The quality of spouse/partner relationships has been linked with health outcomes. Mutuality, the interest in sharing cognitive and emotional experiences in couple communications, is theorized as having importance for women's psychological health and self esteem. Mutuality was tested as a predictor of health outcomes in a rheumatoid arthritis (RA) sample (N = 54) at baseline (Time 1) and six months later (Time 2). Mutuality inversely predicted depressive symptoms at both times of measure. Mutuality failed to predict physical disability and disease flares at both times of measure. Sex differences in mutuality's links with health outcomes were explored. Results suggest that mutuality is an important predictor of depressive symptoms for women. Women who reported more mutuality in communications with their spouses/partners reported fewer depressive symptoms at both times of measure. However, no conclusions can be drawn regarding mutuality's prediction of depressive symptoms for men. Self-esteem was tested as a mediator of mutuality's link with health outcomes. Self-esteem mediated the link between mutuality and depressive symptoms at Time 2. In addition, mutuality was tested as a protective factor relative to health outcomes. Cross-lagged associations between mutuality and health outcomes at both times of measure were examined in structural equation models to determine whether mutuality drives health outcomes or vice versa. Neither mutuality nor health outcomes demonstrated temporal precedence; no support was provided for the hypothesis that mutuality is a protective factor. Finally, depressive symptoms were tested as a risk factor for physical health outcomes. Cross-lagged associations between depressive symptoms and physical health outcomes at both times of measure were examined in structural equation models to determine whether depressive symptoms drive physical health outcomes or vice versa. Temporal precedence of depressive symptoms was observed relative to disease flares, suggesting that depressive symptoms may be a risk factor for disease flares. Limitations, findings, and future directions are discussed.

This dissertation explores the history of family life in northwestern Mexico between 1800 and 1850 through the examination of around 700 state civil and criminal court records from the Sonoran state archives. It demonstrates that in spite of characterizations of ineptitude and underdevelopment, the local judiciary of Sonora, Mexico, was an important arbiter of social hierarchies based on ethnicity, class, gender and age, where people from across the social spectrum created, reconstituted and challenged these inequalities. Moreover, court proceedings reflect the persisting centrality of colonial law and legal process, as well as the growing influence of liberal ideology on judicial outcomes. Marriage, consensual unions, inheritance, sexuality, intergenerational relationships and hierarchies, children and servants are the central themes of this study. An examination of census data, parish records and court testimonies demonstrates the diversity of family patterns in Sonora during the first half of the nineteenth century, including large numbers of small farmers, a significant minority of female-headed households, as well as men and women living in consensual unions. These sources suggest that while Sonorans idealized marital fidelity and deference on the part of women and younger kin, and mutual reciprocity among family members, social practice was far more irregular than any regional patriarch could possibly hope. They also demonstrate that men and women looked increasingly to "the state," in the form of the local courts, to resolve their familial disputes after independence.

School-aged children and adolescents experiencing a chronic illness have verbalized and demonstrated difficulty in accepting their illness and the need for continued treatment. Few researchers have explored the school-aged child/adolescent process of acceptance. To assist school-aged children/adolescents toward acceptance, nurses must have a clear understanding of the process. This study is part of an ongoing program of research designed to increase nurses' understanding of the process of coming to accept asthma. The purpose of this study was to explore relationships among variables in the School-aged Child and Adolescent Acceptance of Chronic Illness Model. A Life-Span Developmental perspective guided the study. Multiple regression was used to test the theory. Concepts contained in the model were defined and operationalized, instruments were developed and/or identified, and relational statements were posed. The research question asked: What is the best linear path fit of the School-Aged Child and Adolescent Acceptance of Chronic Illness Model. The sample consisted of ninety-four school-aged children and adolescent diagnosed with asthma, between the ages of nine and fifteen years, and who were able to read and understand English. Subjects were recruited using the networking method. Path analysis determined the accuracy of the linear path model. Possible threats to validity of the model were examined. Results revealed school-aged child and adolescent acceptance of asthma was directly dependent upon one's perceived social support from his/her school teacher and classmates; and indirectly influenced by one's perceived social support from his/her parent, an objective measure of severity of illness rating, one's level of unrestricted participation in life activities, and one's perceived athletic competence. Results possess clinical and research implications for identifying, developing, and testing interventions to facilitate school-aged child and adolescent acceptance of asthma.

This study shows the findings of a qualitative study undertaken in the homes of seven primary participants of middle school age in Tucson, Arizona, Southern California, and New York City. The purpose of the study was to determine whether mainstream media has commodified these children into saleable audiences who would consume its media products. Findings show that all participants, at all levels, were ready to buy, and wanted to buy, at least one kind of mainstream media at any time. All participants with the exception of one, who did not seem to care about one form of media over another, pursued at least one form of mainstream media, usually more, during most of his waking hours and often. During the ninety hours of observation, at least two or more mainstream media products were used consistently. All participants expressed the desire to buy more specific products and wanted to have more than one title at a time. No regionally or locally distributed media were desired by any subject, only the mainstream media on forced-choice menus. Limitations of the research included difficulty of finding parents and children willing to allow the researcher into the home. Another problem was the invasion of privacy that some subject felt during the study. These were the major two limitations. Further research should be conducted on preschoolers' use of media. This study suggests that children aged one to five may already be addicted to Disney media in ways that preclude their enjoyment of other mainstream media. This study also suggests that these children may be so affected cognitively by their constant use of mainstream media products that their placement in school must be reassessed. Another area that requires more research is the ability of students with diagnosed learning disabilities to concentrate on, and operate, interactive media and to read any manual, article or electronic text having to do with their chosen media, without any problem. The conclusion is that participants in this study are, by their desire and willingness to buy, members of a commodity audience. Thus, the commodity audience actually exists.

This research starts from the premise that women's entry into, and substantial representation in, the workforce has changed the nature of the relationship between family and work roles. Specifically, the purpose is to show that the roles people play in their families significantly affects their determination of job satisfaction. Equity theory and relative deprivation theory suggest that a pivotal factor in determining job satisfaction is the selection and use of a referent. In practice, however, the research on referent use in job satisfaction has not considered family role effects because job satisfaction research has focused almost exclusively on the work domain. This research seeks to expand upon this literature by hypothesizing that family role will influence the choice of the referent and will be a meaningful explanatory variable in job satisfaction models. Analysis of the survey results reveals basic support for the inclusion of family role in models of job satisfaction in four job satisfaction contexts. The family role variable of breadwinning status is positively related to job satisfaction and emerges as a better explanatory variable for job satisfaction responses than respondent sex. The effects of family role on referent choice, however, are not consistent or strong. Instead, only respondent-referent similarity was found to have a robust effect on referent choice. Other referent choice decisions were explored on a post-hoc basis. Overall, the results of this study indicate that breadwinning status is a statistically significant factor in job satisfaction decisions. The data are supportive of a model in which beliefs about the relationship between work and family role obligations mediate the effects of breadwinning status on job satisfaction. Given the exploratory nature of this study, further research is suggested to replicate and expand the major findings.

Nonverbal behaviors impact our perceptions of interaction. Many sociological theories have attempted to understand how perceptions work in interaction. Affect Control Theory is one which has had particular success in understanding the ways in which people perceive events generally; with this research I hope to be able to make that theory even stronger and more predictive by including nonverbal behaviors in its scope. A four-study research design is presented. The first study collected the affective meanings of nonverbal behaviors independent of event contexts. Study two paired nonverbal behaviors with other behaviors to see how they combine in people's perceptions to create new affective meanings. The third and fourth studies required performing two experiments (one with paper stimuli and one with videotaped stimuli) to see what effects the inclusion of nonverbal behaviors has on impressions people form of events and event elements. I found that single nonverbal elements each have distinct meanings and create distinct impressions in those who view them; that nonverbal behaviors work in combination with behaviors to create modified impressions of situations; that nonverbal behaviors play as important a role as behaviors in those combinations; and that nonverbal behavior ratings are essential to understanding the meaning of behaviors in event contexts. This project has increased our understanding of the relationship between nonverbal behaviors and impressions that are formed in the context of interpersonal interaction. In addition, it increased the utility of Affect Control Theory in predicting event perceptions by allowing for more accurate understanding of the complex situations in which people interact.

The process of language shift and maintenance of Yaqui and Mayo against Spanish is analyzed through an empirical study of the social network of four families (in each group a more conservative family in the use of the native language, and the other using more Spanish in everyday interactions). This interpretative analysis integrates a multidisciplinary system that incorporates the model of political ecology, along with the postulates and methodology of the ethnography of communication, linguistic conflict, social networks and the relationship between language and identity, through ideology. This empirical approach follows the model of linguistic anthropology, giving an account of the dynamic relationship between the social phenomenon and the linguistic one. A microanalysis allows us to observe the external, and mainly internal, processes articulated to the linguistic conflict developed within the family social networks. Thus, it is possible to do an objective approximation to the heterogeneous linguistic practice of the members of each family, and the social networks they are immersed in. In this sense we require not only a synchronic approach, but also a diachronic one, in order to construct brief lingual life histories of the members of the families, in which the matriarchs have played a very important roles in the process of language shift and resistance. Moreover, within each family, there is a considerable variety in the uses and functions they give to each language, linked to identities established by ideologies in permanent elaboration.

This study describes how literacy is mentally represented as cultural knowledge, referred to by educational and cognitive anthropologists as "cultural models." These models, widely shared among specific social and cultural groups, depict prototypical events in a simplified world. Despite enormous research attention identifying 'multiple literacies,' particularly emphasizing the literacies of those who live at the 'margins,' the one most closely associated with a literary literacy remains prototypical or 'normal' while terms such as "functional" reading are viewed pejoratively. This common sense reasoning is produced by the White, middle class who largely control the society, whose ideological stances of the way literacy 'ought to be' escape serious scrutiny. My research integrates sociocognitive, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic analyses by reconstructing the cultural models of literacy held by 15, White, urban, middle-class parents of kindergarten children. This reconstruction required the use of numerous interviews and interpretation of those interviews. My goal in the analysis was to search for patterns across interviewees and interview passages that would be indicative of shared understandings. I focused on two features of parents' discourse: their use of metaphors and their reasoning. The metaphor analysis identifies three schemas that parents have about literacy. The reasoning analysis provides the underlying story of the cultural model that links the three schemas. This study concludes that when middle-class parents of young children talk about reading, they conceptualize a literary literacy. Through indirect indexicality, expressing this literacy as a prototype sends a covert message which emphasizes moral worth. Such a moral attachment to reading books marks and morally elevates one's social-class membership, which is itself implicitly linked to racial and cultural status. This moral identity distances these middle-class parents from the lower and working classes as well as from the upper class. Furthermore, institutions designed to facilitate the literacy of children and families construct a similar discourse, where the goal of learning to read is secondary to the primary goal of reshaping the moral character of the families, particularly non-mainstream and minority families. This discourse hegemonically constructs as 'immoral' the kinds of literacies which do not match a 'moral literacy.'

This dissertation examines disputing and dispute resolution primarily among married couples in the small city of Saint-Louis, in the northwest comer of Senegal, West Africa. The goal of this project is two-fold: first, to locate "couples disputing" in the context of the culture and systems of power in urban Senegal; second, to analyze how this context is reproduced and contested through disputing and participation in legal (state) and informal (non-state) dispute resolution processes. At another level, this project focuses on determining how and to what degree the law enables and empowers women to resist domestic violence, and, alternatively, allows it to persist. The place of domestic violence is examined through the lens of local culture and ideology, as well as legal and conflict-oriented behavior. Central to this project is the observation of a dynamic interaction between the daily lived reality of couples and intermediate and higher-level institutional frameworks. In other words, love, cooperation, arguing, disdain, beating, rape, separation, divorce, and reconciliation occur inseparably from the authority structures of family and community, selective coercion and empowerment by state and civil bodies, and the distant impositions of international entities. An ethnographic portrait of marital disputing and domestic violence is created using court observations and recorded speech, structured and unstructured interviews, documentary research on court records, and extended participant observation in the community.

Using a random sample of 368 parents of young children in Pima County, Arizona, this study examines the implications of childrearing for social networks. In addition to cross-sectional network data, the study includes retrospective measures of networks at two periods: just before the birth of the respondent's oldest child, and around the time of the oldest child's first birthday. These retrospective longitudinal data permit a detailed assessment of stabilities and changes in parents' social contact patterns, and a discussion of their implications. Expectant parents occupy distinct structural positions related to the timing of parenthood in the life course, relationship status, ethnicity, and gender. In the year following parenthood, many of these differences are attenuated, suggesting that parenthood is itself a unique social position that may reduce the distinguishing power of other structural parameters. But while the networks of parents are, as a whole, more similar to each other than those of expectant parents, gender differences in network characteristics appear to be somewhat enhanced over the transition to parenthood. Cross-sectional data show that involvement in the domestic sphere, rather than sex-category, is especially predictive of network structure. The patterns identified here Will lead to more precise conceptualization and measurement of gender processes, as roles in work, marriage, and parenting gain increasing flexibility.