya caste in a manner that is disconnected from Malabar, while the Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar seek to re-emphasize the identification of this caste through the region. Participant observation and in-depth interviews indicate that through references to Malabar, the group seeks to establish a Thiyya caste identity that is distinct from the Ezhavas, a caste group within which the nation-state subsumes them. I demonstrate that references to Malabar serve to counter the stigma that the Cyber Thiyyars of Malabar experience when the spatially abstract categorization of the Thiyyas interacts with notions of caste inferiority/superiority. Further, it serves as a mobilizational tool through which they hope to negotiate with the nation-state for greater access to affirmative action. I also demonstrate that caste identification continues to be relevant to the production of place. Place-based identification of the Thiyyas influences the manner in which the group envisions the physical boundaries of Malabar and how other social groups can belong to this region. Based on this analysis, I argue that framework of distanciation should incorporate not only the experience of place and social relations, but also how they are known and represented. This dissertation establishes that even though social categories such as caste and place are not conventionally understood to be connected to each other, it is important to study the associations between them. Although the new media and globalization may prompt to us to think that place does not matter anymore, I establish that this caste group uses the language of place to organize and mobilize itself on a stronger basis in precisely this context.