Though there is significant academic interest in the law of religious freedom in Canada, there has been little research into the experiences of participants in religious freedom litigation. Based on a qualitative analysis of participant interviews and legal documents in three decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, this dissertation explores the social processes at play in that litigation. At issue in the three cases were, respectively, (1) the right of Jewish condominium co-owners to install ritual huts (succoth) on their balconies; (2) the right of a Sikh student to wear a ceremonial dagger (kirpan) in a public high school; and (3) the right of a Hutterite group to be exempted from the photo requirement on driver’s licences for religious reasons. This dissertation adds to the existing academic commentary by looking beyond the judicial decisions and incorporating firsthand accounts of lawyers, litigants, and expert witnesses in these cases. The substantive analysis is divided in three sections. First, the dissertation examines themes of overlapping legal systems in participant narratives. Litigants understood themselves to be subjects of both state and religious laws, and the particular interactions between these legal systems help refine theories of legal pluralism. Second, the work analyzes religious freedom litigation as cross-cultural communication. Specifically, the dissertation employs the normative criteria of respect and self-awareness found in the literature on cross-cultural communication to approach participant narratives and judicial decisions, finding both successes and failures in this regard. Third, the dissertation engages issues of belonging to the Canadian civic community inherent in participant narratives. All litigants told the stories of their litigation as part of their larger immigration and integration narratives, and successful litigants were quick to give positive accounts in this regard. The unsuccessful litigants told more complex stories of integration, complicating the analysis of the impact of a judicial decision on their narratives of civic belonging. Nevertheless, the dissertation argues that the notion of civic belonging ought to be explicitly taken into account by Canadian judgments when dealing with issues of religious freedom.

The purpose of this study was to empirically support and elaborate upon an integrative theory of career development by examining the worklife adjustment and career development experiences of new Canadian immigrant professionals. In focusing on the participants’ subjective views, the study provided an understanding of the lived experiences of this unique life-career transition, and in so doing, aimed to elaborate upon existing theories of career development towards the development and empirical substantiation of a comprehensive, diversity- and culturally- sensitive integrated meta-theory of the career development of immigrants in Canada. A qualitative methodology was employed and transcripts of in-depth interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory approach to data analysis. The central themes within the narratives that emerged were contrasted against an integrative career development theory and career development theoretical constructs, with the goal of elucidating the role and function of such constructs in immigrants’ Canadian career development. The study’s findings and contribution of a diversity- and culturally- informed, integrated, and enriched meta-theory of career development have implications for career counselling, cross-cultural, immigrant, and vocational psychology literature and practice.

Though there is significant academic interest in the law of religious freedom in Canada, there has been little research into the experiences of participants in religious freedom litigation. Based on a qualitative analysis of participant interviews and legal documents in three decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada, this dissertation explores the social processes at play in that litigation. At issue in the three cases were, respectively, (1) the right of Jewish condominium co-owners to install ritual huts (succoth) on their balconies; (2) the right of a Sikh student to wear a ceremonial dagger (kirpan) in a public high school; and (3) the right of a Hutterite group to be exempted from the photo requirement on driver’s licences for religious reasons. This dissertation adds to the existing academic commentary by looking beyond the judicial decisions and incorporating firsthand accounts of lawyers, litigants, and expert witnesses in these cases. The substantive analysis is divided in three sections. First, the dissertation examines themes of overlapping legal systems in participant narratives. Litigants understood themselves to be subjects of both state and religious laws, and the particular interactions between these legal systems help refine theories of legal pluralism. Second, the work analyzes religious freedom litigation as cross-cultural communication. Specifically, the dissertation employs the normative criteria of respect and self-awareness found in the literature on cross-cultural communication to approach participant narratives and judicial decisions, finding both successes and failures in this regard. Third, the dissertation engages issues of belonging to the Canadian civic community inherent in participant narratives. All litigants told the stories of their litigation as part of their larger immigration and integration narratives, and successful litigants were quick to give positive accounts in this regard. The unsuccessful litigants told more complex stories of integration, complicating the analysis of the impact of a judicial decision on their narratives of civic belonging. Nevertheless, the dissertation argues that the notion of civic belonging ought to be explicitly taken into account by Canadian judgments when dealing with issues of religious freedom.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the differences in the effects of different coping strategies on different dimensions of university adjustment of the first-year students in Turkey and in the United States. The data were gathered by administering three instruments, Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ), Brief COPE, and Demographic Sheet (DS) to 1143 first-year university students from Turkey (n = 695) and U.S. (n = 448). In the data analysis, first, the equivalence of the instruments between Turkish and U.S. samples were determined. A series of multiple hierarchical regression analysis was then carried out to examine the cultural differences in coping strategies (Self-Distraction, Active Coping, Denial, Substance Use, Using Emotional Support, Behavioral Disengagement, Positive Reframing, Planning, Humor, and Religion) as predictors of overall and four dimensions of university adjustment, namely, Academic Adjustment, Social Adjustment, Personal/Emotional Adjustment, and Goal Commitment/Institutional Attachment. The results revealed that there were cross-cultural differences in the effects of behavioral disengagement on social adjustment, goal commitment/institutional attachment, and overall adjustment. Differences were also found for the effects of religion and positive reframing on personal/emotional and overall adjustment. Finally, the effect of active coping was found to be significantly different on academic adjustment of first-year students from Turkey and the U.S.

The purpose of this study has two phases. In the first phase, a model that explains students&rsquo / mathematics achievement in TIMSS-R will be proposed. In the second phase, the proposed model will be evaluated to interpret the similarities and differences across three culturally and linguistically different countries / Turkey, the Netherlands, and Italy. This study will basically combine students&rsquo / answers on TIMSS-R Students Questionnaire items with their mathematics achievement scores obtained from TIMSS-R Mathematics Achievement Test. In order to achieve this, items in the student questionnaire will be grouped under latent variables and then the related models will be established. Thirty-seven items selected from the TIMSS-R Student Questionnaire were analyzed using principle component factor analysis for each country. The results indicated seven interpretable dimensions. Based on the results&rsquo / of factor analysis of Turkey, the latent variables were generated by selecting the observed variables with highest loadings. These latent variables were / out-of-school activities, socioeconomic status, importance given to math, math classroom iv climate, perception of failure, teacher-centered and student-centered activities. The proposed mathematics achievement model was tested by structural equation modeling for each country separately with the sample of 4772, 2728, and 2781 eighth grade students in Turkey, the Netherlands, and Italy, respectively. In all of the countries perception of failure was the strongest factor explaining the mathematics achievement of the eighth grade students. The other two important factors explaining mathematics achievement were socioeconomic status and student-centered activities for Turkey and Italy / out-of-school activities and importance given to math for the Netherlands. The results indicated that Turkey and Italy have more similar results when compared with the Netherlands. Different than the other countries in Turkey instructional activities formed two separate dimensions such as / teacher-centered and student-centered instructional activities. Since this finding emphasized the important role of teacher in the Turkish education system, it was suggested that more importance should be given to the teacher education.

In cross-cultural studies, respondents from specific cultures may have different product preferences and scale usage. Combining data from different cultures will result in departures from the basic assumptions of analysis of variance (ANOVA) and loss of power in testing capability of finding product and culture differences. However, the result of violations on power of ANOVA is unknown by sensory researchers. The objectives of this research were by simulating consumer product evaluation data, to evaluate the robustness and testing power of ANOVA under different cross-cultural situations. The study was conducted in two parts. First, an Empirical Logit simulation model was employed for generating sensory data. This model included respondent, product, consumer segment and product by segment interaction effects. Four underlying distributions: Binomial, Beta-Binomial, Hypergeometric, and Beta-Hypergeometric were used to increase or decrease the dispersion of the responses. Alternatively, instead of using these four distributions, the same applications were achieved by a binning step. The entire simulation procedure including the Empirical Logit model and the binning step was called Discrete Empirical Logit model. In the second part of the study, the Discrete Empirical Logit model was chosen to generate specified data sets under six different cross-cultural cases. After analyzing these data sets by ANOVA reduced and full models, the empirical power of ANOVA under different cases was calculated and compared. The results showed that both Beta-Hypergeometric and Discrete Empirical Logit were flexible on simulating sensory responses, but the Discrete Empirical Logit was relatively simple to use. Comparing with the ANOVA reduced model, the full model gave better information on evaluating the case that segments differ in product preferences. This suggested segmentation was very important in cross-cultural data analysis. Under the situations that sample sizes were equal and respondents performed consistently within segment (MSE ≈ 1), ANOVA was very robust to different scale usage, losing at worst 18% in power. From the scope of this study, we recommend using the ANOVA full model in the cross-cultural research. Results from different cultures could be combined when consistency within segments was high. / Graduation date: 2003

China, the developing country with the largest and oldest public education system, is transforming its education system through a large-scale curriculum reform. The new national curriculum marks a dramatic change in the underlying educational philosophy and practices, which, in turn, have deep cultural and historical roots in Chinese society. During this system-wide curricular change, Chinese teachers find themselves, more or less, situated in an ambivalent space. That is, most teachers know of the curricular change, but they are uncertain about the meaning of the change and have some resistances borne out of the experiences of loss and challenges to their teacher identities. This study investigates what this massive curriculum reform means for Chinese teachers by grounding an enquiry in in-depth conversations with six teachers in Western China. An interpretation of these conversations reveals the complex dimensions of teachers’ compliance and/or resistance with respect to change at a time when the Chinese curriculum landscape is shifting dramatically from a local to global perspective. Hermeneutics is employed as the research approach in this study because it attends to the humanness and interpretive nature of the participants’ living through curriculum change and it offers important insights to the deeply inter-subjective nature of teachers’ learning and unlearning. New understandings of teachers’ identity transformation, cross-cultural curriculum conversations, and the psychic and social dynamics of teachers' learning are presented in this study. New discourses for enhancing cross-cultural understandings in curriculum studies and international development are also suggested. This study addresses an absence of research on education change and curriculum theories and serves as an example of engaging curriculum as a transnational conversation between East Asian and Western contexts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 144-158). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / xii, 158 leaves, bound ill. (one col.) 29 cm

The creative work, ¡Latin Jazz! is a 50 minute radio documentary to be broadcast on ABC Classic FM. It looks at the evolution of Latin jazz from Spain, Cuba and the United States. It examines the social effects on the style and specifically on the syncretic movement between the countries. The documentary traces my travel to Madrid, Spain and looks at Latin jazz through a deconstruction of the style, musical examples and interviews with prominent artists. Artists interviewed were Chano Domínguez, a Spanish flamenco jazz pianist, Bobby Martínez an American saxophonist, Alain Pérez a Cuban bassist and Pepe Rivero a Cuban pianist. The exegesis supports the radio documentary by examining the style in more depth, and is broken into three main sections. First it traces the historical relationship that occurred through the Ida y Vuelta (To and Fro), the similarities and influences through the habanera, the decíma and the religion of Santería. This is followed by specific musical elements within Latin jazz such as instrumentation, clave, harmony and improvisation, whilst the third section looks at the influences of the new syncretic movement back to Spain.