At more than three million, Filipina/o Americans are one of the largest ethnic minority groups in the United States. Yet, few studies have focused on the experiences of Filipina/o Americans in institutions of U.S. higher education. Given the increasing disparity in degree achievement between first and second generation Filipina/o Americans, this qualitative study investigated the challenges to persistence that Filipina/o American undergraduates have faced in college and identified resources and strategies that have facilitated their survival in higher education. Through individual interviews and a focus group, participants shared their experiences in a private, Catholic, and predominantly White institution. This study found that challenges to persistence included feelings of cultural dissonance between Filipina/o Americans and a predominantly White and affluent student body, feelings of invisibility and marginality due to lack of representation in the institution’s academic and social spheres, and personal academic challenges. Their stories also elucidated that despite these struggles, students were able to persist. Campus subcultures such as ethnic and cultural organizations, an Asian-interest sorority, and service organizations were primary factors in persistence. Additionally, the support of family was key in fostering participants’ educational aspirations. Institutional characteristics such as size, religious affiliation and mission, and available resources were also cited as important factors in building their commitment to persist. The stories shared in this study are a testament to the need to destabilize dominant narrative of persistence in higher education to include Filipina/o American students who are often overlooked as a result of the model minority myth.

It is thus the purpose of this study to explore the educational aspirations of a group of high school students whose ethnic background is Chinese with the intention of filling the gap in sociological research that has overlooked the Chinese community. As there are many opposing theories on the subject of aspiration, this case study of Chinese students seeks to clarify some of the theoretical perspectives and their problems. Moreover, any study of a minority group would inevitably expose some of the problems that the group faces. Once the nature of the problems is identified and understood, hopefully, solutions may be forthcoming. It is for these research, theoretical, and practical reasons that the present study is undertaken.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation illustrates the cultural dimension of globalization by examining how the ascendance of South Korean popular culture, i.e., the Korean Wave, reshapes the global imagination and transforms the locality of Korean Americans in Philadelphia. As an ethnographic global media study, I conducted in-depth interviews and participated in Korean cultural events/meetings, as well as visited the sites of living for Korean Americans in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. My research finds that advances in the digitalized media environment made my informants consume copious transnational Korean media every day and individualized their media consumption. Accordingly, their perceptions of Korea/Asia/U.S.’s places in the world are complicated and their ethnic identity has become significant. Their global imaginations also intersect with negotiating gender roles, perceiving attractiveness, and planning future paths. This shift contributes to construction of the in-between identities of Korean Americans by denaturalizing ideas and cultural elements in both Korea and the U.S. Most distinctively, the rise of the Korean Wave stimulates global imagination among young second generation Korean Americans to aspire to and operate their agency in a transnational context that their parents’ generation barely anticipated. Finally, the upsurge of the Korean Wave drives Korean Americans to participate in transforming localities rooted in thickened connectivities and activities centering on Korean popular culture across intra/inter-ethnic groups locally and globally. This conversely facilitates intense engagement and belonging in the local spaces of community among Korean Americans. My study shows how transnational media flow under conditions of globalization positively influences immigrants to embrace their own ethnic identities and local spaces. On the other hand, it implies that there should be further examination of different boundaries of global imagination rooted in gender/class differences as well as race/ethnicity. / Media & Communication

My dissertation examines the depression prevalence, symptom patterns and dimension, and mental health service use among Chinese Americans. The purpose of this research is to, 1) provide epidemiological data on the prevalence of depression among Chinese Americans, 2) examine sociocultural impacts on the prevalence and specific symptoms patterns of depression, and 3) generate implications for more culturally-sensitive approaches in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. I use secondary data from the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Studies (CPES). The CPES consists of three nationally representative surveys conducted between 2001 and 2003. Each of three substantive chapters attempts to a set of issues, and together they contribute to the literature on generational differences in mental health status and help-seeking behaviors among Chinese Americans. The first substantive chapter examines depression prevalence and correlates among different generations of Chinese Americans, using non-Hispanic whites as a comparison group, using weighted multinomial logistic regression. Results of the study indicate that Chinese Americans in general have a lower risk of depression than do non-Hispanic whites. Moreover, the prevalence and correlates of depression do not show a linear trend of difference from first to second to third-or-higher generation Chinese Americans, and then to non-Hispanic whites; rather, the risk of depression and its associated with social relational factors present distinct patterns for first and second generation Chinese Americans, compared to third-or-higher generation Chinese Americans and non-Hispanic whites. Specifically, friend network and extended family network play different roles in their influence on depression risk for different generations of Chinese Americans. In the Chapter Four, I conduct exploratory factor analysis to examine two subgroups of Chinese Americans, the foreign-born and the US-born, and compare them to the non-Hispanic whites. I also conduct weighted binary logistic regression to examine the patterns of depressive symptoms for Chinese Americans (separate by nativity status) and compare the two groups to non-Hispanic whites. I also examine how demographic characteristics and social factors are related to different dimensions of depressive symptoms for each group. I also find very similar factors structures of DSM-IV depressive symptoms among foreign-born Chinese Americans, US-born Chinese Americans, and non-Hispanic whites. For all three groups, suicidal ideation or attempt is a construct that is distinct from the rest of the symptoms items. The three groups have different social correlates, yet there are only minor differences in the social correlates for each one of the four depression dimensions within each group. Chronic physical condition is the most consistently significant predictor, for the negative affect, somatic symptoms, and cognitive symptoms among the two Chinese groups, and for all four dimensions of depression among non-Hispanic whites. Finally, in Chapter Five, I find significant heterogeneity of exclusive complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by race/ethnicity and generational status, as well as English proficiency, gender, age, marital status, education, employment status, having insurance, and having any probably psychiatric disorder. Specifically, first generation Chinese immigrants lag behind second, third-or-higher generation Chinese Americans, and non-Hispanic whites in the likelihood of using exclusive CAM services, as well as any services in general. In addition, this chapter finds that exclusive CAM service use was more popular than the use of only conventional Western medicine or a combination of both, among all Chinese Americans except for the second generations. The findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the pattern of mental health service use among Chinese Americans. / Sociology

In The Rhetorical Making of the Asian/Asian American Face: Reading and Writing Asian Eyelids, I examine representations of East Asian blepharoplasty in online video in order to gain a sense of how cultural values change over time. Drawing on scholarship in and around rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, Asian American rhetoric, cultural studies, Asian American studies, and postcolonial theory alongside qualitative data analysis of approximately fifty videos and the numerous viewer comments that accompany them, this study is a rhetorical analysis of the discourse on East Asian blepharoplasty in online video. These videos--ranging from mass media excerpts and news reports, to journals of healing and recovery, to short lectures on surgeon techniques, to audience commentary--offer insight into how social time is negotiated in the cross-cultural public sphere of YouTube. I do my analysis in two steps, first looking at how rhetors rationalize the decision to get blepharoplasty, and second, examining the temporal logics that ground these rationalizations. As result, I've identified five tropes through which people rationalize double eyelid surgery: racialization, emotionologization, pragmatization, the split between nature and technology, and agency. Moreover, I've identified at least five temporal logics that ground these tropes: progress, hybridization, timelessness, efficiency, and desire. Using these two sets of findings I build a framework for the analysis, production and organization of multimodal representations of bodies.

This thesis addresses how Japanese and Japanese Americans may have lived and been perceived in Virginia from 1900s through the 1950s. This work focuses on their positions in society with comparisons to the nation, particularly during the “Jim Crow” era of “colored” and “white,” and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It highlights various means of understanding their positions in Virginia society, with emphasis on Japanese visitors, marriages of Japanese in Virginia, and the inclusion of Japanese in higher education at Roanoke College, Randolph-Macon College, William and Mary, University of Virginia, University of Richmond, Hampden-Sydney College, and Union Theological Seminary. It also takes into account the Japanese experience in Virginia during Japanese internment, while focusing on the Homestead, Virginia, as well as the experiences of Japanese students and soldiers, which ultimately showed Virginia was distinct in its mild treatment towards the Japanese as compared to the West Coast.