Families stay connected over time through the intergenerational transmission of legacies. Legacies help family members to articulate family identity, learn more about family history, and provide succeeding generations with information about family culture and ethnicity. This qualitative study examines how older mothers transmit family meanings, history, and culture to family members through legacies and how ethnic histories influenced this process. Thirty older Armenian American mothers residing in California were interviewed. A life course perspective provides the overarching framework for analysis. Participants described the legacies they received and those they planned to pass on to family members. Emphasis was given to those legacies that symbolized connection to family, underscored family cohesion, and accentuated Armenian cultural roots. Individual age, larger historical events, and the gendered construction of family life influenced both the receipt of legacies and those that were passed on to family members. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Armenian families were forced to leave their native homeland. Because of these events, Armenian families passed few physical legacies on to family members. Legacies took on other forms such as stories, rituals, family gatherings, religious participation, cooking, and service to others. Women viewed their legacies within the context of motherhood and worked to ensure that certain legacies would be valued and remembered by future generations. Shaped by age, generational position, and ethnic identity, women expressed variation in types of legacies and the ways they planned to share them with family members. Women reported tension when certain legacies lacked meaning for their children (in-law) and grandchildren due to the influences of assimilation, intermarriage, changes in family and paid work patterns, and the characteristics and interests of adult children. A focus on legacies provides a useful lens for understanding how families transmit family identity, culture, and ethnicity to succeeding generations. / Graduation date: 2002

Desolation is Key: Essays is a collection of eight personal essays that revolve around the themes of the redemptive qualities of desolation in nature; the legacy of violence in the family and in the relationship between man and his environment; and the struggle of the speaker to reconcile her adult self to the burdens of inheritance and loss from her childhood. The content is a blending of exterior observation and interior meditation; it straddles the line between narrative journalism and memoir, which allows the narrator both to treat the exterior as an entry point for personal reflection, and to use the personal as a frame to connect with more universal human experience. In addition to thematic connections, the essays share a setting: Southern California, and in particular, the Colorado Desert region in the southeastern corner of the state. Circling back to this desert setting again and again works as a frame for the speaker to contemplate the death of her parents, and her relationship with her father, who died by suicide more than two decades ago. As the essays build upon each other, family lore and personal recollection aggregates and culminates in what eventually becomes a full picture of the situation surrounding the father's death, and the reasons behind its haunting legacy for the speaker.

The purpose of this research is to assess Filipino Americans' perceptions of and experiences with domestic violence. The Original Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS1) was used to assess participants' experiences with domestic violence.

The parenting style, level of acculturation and incidence of stress, were explored in order to identify the likelihood of intervention by child protective services to prevent child abuse. Additionally, concerns of whether reports of child abuse were related more to the lack of information about American parenting rules, rather than intentionally abusive behavior.