Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Seminary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-177).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Seminary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-177).

Thesis (doctoral)--Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulu, 2008?

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This dissertation examines rural families responses to global and local situations that have made earning a livelihood as a farmer very difficult. Drawing from original research, including a household livelihood census of 195 households, interviews with 72 people, participant observation, and archival research, the dissertation explores how rural families have responded to declines in domestic agricultural markets fueled by global and national forces and local environmental change. It asks: what impact will small farming families responses to these forces of change have on peoples identities as peasants? I argue that while great change is underway in the countryside, peasant identity continues to flourish as people on the ground re-work and re-negotiate what it means to be a peasant. This research provides a voice to those often overlooked by macro-analyses of economic, political, or cultural development by providing rich ethnographic details on how global forces impact otherwise out-of-the way places. This dissertation critically examines what is meant by development and change, what development and change look like in a local, grounded context and what current trends can teach us about the future of rural areas both in Costa Rica and in other regions of the world experiencing similar phenomena: increasing educational opportunities for youth, a continued opening up of agricultural markets, a blurring of the line between the urban and the rural, and declining environmental quality.

I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to explore three dimensions of couples' career success: career input (hours), career output (wages) and happiness. I focus on West German parents because, until recently, they faced low levels of state-level childcare support and adverse attitudes towards maternal employment. I investigate the extent to which couples specialize in paid work in the long term. Previous approaches – even those using couple-level longitudinal data – failed to explore this fully, instead examining men and women separately, or a single transition. I develop a “dual curve” approach and find that even among the 1956-65 female birth cohort (which faced low state-level support for dual employment) only a fifth of all couples adopt full specialization in later life. A sizable proportion – a third – moves into dual fulltime employment, while half of highly educated couples adopt such employment. Highly educated women are not only less likely to permanently specialize but also more likely to try working full-time, possibly because their partners' comparative advantages are lower. I explore whether the take-up of work hour flexibility relates to rises in both the respondent’s and their partner’s wages. Men and women benefit from working flexibly, even when controlling for selection into work hour flexibility with growth-curve and fixed effects analysis. Moreover, there is a positive cross-partner wage effect, which is particularly pronounced for mothers, suggesting that men – the main users of the policy – use this measure to support their wives' careers. Are dual career couples (equal human capital investment) happier than specializing couples? I create a human capital measure to account for differential human capital during periods of non-employment, which has been ignored in past analyses. I find that women in dual career couples are unhappier when the child is young but happier later in life. Conversely, women who give precedence to their partner’s career in terms of human capital investment grow unhappier.

This thesis investigates in what ways the family matters for educational outcomes. Six research questions are answered. First, is family size associated with familial resources? Second, is having a large family associated with lower levels of objective and subjective educational outcomes and has this changed over the 20th century? Third, is there evidence of an association between family size and emotional health and life perspectives of young people? Fourth, is there any evidence of an association between family size and the degree of confidence and sociability? Fifth, do parenting strategies vary by family size? Sixth, is there evidence if a causal relationship between family size and educational outcomes? The British Household Panel Survey, the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England and the ONS Longitudinal Study are used to answer these questions. The key findings from the observational studies are as follows. First, as family size increases there is a reduction in familial resources. Second, as a result of resource dilution there is a reduction in the highest qualification attained; this finding is robust to alternative measures of educational outcomes. Third, there is a positive relationship between family size and reporting poor emotional health and external locus of control. Fourth, there is some evidence that the manner in which the young person socialises varies by family size. Fifth, parenting strategies vary by family size; these strategies are positively associated with GCSE achievement and ameliorate the negative family size association. Sixth, testing the resource dilution model using twins as an exogenous increase in family size found that there is weak evidence of a causal relationship between family size and educational outcomes. This thesis addresses the influence of the family on inequalities in education. The findings have important implications for future research on this topic.

This thesis investigates how the experience of labour market insecurity affects individuals’ life courses and family lives in the UK. It focuses on unemployment and temporary work as the two sources of insecurity and examines their consequences on partnership formation, transition into parenthood, the well-being within family, and partnership dissolution. It follows a longitudinal approach and uses a sample from the BHPS. The results showed that unemployment has serious negative consequences for individuals’ family outcomes. Temporary work also has some negative outcomes, particularly for the vulnerable groups. Unemployment and temporary employment seem to discourage young adults to form marital unions, whereas especially for the young and non-married men unemployment increased the risk of fatherhood. Temporary work has a similar effect for those with no educational qualification, who are more likely to have their first child. Unemployed individuals and their spouses report a drop in their life-satisfaction, psychological well-being and are more likely to feel depressed, and they face a greater risk of marital separation. Male temporary work is associated with poorer well-being for the low-skilled employees and those who report subjective job insecurity. The wives of men working on temporary contracts also suffer from a decline in the well-being. The thesis also looked into the consequences of insecurity at the couple level. Contrary to our initial assumption, dual-insecurity - where both of the spouses are in insecure employment - does not have the strongest effect on the family. Rather, role-reversal between the spouses has the largest impact for family outcomes. When a male partner is unemployed and the female partner is employed, or when the male partner is working on temporary basis and the female partner is working on permanent basis, then the couple delays transition into parenthood, it suffers from a decline in the well-being, and it is more likely to separate.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of ancient Egyptian kinship in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom (ca 2150–1650 BCE) by exploring how forms of relatedness were displayed in the monumental record. Kinship and marriage are contextually driven sociocultural phenomena that should be approached from the actors' perspective; such an approach can achieve some insight into emic notions of kinship, because monuments were integral to society and contributed to perpetuating and sustaining its fabric. The introduction (chapter 1) presents the theoretical background on which the thesis is based, namely the notion of kinship as process, where relationships can be constructed and reconstructed throughout one’s life. In addition, it provides a working definition of 'kin group', an analytical category that is taken as the primary unit of social analysis that can encompass several ways of being related. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of kinship terminology in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. The focus is less on basic kinship terms than on the little understood terminology for kin groups and how these were presented in the written record. Chapter 3 treats stelae, which constitute the core corpus of material for the thesis. Stelae present a variety of images of kin groups and, moreover, they should be considered within the larger units of which they were part. Many of these stelae are unprovenanced but have been attributed to Abydos. At this site, memorial chapels have been identified archaeologically, and some stelae have been found in association with them. Thus, the site offers a materialisation of constellations of relationships. Possible reconstructions of such chapels – one from Saqqara and two from Abydos – are presented in chapter 4, and the impact they may have had on the social memory of visitors is assessed. Display, presence, and performance were some of the ways in which the social role of those groups was communicated. Chapter 5 is concerned with how change and time may be represented in apparently static objects. On the basis of the model of the developmental cycle of domestic groups first introduced by Meyer Fortes, the dynamism of the social fabric is explored through three case studies of groups at different stages of their developmental cycle. The strategies of survival can be seen pervasively in the monumental record, allowing for a glimpse into time and change in kin groups. The conclusion (chapter 6) offers a holistic approach to the material presented in the thesis, emphasising the ways in which the different theoretical approaches proposed intertwine with the material.

This study, located in the disciplines of human geography and demography, explores the socio-spatial boundaries encapsulating Britain’s Jewish population, particularly at micro-scales. It highlights and challenges key narratives of both Jewish and general interest relating to residential segregation, assimilation, partnership formation, exogamy and household living arrangements. It presents a critical exploration of the dual ethnic and religious components of Jewish identity, arguing that this ‘White’ group has become ethnically ‘invisible’ in British identity politics and, as a consequence, is largely overlooked. In addition, the key socio-demographic processes relating to Jewish partnership formation are addressed and a critical assessment of data pertaining to the decline of marriage, the rise of cohabitation and the vexed topic of Jewish exogamy, is presented. The analysis culminates by linking each of these issues to the micro-geographical scale of the household and develops a critical assessment of this key unit of Jewish (re)production. Jewish population change is contextualised within the framework of the second demographic transition. This deliberately quantitative study is designed to exploit a recent glut of data relating to Jews in Britain. It interrogates specially commissioned tables from Britain’s 2001 Census as well as four separate communal survey data sources. It highlights and challenges recent geographical critiques of quantitative methodologies by presenting a rigorous defence of quantification in post-‘cultural turn’ human geography. It emphasises the importance and relevance of this fruitful shift in geographical thought to quantitative methods and describes the role quantification can now play in the discipline. Above all, it synthesises two disparate sets of literature: one relating to geographical work on identity and segregation, and the other to work on the identity, demography and cultural practices of Jews. As a result, this thesis inserts the largely neglected ethno-religious Jewish case into the broader geographical literature whilst developing a critical quantitative spatial agenda for the study of Jews.