Ph.D. Dissertations

Recent Dissertations

2008

Kristen Drummey

The Role of Cultural & Economic Capital in Education 1972-2002

10-12 am on 4/16/2008 in Cushing 333

Beginning with Bourdieu’s observations on Algerian schools in the 1950’s, the role of cultural capital in the education system has been conjectured, confirmed, and scrutinized.  He and other scholars have subsequently examined the influence of cultural and economic capital on academic success.  While many studies have confirmed Bourdieu’s assertion that cultural capital plays a role in social reproduction, others have asserted that it can also affect student’s opportunities for social mobility.  The conclusions drawn depend profoundly on how cultural capital is operationalized.  Cultural capital acquired prior to schooling is associated with the social reproduction model, while that acquired through participation in school-based cultural activities is associated with social mobility.

Based on surveys undertaken by the National Center for Educational Statistics of three cohorts of students – the graduating class of 1972, 8th graders in 1988, and sophomores in 2002 – as well as a series of follow-up surveys for the two older groups, this study uses hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the role of both student and school levels measures of three types of cultural capital and economic capital on a wide range of academic outcomes.

Parental and family-based cultural capitals are used to confirm the role of cultural capital in social reproduction, while significant effects for school-based cultural capital also offer support for the social mobility model.  Student-level effects have a larger impact on outcomes than school-level variables. Along with the analysis of separate models of social reproduction and social mobility, an investigation of equations for where all four types of capital are present indicates that social reproduction is the dominant effect of cultural capital throughout all three cohorts and for both immediate and long-term outcomes.

Joyce Mandell, Ph.D.

Before, During And After Bricks And Mortar: Network Organizing As A Community Development Strategy

This is a case study of Lawrence Community Works (LCW), a community development corporation (CDC), in the mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.As a “deviant” case, LCW serves as a model in the movement for organizing truly community controlled development.This ethnographic study assesses the variables that make a neighborhood based organization a locus of participatory democracy. For Lawrence Community Works (LCW), the question is not whether to base development on what the community wants.Organizing “before, during and after” bricks and mortar is a given basic mode of operating.The question becomes:What kind of community organizing?  What is the best way to engage residents to shape the development agendas in neighborhoods and cities?  How can CDCs work with people to create a truly engaged civic culture on the streets?

This dissertation makes a contribution to the academic literature on community development corporations by demonstrating how CDCs can theoretically and in practice become true vehicles of grassroots neighborhood owned development. The case study of LCW demonstrates that CDCs are able to organize residents of a neighborhood effectively and become internally democratic neighborhood vehicles directing local neighborhood change. Secondly, this dissertation makes a contribution to the theories and literature on community organizing while drawing out the variables of a new method of community organizing based on network theory. A comparison of network organizing to traditional Alinsky style community organizing highlights the theoretical and practical differences between the models.  The third contribution of this case study is to the literature on social capital and specifically the academic debate on whether there is a link between social capital and social change. Through an analysis of LCW’s success in community building emerges a model of how network building can be directly linked to civic power. This case study challenges the literature in the field that denies the link between “picnics” and “power”. Ultimately, the true test to the power of this work is if this case study can serve as a model and template in testing out the replication of this model in other contexts.

Deb Piatelli, Ph.D.

Stories Of Inclusion? Power, Privilege And Cross-Difference Organizing In A Contemporary Peace And Justice Network

This multi-method, qualitative study of the organizing processes of a predominately white, middle-class peace and justice social movement network enhances the literature on cross-difference organizing by bridging the literatures of social movement theory, critical race studies, and feminist theorizing on intersectionality and community organizing, challenging common assumptions about inclusivity and difference. Why are white, middle-class progressives experiencing difficulty working across racial and class differences? What are the obstacles and what is being done to overcome them? How do these activists approach cross-difference organizing when race, class, and other intersecting identities can often prevent cooperation? What type of movement structures, cultures, and practices can best facilitate building alliances across differences? Since working across race and class had been historically problematic for the white, middle-class peace movement, I was interested in uncovering how a newly formed network planned to overcome this history. What lessons might be learned? How are people within this network working to create a multi-racial, multi-class movement? How and to what extent are individuals and organizations within this network building relationships, goals, and strategies together? What might be uniting these actors and sustaining collective action?

This dissertation explores these questions through the examination of the practices, beliefs, and social biographies of a predominately white, middle-class peace and justice network that is working to transform itself into a multi-racial, multi-class network. “Stories of inclusion?” refers to the myriad of ways marginalized populations have been historically silenced and excluded from the peace movement. Stories of inclusion questions whether this network’s organizing practices are silencing and excluding diverse populations despite its commitment to create an inclusive movement. This dissertation explores the processes of collection action and examines the context in which members of this network are working, or not working, across differences.

The data provide a greater understanding as to how power and privilege influence the dynamics of cross-difference organizing, as well as what organizing practices may best facilitate inter-racial and inter-class solidarity. This research also calls attention to the continuing importance of race for those collective actors attempting to construct inclusive movements across diverse groups, and raises critical questions for this network as well as the larger community of progressives working for peace and justice. Can a broader definition of peace work be more successful in changing U.S. policies? Is the goal of a creating a unified, multi-racial, multi-class movement feasible and desirable, and if so, what form should it take?

 

Abigail Brooks, PhD

Growing Older in a ‘Surgical Age’: An Analysis of Women’s Lived Experiences and Interpretations of Aging in an Era of Cosmetic Surgery.

This dissertation explores women’s lived experiences and interpretations of aging against the contextual backdrop of the growing normalization of cosmetic surgery. C. Wright Mills’ (1959; 1999: 21, 22) articulation of the “task and promise” of the sociological imagination—the reflexive interaction between “personal troubles” and “public issues”— inspired my investigation into the meanings women ascribe to aging in our contemporary era of commercialized medicine.  How do women make sense of growing older in a world of expanding anti-aging surgeries and technologies, in a world whereby the older woman’s body is increasingly targeted as source of profit?

Drawing from intensive interviews with women between the ages of 47 and 76 who are having and using, and refusing, anti-aging surgeries and technologies, themes of self, identity, and self-body relationships are analyzed. I also investigate the construction of my respondents’ attitudes and experiences of growing older in and through their immediate social milieu (including interactions with friends, family members, colleagues, and doctors.) Finally, I seek to illuminate the interplay between my respondents’ understandings of aging and their encounters with, and exposure to, the cultural prevalence of anti-aging surgeries and technologies at large—from media images of older women, to anti-aging surgery/technology print and television advertising campaigns, to marketing brochures and posters in doctors’ offices.

This dissertation is located at the intersection of four emergent sociological fields: critical gerontology; feminist age studies; sociology of the body, and feminist theories of the body. Even within these fields, the older woman’s body is relatively absent. Through giving voice to women’s articulations of self, body, and aging, my research empirically informs each of these fields and contributes new theorizations of the older woman’s body.

 

Delario Lindsey, PhD

Controlling the Spectacular World City: A Discursive Analysis of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Making of Giuliani's New York

The dissertation seeks to examine the relationship between crime/social control and the discursive production of World Cities (specifically New York).  Frame Critical Analysis is used as a method of de-coding the rhetoric shaping and informing not just crime/social policy in New York City since 1991, but the city itself.  The analysis seeks to demonstrate the ways in which narratives regarding safety and the control of violence are an integral component of the processes governing the acquisition and maintenance of "World City" status.  The 1999 slaying of African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York police officers is viewed as the consequence of particular "crime stories" constructed about New York City as a means of justifying the creation and implementation of crime/social policies and strategies that have proven to be particularly repressive for communities of color in the city.

 

2007

Michael Anastario, PhD

An Analysis of Violence Victimization and Women's Mental and Reproductive Health in Two Internally Displaced Populations

 

Mental and reproductive health consequences of violence victimization have been reported in various female populations, however these associations have not been tested among internally displaced persons (IDP’s), who already have elevated rates of psychiatric and reproductive health abnormalities. This dissertation examined associations between violence victimization, individual symptoms of depression, and simple reproductive health attributes using data from two probability samples of women: those displaced by the 2006 Gulf Coast hurricane season living in FEMA trailer parks in the United States, and those displaced by human conflict living in internal displacement camps in Darfur, Sudan (2005). Using logistic regression models, this study found that in the Gulf Coast sample, women who reported motor dysregulation and/or suicidality were more likely to be victims of sexual violence, and women with at least one failed pregnancy were more likely to be victims of any violence.  Further, women who used birth control and who exhibited motor dysregulation were more likely than any other subgroup to be victims of violence. In the Darfur sample, violence victimization data were not available, and secondary physiological indicators of violence (SNDV) were examined. Women who reported anhedonia were more likely to have experienced SNDV.  Further, among women with standard depressive symptoms, lack of birth control use elevated the likelihood of SNDV. To determine the prevalence of any lifetime violence victimization in the Darfur sample, logit coefficients derived from the Gulf Coast analyses were used to obtain propensity scores for lifetime victimization in Darfur, suggesting that the prevalence of any lifetime violence victimization in South Darfur is 57%.  This study demonstrates that there are clear associations between violence victimization and mental and reproductive health among female IDP’s.  The models developed in this study can be used to predict the prevalence of lifetime victimization in IDP populations where victimization screening is not possible. The results of this study will be particularly useful to practitioners working with female IDP’s who may not be permitted to directly screen for victimization.

 

Robert Levine, PhD

The Effects Of Organizational Democracy On Organizational Social Capital  

 

Using multilevel modeling, this dissertation examines the effects of the organizational democratic structures of employee ownership and participation in decision making on organizational social capital.  Non-managerial level employees (n=520) were surveyed in five traditionally owned companies matched to five employee owned ones.  The results show that participation has a positive and linear main effect on the strength of ties among co-workers and trust towards co-workers.  Employee ownership has a positive main effect on organizational identity, organizational commitment and reciprocity towards co-workers.  Ownership also moderates effect of participation on organizational identity, organizational commitment, trust towards managers, and reciprocity towards one’s company with employee owned companies having higher levels of these outcomes. 

The results also show how the effects of participation further differ between employee owned and traditionally owned companies.  In traditionally owned companies, participation has a curvilinear relationship with organizational commitment, trust in managers, and reciprocity towards managers.  Higher levels of participation are initially associated with increased levels of these outcomes, but the relationship reverses and increases in participation become associated with lower levels of these outcomes. 

However, within employee owned companies the effects are linear with respect to organizational commitment and trust towards managers, and less curvilinear for reciprocity towards companies.  Thus, in additional to higher levels of organizational social capital associated with organizational democracy, employee owned companies are in a better position to take advantage of the positive effects of participation in decision making.

William Wood, PhD

Asking More Of Our Institutions: The Promises And Limits of Restorative Justice In Clark County, WA

In 1999, the Clark County Juvenile Court (CCJC) in Washington State adopted the use of victim offender mediation for offenders and victims harmed by these crimes. The CCJC subsequently expanded the use of mediation to address a larger number of serious offenses; developed a separate unit within the court to address crime victims’ needs; and reoriented its diversion, probation and community service programs towards the inclusion of victims and community members into these practices. These changes were part of a larger shift towards the court’s adoption of “restorative justice,” a loosely aligned set of juvenile and adult justice practices that have become increasingly popular within the United States and elsewhere over the last two decades.

In this research I seek to better understand two questions, namely how or under what conditions do organizations such as juvenile courts change, and what do people do with restorative justice? I look first at the organizational changes that have taken place at the court in relation to its implementation of restorative justice and the integration of such practices throughout the court. I map the degree to which victims, offenders and community members have been afforded new decision-making capacities within the court’s diversion and probation processes. Within this organizational framework, I also consider how the court has navigated constraints and opportunities related to legal and political structures, funding, community support, support from other organizations, and internal problems related specifically to the culture of the court itself.

Secondly, I look at the experiences of victims, offenders and community members within three of the court’s restorative programs and interventions. Here, I give consideration as to what these groups and individuals do with restorative justice, as well as to how the standardization of juvenile justice practices in Washington State informs the limits and scope of the type of restorative work that can be done within this framework.

 

2006

Allen Fairfax, PhD

Challenging the Rules: The Merrimack Valley Project and the Construction of Public Space

The Merrimack Valley Project (MVP) is a regional organization of congregations, labor unions, and other community groups that began to come together in 1989 to address issues of common concern across the historic industrial district along the Merrimack River in northeastern Massachusetts. The MVP is a modern Alinsky-style organization (ASO). This means that it is a grassroots coalition working on multiple issues with a diverse set of participants and connected to an evolving community organizing tradition rooted in the work of Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation. This case study of the MVP provides an analysis of an exemplary ASO from the framework of participatory democracy. The particular question addressed is whether or not groups such as the MVP are able to find ways to institutionalize participatory democratic practices in the local/regional polity. As well as simply telling the story of the Merrimack Valley Project, the study also presents a conceptual framework for understanding the political “rule patterns” that dominate a local/regional polity and how the MVP organizes/constructs public spaces through its organizing work. These public spaces are the ground from which new rule patterns are practiced and linkages built with various power structures in the polity. In short, the study looks at how the MVP organizing practices challenge the dominant rule patterns and examines the internal organizational practices that allow those challenges to be sustained over the long run.

Adria Goodson, PhD

Bridging Institutions and Social Policy: Philanthropic Foundations and the Development of Federal Funding for After School Programs

Between 1997 and 2002, federal funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, an initiative that funds after school programs for school-age children, jumped from $1 million to $1 billion. This increase made this small federal program one of the fastest growing federal social provisions over the past half-century. This dissertation utilizes Skocpol and Amenta’s polity-centered approach of federal policy development and social movement theory to explain the process by which organizational actors worked over twenty years to transform the federal government’s relationship to after school programs. It demonstrates the opportunities for institutions and individuals to influence the development and structure of social provisions. The historical institutional model undertheorized the importance of philanthropic foundations due to a lack of focus on the pre-figurative processes that bring a particular social provision to the federal level in the first place. In this case, philanthropic organizations played a critical role as a bridging organization. This role is similar to and yet quite different from the role that voluntary organizations played in the early 20th century. Using in-depth interviews and historical evidence from federal legislative documents, philanthropic foundations and grassroots organizations, I document the process by which philanthropic foundations, and individuals within these organizations, collaborated with grassroots organizations, national advocates, and federal agencies to build national support for increased federal funding for after school programs, ultimately resulting in a significant increase in federal dollars for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program. In this case, philanthropic foundations are identified as one of the keys to political leverage in the development of United States federal policy. Finally, this case demonstrates that philanthropic foundations and state agencies are potential allies for grassroots advocacy organizations and social movement actors, not simply adversaries.

 

Aimee Van Wagenen, PhD

Doing Outreach, Doing Sexual Citizenship: Meanings of HIV Prevention Outreach to Men Who Have Sex with Men

This dissertation explores the meanings of HIV prevention outreach to gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. I begin the investigation of the meanings of outreach from the perspectives of outreach workers, but also expand my angle of vision to include an examination of the broader institutional discourses of public health and the state in which outreach is situated. In this, I conceive of outreach as an interpretive practice in which outreachers actively construct the meaning of the work but not wholly on their own terms; the meanings of outreach are  constrained by discursive structures. The research combines ethnographic methods and includes participant observation as an outreacher in a state-funded, largely volunteer outreach program and in the audience at several HIV prevention conferences, in-depth interviewing with outreachers and outreach program managers, and analysis of public health documents guiding HIV prevention.

Meanings of outreach cohere around differential understandings of the effectiveness of outreach and its measurement, around the tension between fixity and destabilization of sexual identity, and around the tensions between sexual liberation and regulation in understanding outreach. In the dissertation, I devote a chapter to each of these themes and also review the history of HIV prevention in the context of the history of the AIDS movement. Throughout the dissertation, I conceive of doing outreach as doing sexual citizenship. As volunteers, outreachers actively engage in civic participation in the realm of the sexual. They model a different kind of good sexual citizenship that rejects the compromises of mainstream sexual citizenship including the essentialization of sexual identity, the privatization of sexuality and the marginalization of gender dissonance and sexual deviance.

 

2005

John Shandra, Ph.D.

The Economics and Politics of Deforestation: A Quantitative, Cross-National Analysis

Most previous cross-national studies of deforestation have been criticized for being largely atheoretical. While these studies provide some initial insights into deforestation, the absence of theory is problematic because the choice of variables for models remains unguided in that variables are included according to data availability or other ad hoc reasons. I address this concern by conducting an empirical analysis of deforestation informed by five different perspectives using the stochastic impacts (STI) by regression (R) on population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T) or STIRPAT analytical framework. In doing so, I include variables not taken into account in previous research but theoretically relevant to any study of deforestation. These measures include democracy, international non-governmental organizations, and political protests. Initially, these variables do not explain a significant amount of variation in deforestation. However, subsequent analyses incorporating interaction terms suggest international non-governmental organizations and political protests reduce deforestation more in democratic nations than in repressive nations. Analyses also reveal that export partner concentration, commodity concentration, multinational corporate penetration, and International Monetary Fund conditionality increase deforestation more in repressive nations than in democratic nations. I increase the validity and reliability of the findings by estimating the models with three missing data techniques including listwise deletion, group mean substitution, and full information maximum likelihood estimation. Similarly, I use a variety of different model specifications. The findings remain stable and consistent regardless of the method for handling incomplete data and the indicators included in the models.

Sandra George O’Neil, Ph.D.

Environmental Justice In The Superfund Clean-Up Process

In this work, I examine the concerns of the next generation of environmental justice – namely tracing the impacts of race, class and family composition on environmental remediation, or clean-up efforts. This study focuses on environmental “cleanup” justice, and the differential process of Superfund listing across different socioeconomic, racial, gender, and family variables. The overall logic of my argument remains the same; poor people, people in communities of color, and single parent families are at an on-going disadvantage in the remediation process, as they are in the processes which lead to initial exposures. The influence of demographic variables in the Superfund clean up process however, is not as straightforward as past environmental justice research, which supported a more clear-cut relationship between poor and minorities and exposure to environmental hazards. The association between Superfund listings and marginalized populations is one with many fine distinctions since a Superfund listing is dependent on several changeable factors such as: the Superfund budget, community pressure and organization, the availability of alternative cleanup strategies outside the scope of the EPA, and changes in the implementation of the Superfund program itself. Given these complexities, we would expect to see the pattern of association between race, class, family composition and environmental clean-ups to have far more nuances than the relationship between these factors and environmental exposures.

 

2004

Eitan J. Alimi, PhD

The 1987 Palestinian Intifada – Cracks in the Israeli Second Republic

The study promotes a new perspective of inquiry into the analysis of the unprecedented 1987 Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. Combining theories of social movements and conflict study, I attempt to account for the so far neglected aspect in the literature on the Intifada: the reasons for the specific time context in which the Intifada consolidated. For accomplishing this, I combine two methods for data collection. As an exploratory method, I use in-depth interviews with several Palestinian grassroots activists and Israeli journalists and officials. Next, as an explanatory method, I analyze the content of three Palestinian dailies for examining the framing processes that take place in regards to (1) contention with Israeli forces and (2) internal Israeli events and developments throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The style and nature of Palestinian newspapers as a resource of political mobilization provides a rare opportunity for a researcher to grasp the process of social construction of meaning by a consolidating challenging collective actor. The study suggests that the Intifada’s inception is determined by a deepening Palestinian shared perception regarding ripe conditions to act collectively - an internal Israeli system-wide conflict over the future status of the occupied territories and the Palestinian populace inside them. The study suggests further that such a shared perception affects the internal relations among various rival Palestinian political actors and organizations such that a specific mode of action evolves and is elevated as the appropriate strategy for contentious politics. Finally, I argue that the tactics for contention Palestinian insurgents employ during the Intifada should be seen as a deliberate attempt to capitalize on their favored strategy, an attempt to influence the Israeli sociopolitical system and the international community, thereby increasing the prospects for political goals.

 

Isabel Araiza, PhD

How Alternative Definitions of Retirement and Social Class Shape Conclusions about the Retired Population

The conceptualization and operationalization of retirement remains a challenge in retirement research. Those studies which have examined multiple conceptualizations of retirement often limit the investigation to two, three, or four definitions of retirement. These studies also produce contradictory results with respect to the degree of overlap among various definitions of retirement. Moreover, in the investigation of the relationship between predictor variables and the probability of retirement, push and pull factors (such as pension receipt and health) are often the focal point of the inquiry. While most studies include in their analysis a class measure as a control variable for the model, seldom is the relationship between social class and the probability of retirement the focal point of investigation. This study employs data from the 1998 wave of the Health and Retirement Study to perform an extensive analysis of seven operationalizations of retirement and five operationalizations of social class to evaluate how the use of alternative definitions of retirement and social class shape conclusions drawn about the composition of the retired population. Analyses are performed for the entire sample selected for this study, as well as for Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and Non-Hispanic Black subgroups. The results of the analyses indicate that different operationalizations of retirement affect the characterization of the retired population; moreover the use of different operationalizations of social class influences the perception of the socio-economic condition of the retired population. Despite socio-economic achievements, the findings suggest that initial inequalities associated with ascriptive traits like race and gender continue to constrain women and minorities’ life course trajectories. While it is not possible to conduct a comprehensive examination of operationalizations of retirement in Gerontological literature, this study includes operationalizations of retirement that acknowledge retirement as an event, an identity, and a process.

 

Julia Childers, PhD

Achieving a ‘Beautiful Birth’: Holistic, Feminist and Medical Discourse in a Free- Standing Birth Center

In this dissertation I suggest that scholars should take seriously the social movement organizing that occurs inside mainstream institutions. My research takes up the issue of insider politics through examination of one of the most powerful discourses in our society: medical discourse and its incarnation in the institution of the hospital. I use ethnographic methods to develop a case study of the Baytown Birth Center, a free-standing birth center on the East Coast. In a renovated Victorian house on the campus of a public hospital, women are empowered to give birth according to a holistic, non-medicalized philosophy while attended by their family of choice, midwives, and doulas.

I argue that the Baytown Birth Center cultivates an identity as an alternative, counter-hegemonic health care group that remains part of the conventional Baytown Hospital. In order to achieve what midwives call a ‘beautiful birth’ and to continue to practice within the traditional institution of medicine, Birth Center midwives and staff draw on three discourses, strategically, to explain, justify, and negotiate their existence: holistic discourse, feminist discourse, and medical discourse. Organizational identity is not easy to categorize and is better understood as a weaving together of ideas rather than strict adherence to one set of beliefs. The maintenance of this complex identity requires the negotiation of situations in which these discourses come into conflict with one another. My findings contribute to the study of alternative health practices, social movement change within institutions, third wave iterations of the women’s movement, and organizational identity and culture.

 

Cheryl Holmes, PhD

Sacred Meets Secular: Commonality and Difference Associated with the Self-Determined Nature of the Sacred Christ-Centered and Secular Assertive Life Practice

This study describes what happens when sacred and secular meet in the day and life of the sacred Christ-centered Disciple and the secular assertive practitioner. It suggests there is a difference between ritualized Christianity and sacred Christ-centered life practice. The term orthodox is used to describe how the sacred Christ-centered population learns to view the Holy Bible as the literal Word of God. The term reflexive describes how individuals within the population learn to believe that the person of Christ lives within the heart of the Disciple of Christ. Individuals within the sacred Christ-centered life practice suggest that they surrender individual free will to Christ by accepting him as Savior and Lord. It is a life practice engulfed by reflecting on how Christ responded to tension-generating dilemmas and then normalizing the character of Christ when bombarded by contemporary tension-generating dilemmas. The three tension-generating dilemmas considered within the study are:

• Anger
• Sexual propensity to act on sexual desire while single
• Gossip and speaking ill of others

Within the study the above life practice is juxtaposed against secular Assertiveness in the attempt to uncover areas of commonality and difference associated with the two selfdetermined life practices. The term self-determined is used suggesting that at some point in a practitioner’s life, individuals self-determine that it is best to adopt precepts associated with either life practice. The individual desire becomes the acquisition of greater inner stability while living within a violent and confused world.

Moreover, the study assists in developing an appropriate vocabulary bridging the sociological, secular humanistic psychological, theological and literal orthodox Christcentered domains. One might ask why study the relationship between these populations? The answer to this question is twofold. The field of sociology has neglected comparative discourse of these groups. In neglecting this area of study, sociology can not comprehend the unique import of commonality and differences associated with the relationship existing between both life practices and the secular society wherein they exist. Additionally, the study provides the field of sociology opportunity to explore the import and impact Christcentered Disciples have within the secular world as they attempt to adopt biblical narrative while living within contemporary secular society.

Primary framing data is drawn from full-participant observation, in-depth interviews conducted with more than twenty five individuals and a survey of secular humanistic psychological literature. With one exception research participants are African American. Yet, research participants indicate that issues addressed in this project extend to anyone who self-ascribes to the literal-orthodox Christ-centered life practice. Diversity was sought in gender, education, economics and age. The sample includes men and women 25-40, and over, who completed college, high school or less. Clusters consist of at least five individuals in each group.

 

Charles Sarno, PhD

Power and the Spirit: Methodological Studies in a Black Apostolic Church

This dissertation examines the sociological workings of the Holy Spirit in a Black Apostolic Church located in the Boston area. Using both participant observation and intensive interviewing techniques, this research explores the variety of meanings the experience of the Holy Spirit has for church members at God’s Victorious Tabernacle. At the same time this research attempts to locate these subjective meanings of the church and its members within the immediate organizational and broader institutional contexts within which and against which they are generated. This research has three distinct but interrelated objectives that should make a significant contribution to the field of sociology in both the areas of religion and research methodology: 1) to provide a thick and rich ethnographic account of the worldview, meaning structures and rituals found in a black Apostolic Pentecostal church which would further add the few existing case studies on this topic; 2) to further exemplify and develop the theoretical concerns of a critically interpretative (phenomenological) sociology which links up this ap- proach with questions about the structuring effects of power in history, while not engaging in a completely form of reductive analysis; and 3) to follow the logic of a power reflexive methodological approach and thereby explore the knowledgeable possibilities, limitations and tensions of interpretative sociology itself as it desires to achieve understanding of a “sectarian” religious worldview vastly different from its own.

 

Leah Schmalzbauer, PhD

Striving and Surviving: A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families

Sociologists and anthropologists have focused considerable attention on contemporary transnational flows of capital, labor and culture, as well as on the ways in which communities create and maintain transnational ties. However very few have studied the specific role of the family in transnational processes and fewer still have looked at how families actually function in a transnational space. In this dissertation I address this gap in the literature by investigating how transnationalism works as a survival strategy in which families use the difference in living costs between Honduras and the United States to support household consumption. Drawing on data I gathered in Honduras and the United States from one week time diaries, in depth interviews, participant observation and interpretive focus groups, I look specifically at the experience and prospects of transmigrant labor in the United States; the aspirations and consumption practices of transnational family members in the United States and Honduras, especially as they relate to the American Dream; and I explore the ways in which families negotiate caretaking responsibilities, both financial and emotional, while striving and surviving in a transnational space. This is the first daily life study of undocumented immigrants and the first transnational analysis of  Honduran families.