The study is a contextual analysis of flood victimization. Victimization is defined as the social, psychological, and physiological aftermath experienced by victims of a disaster. Disaster researchers concentrate on the victims' characteristics to explain the varying degrees of their victimization, providing only ambiguous results. Theorists such as Kreps, Wildavsky, and Douglas contend that the outcomes of disasters are contingent upon social structure. This analysis treats victimization as one such outcome. The condition and behavior of individuals can be explained by the presence of disaster and the conditions of social organization. A model explains victimization based on individual's attributes (individual resources), his social environment, and the disaster characteristics. This study uses the 1984 Mingo Creek Flood Victims Survey data to test the model. The data contain information measuring victimization. The survey data are linked with 1980 Census tract data. The tract data provide indicators of the social networks. This tract information, the contextual variables, taps the social conditions, including poverty, unemployment, geographic mobility, and family patterns. This study uses factor analysis to identify the dimensions of victimization. Regression tests the relationship between the contextual variables, the individual resource variables, the disaster characteristic variables, and victimization. The results of the analysis show that victimization is multidimensional with different types of variables being significant predictors for each dimension of victimization, one variable indicating the intensity of the disaster, the dollar value of damage victims experienced, is found to be a significant predictor of the psychological, physiological, and social disruption aspects of victimization. Variables measuring the family and unemployment patterns in the victims' census tract are significant predictors of the psychological and social disruption aspect of victimization. The findings provide general support for the proposed model of victimization. However, victimization is multidimensional with each dimension having a unique set of predictors. Based on the findings, this study suggests that future research focus on measurement and conceptualization of the characteristics of disasters and the victims' social environment.

People are often a product of their environment, and each of the characters in this collection is an example of that shaping effect. These stories take you to the southern plains–land of red dirt, Bluestem, and prairie wind. Themes like hope, loss, and the exploration of frontier appear throughout the collection. In each story the setting becomes a character, forcing us to recognize the importance of place in our lives.

In the early twentieth century, the American eugenics movement began to dominate much of the public discourse surrounding disability, particularly the disability known as “feeble-mindedness.” Eugenicists broadly depicted the feeble-minded as both innocent children because of their supposed lack of intelligence and moral deviants who could harm members of society. There are many studies that have analyzed the effects of this construction of disability in popular culture and American films. However, only a few scholars, such as Joseph Straus and Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, have asked what the feeble mind sounds like. Through a musical analysis of the leitmotifs present in the film scores for Of Mice and Men (1939) and Oklahoma! (1955), this thesis argues that the symptomology of feeble-mindedness and social stereotypes of the disability seeped into and influenced the musical portrayals of Jud Fry and Lennie Small. Jud and Lennie reflected many of the anxieties surrounding disability during the eugenics era. Although the films’ narratives reveal the ideological positions towards disability, music also plays a significant role announcing characters’ disability and encouraging particular responses to disability. The musicians for these films, including Aaron Copland, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Robert Russell Bennett, accomplished this task by musically imitating a disabled embodiment. By mimicking either physical symptoms or social stereotypes of feeble-mindedness, particularly obsession and idiocy, the film scores represent Jud and Lennie as either innocent children or social menaces to support the ideological stance of each film.

This study examined the role mass media play in animating the relationship between globalization and the nation-state. This study interrogated this relationship using a multi-method approach that analyzed news coverage, the general "media climate" in Oklahoma, and audience responses to the media climate regarding the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, a comprehensive immigration reform bill passed into law in 2007. The key goals of this study were to examine the ways in which news media in Oklahoma cover the issue of immigration, particularly as it relates to the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, in order to garner a deeper understanding of the ways in which the mass media participate in global processes while cementing the national imagined community. Moreover, by examining audience interpretations of news coverage from mainstream and diasporic news outlets regarding this legislation, this study provided insight into the ways messages about the immigrant family and its contingent gender roles circulate and incorporate into day-to-day culture and how, in turn, these cultural meanings are put into the service of the nation-state. This study used a multi-method approach comprising of a textual analysis of the bill itself and news coverage of the two largest English-language newspapers in the state. I also analyzed the text of a Spanish-language paper based in Tulsa and conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with various state legislators, journalists, community members, and staff members at and clients of the Latino Community Development Agency in Oklahoma City. In my analysis of the text of the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, or, as it is commonly referred to, HB 1804, I argue that the bill established the ideological parameters of the immigration reform debate in the state. The text of the bill also reifies the nation-state, produces a subaltern immigrant community without recourse to the legal system, and provides a template of the ideal U.S. citizen through its representation of the deviant immigrant. My textual analysis of the two largest English-language newspapers in Oklahoma posits that these news discourses criminalize the immigrant, and gender, racialize, and class the immigrant worker, family unit, and its contingent members. As a result, the news coverage can be seen to highlight the ways in which 1804 is an attempt at resistance to global intrusions in Oklahoma and to offer assurance to the citizen community that cultural turmoil will be calmed. The figures of the bill's main author and the Catholic Church also symbolize the tension between the nation-state and the global in these news discourses. Finally, I argue that the Spanish-language media and the LCDA serve to unify the Latino community in Oklahoma in the context of immigration reform discourses, regardless of legal status, providing cultural sustenance and support when 1804 would deny this to the immigrant community.

Thesis (D. Ed. Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-89).

Utilizing data from the Oklahoma Department of Health Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) for the years 2004 through 2011, this study examines racial and ethnic differences in unhealthy maternal behaviors and the consequences of those actions on the health of both mother and child. The maternal behavior variables include smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, multivitamin use, and prenatal care utilization. The maternal health variables include gestational diabetes and hypertension. The labor and delivery outcome variables include placental issues, premature rupture of membranes (PROM), low birth weight, and child placement in an intensive care unit. This researcher hypothesized that minorities would engage in risky and unhealthy behaviors while pregnant more often than whites due to social disadvantages in the economic and educational realms. Furthermore, minorities would be more likely than whites to have unfavorable outcomes regarding labor, delivery, and health of the child due to lower socioeconomic status, poor maternal health, and underutilization of preventative care. The researcher finds that minority women seem to adhere to proper maternal health recommendations associated with personal choice, including smoking and drinking, though disparities are evident when compared to whites regarding behaviors associated with socioeconomic status, including prenatal care utilization and multivitamin use. African American women are more likely than whites to experience premature rupture of the membranes, have an underweight baby, and to place their baby in ICU, though less likely to experience placental issues. Native American women are less likely than whites to experience premature rupture of the membranes, have an underweight baby, and to place their baby in ICU, but more likely to experience placental issues. As expected, substantial changes have occurred in the maternal health and well-being of Oklahoma mothers over the course of the two PRAMS data collection phases.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-124)

Thesis (M.A.) History--University of Central Oklahoma, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 161-169 ).

Thesis (D.Min.)--Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, 2009. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Apr. 19, 2010). Includes abstract. "A project report and thesis submitted to the Faculty of Brite Divinity School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Ministry." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-182).