There are a number of childhood factors reported to be associated with gay male sexual orientation including childhood gender non-conformity and socialization factors such as paternal and peer rejection. Attachment theory suggests that poor quality childhood relationships may be related to anxiety and avoidance attachment dimensions in adulthood. The purpose of this study was to explore the association between these childhood factors and anxiety and avoidance in gay men's close relationships. A community sample of 192 self-identified gay men completed questionnaires and a 2 hour attachment interview. No major findings related to the avoidance dimension were significant. In terms of attachment anxiety, results were partially consistent with attachment theory: paternal and peer, but not maternal, rejection independently predicted anxiety. Quality of peer relationships largely mediated the association between parental rejection and anxiety. In addition, quality of peer relationships mediated the association between gender nonconformity and anxiety. Good quality relationships in one domain did not compensate for poor quality relationships in another domain. The importance of fathers and peers to gay men's current relationship functioning is discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

The present study assessed the relationship between the paternal use of food in a contingency manner and the physical status of the respective son. The prevalence of childhood obesity has been documented to be significant in this country (Mayer, 1968; Collipp, 1975; Forbes, 1975; Hafen, 1981). The etiology of the increasing percentages of obese children is based upon a variety of variables. Parental influence on children's eating habits and socioeconomic variables, which influence parents, appeared to be possible factors in the development of childhood obesity. / Master of Science

No description available.

There are many ways parents can improve their offspring’s outcomes. For example, they can invest in offspring’s education or health. They can provide better social connections to obtain job information or personal references. In addition, they can exert political influence to obtain better labor market outcomes for their offspring. Understanding exactly how parents improve their offspring’s outcomes is very important for the formation of political perspectives and policy designs. However, it is very difficult to disentangle the factors, as parents of high socioeconomic status do many things to help their children succeed. This dissertation presents three quasi-experimental studies to understand the causal mechanisms of parents’ influence on children’s outcomes in the context of China and United States. Chapter two examines the implementation of court-ordered racial desegregation of schools and finds that school desegregation increases biracial births. This provides the first evidence of how an education policy that affects racial integration also has demographic implications and an intergenerational impact on social and economic opportunities. Chapter three examines the effect of school desegregation on infant health. This chapter adopts the same empirical strategy and data as chapter three. I extend the paper by examining the effect of school desegregation on infant health. I find that for black mothers, school desegregation improves infant health, as measured by preterm birth. It also increases maternal education and fertility age. These may be important pathways to improve infant health. Chapter two and chapter three add to the growing literature on the impact of school desegregation beyond academic achievement. Chapter five examines the effect of fathers’ political influence on offspring’s labor market outcomes in China. It presents a difference-in-difference approach that exploits the variation of political influence in three dimensions: parent bureaucrat occupation, retirement status instrumented by retirement policy, and offspring gender. Using cross-section data from China Household Income Survey, it finds that the retirement of a bureaucrat with political influence translates into a decrease in offspring’s income of 13 percent. Chapter six provides a summary and conclusions and discusses future research directions.

Project Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Seminary, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-377).

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 50-53).

Project Thesis (D. Min.)--Denver Seminary, 1995. / This is an electronic reproduction of TREN, #090-0123. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-377).

The remains of James Oliver Plunkett are dug up one night from their grave at Mount Calvary Cemetery by two college adjunct writing professors, Bob Rusher and Phil Pike. Having chopped through Plunkett's coffin with a pick, Rusher lifts Plunkett's skeleton from the coffin and pronounces his name--and in this moment Plunkett returns to consciousness as a cognitive vapor. The reason that Plunkett has been dug up is hinted at: After writing many unpublished novels and stories during his lifetime, and dying utterly anonymous, Plunkett's fiction has somehow been posthumously published, to great acclaim. Rusher is a huge fan of Plunkett's published work and is digging him up in the belief that one of his unpublished novels--The King of Portland--has been buried with him. When he does not find the novel, Rusher decides to kidnap the remains to force Plunkett's family to reveal the status of The King of Portland. Plunkett drives with Rusher and Pike to a strip club called the Serpentine, located in downtown Portland. They are not aware of Plunkett, but when they enter the club, leaving his bones behind in the car in a brown sack, Plunkett accompanies them. Rusher is courting one of the strippers, Hazel, and has given her one of Plunkett's posthumous novels to read, which she's enjoyed. Hazel's employer and perhaps boyfriend Chuck arrives at Rusher and Pike's table and, with Hazel still present, demonstrates his claim to the stripper by urinating in Rusher's beer. Rusher leaves the club humiliated. After dropping Pike off, he drives to the Hollywood District and brings the sack with Plunkett's remains into his house. His girlfriend Ava Snyder is there, reading the poet Rilke in the bathtub--fully clothed, smoking a cigarette, lying on an air mattress, and drinking an old fashioned. Plunkett is present in consciousness throughout. Rusher does not tell Ava about his grave robbing or the bone-sack he's carrying; but when he leaves Ava in the tub, taking the bones with him, Plunkett remains behind in the bathroom and is startled to find himself privy to Ava's thoughts. After Ava splits from Rusher, Plunkett remains with her, experiencing her life while wondering about the family he might have left behind at his death, nine years earlier. Ava has a scary encounter with her bullying, drug-addled sister Judy, during which she has hints of Plunkett's presence in her mind; but Ava dismisses these hints until after a disappointing visit to her mother, with whom she has long had trouble communicating. At this point Ava hears Plunkett's voice for the first time, and they begin conversing. After transitioning from disbelief to annoyance to the intimate, irresistible pull of their shared consciousness, Ava eventually helps Plunkett to discover the reason for his posthumous, unlikely literary fame and the state of his still-living family: A wife and son who have reaped the profits of his posthumous success, but do not harbor fond memories of their long lives together with him. Plunkett has a vision of his death, in which he apparently committed suicide over his decades-long literary obscurity. Ava seeks out Plunkett's son, Kyle Fleming, an artist who has established his own, prominent comic book company. Kyle is bitter toward his father for neglecting him while growing up, and has taken on his mother's maiden name; but he then reveals that it was his father's fame that propelled him to celebrity as a comic book artist and publisher. Meanwhile, Plunkett's wife Camille is suffering from dementia and lives in a managed care facility. Ava and Plunkett arrive at Camille's room; in the presence of her late husband's consciousness, Camille reveals that it was she who asked Kyle to send out one of his unpublished manuscripts for publication--a romance novel whose enormous, unexpected success led to the publication of several other best-selling works by Plunkett. In spite of this, Camille tells Plunkett that she experienced the happiest years of her life after he died. While Plunkett was never violent and rarely verbally abusive, he was always distant, neglecting his wife and son to write his fiction around a series of demanding day jobs. After this visit, in which she thought she might lose him to Camille, Ava informs Plunkett that she has fallen in love with him. Plunkett reciprocates her feelings. And yet, Plunkett's lack of physical being is causing Ava to consider a romance with Kyle, his son, in order to experience more fully the voice of the dead writer she has come to love. Ava meets Kyle at a bar on Lombard Street; Kyle informs Ava that his mother, Camille, has died. Kyle insists that Ava take him to the managed care home to help make arrangements for his mother's body. During this car ride, with Ava driving, Kyle begins to hear his father's voice and to rail against him. Kyle reveals that his father hasn't committed suicide, but that he shot him for what he considered to be Plunkett's cruelty toward his mother. Ava and Plunkett are stunned. By this time, Ava has Plunkett's remains in the trunk of her car; she insists that Kyle return the bones to their grave as penance for the murder. At the cemetery Kyle runs away; Ava cannot bring herself to let go of Plunkett's remains. Ava's sister, Judy, shows up at the cemetery and in a drug-addled haze shoots Ava, of whom she has long been jealous. Ava dies of her wounds. Plunkett is left behind--but ultimately they are reunited in the dry, dark sea beyond this life.

The shifting topography of contemporary Japanese society is engendering a significant reorientation of men’s family relations. However, exactly how Japanese men are adapting to these broad-based trends, including parent-child relations, demographics, marriage norms, care provision, residential choices, and gender roles, as well as in the decline of Confucian worldviews, remains relatively obscure. In this dissertation, I explore men’s everyday practices underpinning their family relations as husbands, fathers, sons-in-law, and grandfathers. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the summers of 2013 and 2014 in Hyogo, through narrative interviews and participant-observation. I find husbands’ view of their wives transitioning from having a culturally prescribed duty to perform domestic matters to simply having responsibility for domestic matters. This opens up space for negotiation within married couples, with my informants providing what I refer to as additional help, which offers new insight into charting the evolution of hegemonic masculinity. I evidence relatedness founded on exchange as an approach to understand relations across the extended family, which importantly involves additional help, financial resources, and intimacy. I underscore how men selectively seek intimacy in some family relations, notably as fathers and grandfathers. Provision of additional help and seeking of intimacy lead to men’s (re)construction of masculinities differing across family relations, with an important reason for men to select their practices so as to craft their family relations is to address their sense of well-being. Further, the pattern of men’s family relations reveals the emergence of substantially novel sons-in-law relations, as compared to that found in ie patriarchal norms. This evidence suggests a fundamental shift from a vertically-dominated set of family relations, as in the ie household, to a more horizontal, fluid set of relations across the extended family.