College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Institutional Involvement and the Mental Health Effects of Perceived Neighborhood Disorder in Old Age: The Role of Personal and Divine Control(2007-04-23) Bierman, Alex; Milkie, Melissa A.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous research has shown that perceptions of neighborhood disorder are related to increased levels of psychological distress. Neighborhood disorder may be especially salient for older adults because the transitions associated with aging heighten the salience of the neighborhood as an arena for social interaction. A stress-process perspective suggests that the effects of neighborhood disorder on mental health may be indirect, and mediated through harm in elders' self-concepts, but also that the structural arrangements in which individuals are embedded may protect elder's mental health by protecting the self. I add to this perspective by focusing on engagement in family and religious institutions as primary indications of enmeshment in the structural arrangements of society. Using a longitudinal study of older adults, I examine whether marriage prevents the mental health effects of perceived neighborhood disorder by protecting mastery, and whether attendance at religious services and prayer protect elders' mental health by preventing loss of a second type of perceived control, sense of divine control. Results show that marriage prevents the effects of neighborhood disorder on depression and anger by preventing a loss of mastery. Further, losses in mastery strengthen the effects of neighborhood disorder on mental health, but only for women and the less educated. Neighborhood disorder is also related to loss of sense of divine control, but only for elders with greater levels of education, and religious involvement helps prevent these effects. However, this moderation provides no mental health benefits, and change in sense of divine control does not alter the relationship between neighborhood disorder and mental health. A primary contribution of this dissertation is that it places the effects of perceived neighborhood disorder in a larger structural context by demonstrating that they are contingent on engagement in the social structures which pattern human behavior and sustain the structure of society.Item The emergence of a local memorial landscape in the aftermath of violent tragedy: a study of Baltimore's Dawson murders, 2002-2005(2007-02-27) Steele, Christopher Perry; Geores, Martha E.; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Memorial landscapes are inextricably linked to the processes of national, regional, local, and individual identity formation; and are tightly bound to notions of place and space. A rich body of literature exists in the social sciences on the structure and function of national scale memorial landscapes. A nascent body of literature on informal memorial works and landscapes is emerging in the social sciences. The current study bridges these bodies of literature by investigating the collection of memorial interventions as elements of a single memorial landscape and by focusing on local, human-scale remembrance over a three years period. A triangulated, multi-method, qualitative research design has been applied to the investigation of the material, discursive, and representational components of the memorial landscape which has emerged in Baltimore's Oliver neighborhood in response to the murder of all seven members of the Dawson family on October 16, 2002. The memorial landscape is viewed here as the manifestation of the community's negotiation between the production of space and the making of place. The data reveal that the initial years in the formation of a local-scale memorial landscape are bound up with complex sociopolitical processes. The outcomes of this research are that the formation of the local-scale memorial landscape is a complex and dynamic expression of sociopolitical identity and power; that memory work is transformative with regard to space and place; that there is merit in a more inclusive definition of the memorial landscape; that multiple geographic scales produce the memorial landscape; and that participation in local-scale memory work diminishes over time. Future research should focus upon the variability of memory work across race, class, gender, faith and geography at the local scale. Such an investigation has the potential to yield greater degrees of understanding of complexity and ambiguity of local-scale identity formation..