Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2006. / Title from title page screen, viewed on May 2, 2007. Dissertation Committee: Edward Hines, Amee D. Adkins (co-chairs), Dianne C. Gardner, Alvin Goldfarb. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-140) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 5, 2009). Advisor: Vilma Seeberg. Keywords: Rural Chinese girls; higher education; disadvantaged; Limited Good; patriarchy. Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-46).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, May, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 492-506). Also available in electronic form online.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Njoki Wane.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 220-228).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2006. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-146). Also available on the World Wide Web.

The intent of this investigation was to examine age and gender differences in neuromuscular adaptations following 12 wks of progressive resistance training(PRT). 39 healthy, untrained individuals were divided into four groups: older men((OM); 70±1.67; n=9), older women((OW); 73.75±1.76;n=8), young men((YM); 25.9±2; n=6) and young women((YW);22.2±1.2; n=6). Subjects participated in a bi-lateral knee extensor PRT consisting of 2 sets of 10 repetitions and 1 set to volitional failure at 80% of their onerepetition maximum(1RM), 3 days per week. Prior to and after completion of the PRT, subjects' right thigh muscles were evaluated for cross-sectional area (CSA) via computed tomography, maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVC), specific tension((ST);MVC/CSA), maximal neuromuscular drive(IEMG), and 1RM. Subcutaneous needle biopsies were also taken from the subjects' right vastus lateralis pre and post PRT. CSA increased (time, P<0.05) in all four groups following the PRT (4.35%+0.94 to 7.31%+3.87). Excluding OW, each group displayed an improvement (time, P<0.05) in MVC (OM 28.7%+5.06, YM 17.4%+5.8, and YW 17.8%±10.3). OM and YM demonstrated increases (time, P<0.05) in ST after completion of the PRT, 21.67%+4.88 and 12.5%+5.1, respectively. These two groups also improved (timeXgender, P<0.05) over their gender counterparts for this variable. IEMG increased (time, P<0.05) in OM and YM (37.8%+12.3 and 43.26+12.54, respectively) and both groups also showed improvements (timeXgender, P<0.05) over their gender counterparts. 1RM increased (time, P<0.05) in all groups (34.9%+7.9 to 57.3%+8). OW showed an increase (time, P<0.05) in the CSA of the MHC type Ha fibers. No other changes in single fiber CSA occurred. While all groups displayed increases in CSA and strength, ST and IEMG data indicate that neuromuscular drive may influence strength increases seen with resistance training to a greater extent in males than females, regardless of age. / School of Physical Education

Higher education in the United States has experienced a revolution over the past half-century, with more students of color and low-income students attending college than ever before. This compositional change has emerged in parallel with an exponential expansion of the higher education sector, both in its size and variety. As a result, racially-diverse and less-resourced students attending public and for-profit commuter colleges, rather than white, high-resource students attending private residential colleges, comprise today’s “new majority” of college enrollees. Yet despite new majority students' increase in college attendance, many such students arrive at college underprepared to succeed and the colleges they attend are ill-prepared to receive them. This dissertation investigates the tensions produced by the expansion and diversification of the higher education sector in the United States, analyzing how organizational characteristics and practices, shaped by institutional and cultural arrangements (e.g. normative accountability and race- or class-based discrimination), impact inequality in individual outcomes by race and socioeconomic status. The empirical context for this work is a large, urban, public university system that I refer to as, “Metropolitan University,” which includes 11 baccalaureate-granting colleges that share many structural and compositional similarities with the colleges attended by the majority of enrollees in the United States. Using a combination of longitudinal administrative records, longitudinal interview data, and information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), together with core insights from the literatures in stratification, organizations, and the sociology of culture, this dissertation shows that higher education organizations independently play an appreciable role in producing inequality in students' bachelor's degree (BA) completion outcomes. I arrive at this core finding through three papers that draw on distinct data sources, analytical strategies, and theoretical lenses to evaluate BA completion outcomes in the Metropolitan University context. In the first paper, I argue that the rise of accountability standards in higher education unintentionally has obscured the role of colleges and universities in producing unequal student outcomes. Using longitudinal administrative data and fixed-effects estimation strategies, I show that statistical measures that isolate the independent effects of colleges on student outcomes often yield very different understandings of effectiveness than measures required by federal agencies or produced by the popular press. Once I employ more appropriate statistical strategies, I find unexpected variation in college effects across the university system as well as heterogeneous effects given students’ racial background, family income, and transfer-in status. In the second paper, I show that academic factors such as students' success in passing initial “gateway” coursework and the field of study trajectories colleges shape correlate strongly with college effectiveness and provide an initial explanation of differences in college performance. Yet longitudinal interview data collected at three colleges within the system during one academic year, allow me to identify other explanatory mechanisms. Specifically, in the third paper, I examine interactions between students’ belief systems concerning the meaning and value of higher education, the symbolic boundaries they create to separate themselves from dropouts, and their socio-academic experiences during the first year of college. Belief-boundary interactions contribute to students’ discrepant outcomes, though not as powerfully as students' field of study pathways and the support they receive from college advisors. Together, these three papers work to connect micro-, meso-, and macro- levels of analysis, illustrating the extent of individual and group-based inequality in higher education while also acknowledging and interrogating the organizational and institutional structures that produce it.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Leila Villlaverde; submitted to the School of Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 222-240).