Grounded in previous research on academic engagement and resilience, this study presents a clear conceptualization of re-engagement, defined as students' ability to bounce back from everyday academic challenges and setbacks, as a process of everyday resilience in school, and examines how teacher support can promote it. Data from 1018 third through sixth grade students and their 53 teachers were used to examine the extent to which teacher autonomy support and involvement (individually and in combination) predicted changes from fall to spring of the same school year in students' re-engagement (behavioral and emotional). Overall, correlational results provided consistent support for study hypotheses. In terms of unique effects, teacher autonomy support (both student- and teacher-reported) was a unique predictor of both behavioral and emotional re-engagement, whereas involvement (both student- and teacher-reported) was a unique predictor for behavioral but not emotional re-engagement. In terms of predicting change over the school year, student perceptions of autonomy support predicted changes in both behavioral and emotional re-engagement, but teacher-reports predicted changes only in behavioral re-engagement; teacher-reported involvement showed the same pattern of effects. When both involvement and autonomy support (student-reported) were used as predictors of changes in re-engagement, both made unique contributions, although teacher-reports did not, due to multi-collinearity. Students' perceptions of teacher support were more closely related to their re-engagement than was teacher-reported support, and those perceptions acted as mediators between the teacher-reported support and students' re-engagement, partially mediating the relationship between teacher-reported support and students' behavioral re-engagement, and fully mediating the relationship between teacher-reported autonomy support and emotional re-engagement. The relationships between teacher support and student re-engagement played out similarly for students at all grades and both genders, with the exception that student perceptions of teacher autonomy support were more important predictors of behavioral re-engagement for boys than for girls. This study has implications for the conceptualization of re-engagement within a larger motivational model, for the importance of considering both teachers' and students' perspectives when studying teacher-student interactions, and for next steps in conceptualizing the construct of re-engagement as potentially encompassing separate behavioral and emotional components.

Investigations into cultural aspects of organizations offers promising improvements to understanding those organizations, and to the field of organizational development. The study of figurative language usage provides revealing analogs to the culture, represented through attitudes, values, beliefs, and assumptions. Organizational meetings of four units of a division of student affairs at a large state university were observed over a period of eight weeks using a naturalistic research design (Lincoln, 1985) to collect qualitative data about language usage. Data analysis was inductive and was reported as case studies of the unit meetings. Findings of the study revealed several perceptions of dominant relationships viewed by student affairs professionals as crucial to their work. These relationships were described using the metaphors of "family" and "servant," t which revealed important cultural themes of the student affairs division of the university. This research provided insights into student affairs culture, valuable data for student affairs practitioners, and further evidence for the usefulness of emergent research methodologies. / Ed. D.

Education is a crucial site and primary driver of elite status maintenance and reproduction. Decades of research highlight how elite colleges and universities use various forms of gatekeeping to admit and represent the interests of dominant groups. This body of research explains that most elite private schools served White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant upper-class children, preparing them to be the country's future leaders. These schools and colleges work together, creating well-trodden pipelines for young elites. However, there is limited research considering how parents think about securing their child's place in elite schools or how organizations external to the educational institutions facilitate this decision-making process. What logics of justification and frameworks do parents and organizations use to secure their child's place in the proven pipeline for elites? This dissertation investigates how parents and organizations decide to socialize children in elite independent schools, beginning at preschool or kindergarten. The empirical context for this work is the early admissions process for independent schools in New York City. I draw on 52 interviews with parents, ten interviews with expert service providers, and 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a for-profit educational consulting firm that supports families in the elite independent school admissions process. By centering parents and early childhood admissions, I examine a critical moment when parental decision-making and organizational maneuvering have the potential to impact life-long outcomes. I also highlight how social positions of race, class, and gender complicate parental and organizational logics. The first chapter introduces this dissertation’s motivating research questions and situates it within the broader literature on elites, parental investments during early childhood, rising inequalities and the fear of downward mobility, and the literature on educational admissions. In Chapter 2, I examine the parenting logics of justification during the early childhood admissions process. I argue that parents have "speculative projects" for their children, defined as ideas parents have about their children's imagined futures that underlie parents' day-to-day choices. I examine how parents allocate resources to these speculative projects and how education shapes the projects. Chapter 3 illustrates how organizations facilitate and influence parental decisionmaking. I present research on how brokers of the educational marketplace – in this case, educational consultants – regularly realign the moral boundaries of their work to justify profiting off their chosen commodity – in this case, the potential outcomes of young children. I also demonstrate how educational consultants make tremendous non-economic gains through their line of work, gaining trust and being seen as “experts” in a high-status social field. Chapter 4 examines how parents feel about their decisions one year later. I review their range of outcomes and show how other social positions mediate their ability to access privileged spaces and identities. Finally, I end with Chapter 5, highlighting the broader implications of this work and directions for future research. Together, these chapters illuminate how parents of young children attempt to understand, navigate, and manage elite educational admissions processes under conditions of uncertainty. This work has broader implications for understanding the cultural meaning and the social value of children in the 21st century, a time when parents are placing a premium on education amidst a landscape of unprecedented economic inequality.

Undergraduates' field of study is intricately linked to inequality in the US, where women have surpassed men in most indexes of academic achievement but continue to be less likely than men to complete STEM degrees. This gendered variation in major selection has substantial implications for stratification: college major choice is closely related to labor market outcomes and advancement to future degrees. Building on recent theoretical developments in social aesthetics and field theory, the project argues that academic interests are developed in concert with encounters in the environment, and that position in academic fields at the start of university, gendered distributions of interest patterns, and peer influence play a critical role in gender differentiation in college major choice. The project uses a unique longitudinal data combining complex administrative databases from an elite American university, merging admissions, housing, course, financial aid, and alumni data. Multiple correspondence analysis shows that students' interests are organized in academic fields characterized by divisions between knowledge domains: science interests oppose social sciences, economics interests oppose humanities, and life sciences are differentiated from hard sciences. Knowledge domains share features of retention and attraction, and movement between disciplines that are close together in students' interest spaces are more common. Using clustering methods, the project shows that there are important distinctions in how students are interested in disciplines: some students are particularly devoted to knowledge domains, while other students are generalists. These finding have important implications for women and men, who have different interest patterns. There is durability in gender differences in high school interests reinforced by both retention and attraction to disciplines once at school. The last chapter of the dissertation explores the role that peer influence plays in these outcomes. Because students' interests are organized in academic fields, peer influence on academic major choice is better understood as a field effect. Utilizing the fact that roommate assignment is random at this university, the project shows that choosing a major is associated with roommate's interests coming into college, and this association depends on students' own initial interests when applying to university. Generalist science students are more likely to complete science degrees when they have science or engineering roommates compared to those who have humanities roommates, while devoted science students are less mutable. Because women are less likely to have roommates who are in sciences and engineering, gender segregation of roommates contributes to gender difference in STEM outcomes. By reframing choice as a question of social aesthetics, the project makes important contributions to understanding choice, inequality and peer influence.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to ascertain if formal early childhood education was related to the likelihood of later criminal activity. The secondary data analysis within this study did support inferences for four specific crime factors. This study found that preschool attendance lessened the incurrence of future criminal activity in crime categories of total numbers of damage offenses, total numbers of theft offenses, total numbers of damage alone offenses, and total numbers of injury and theft offenses.