published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Master / Master of Public Health

The major focus of this study was to examine the consistency between the perception of teachers and parents toward the value of bilingual education for facilitating the academic growth of school-age children. Relationships of perceptions to the academic achievement of children was also evaluated. Three specific areas of the bilingual program were investigated: philosophy, functional value, and implementation. In order to obtain measures of perception of teachers and parents toward bilingualism and bilingual education, an instrument was developed. This instrument, named as the Attitudes Toward Bilingualism (ATB), contained 49 Likert-type items. The items of the ATB were divided into three categories: philosophy, functional values, and implementations. Items in each section were rated on a five-point scale ranging from a low to a high agreement scale. Teacher and parent volunteers filled out the ATB. The faculty of five targeted bilingual schools volunteered to participate in this study. Teachers included in the sample were drawn from all first, second, and third grade bilingual classrooms of the target schools. Thirty bilingual teachers and 107 parents participated in the study. The overall directions of the findings clearly suggested a great deal of similarity in the perceptions of parents and teachers toward various issues surrounding bilingual education practices. The specific issues examined in this study can be viewed in a broad sense of parent-school partnership issues, which need to be studied at greater depth. Issue concerning implications of the study and the general utility of obtained results were discussed.

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The representation of the national minorities of Hungary in the historiography of the dualistic era (1867-1918) Imre Tarafás Abstract One of the most problematic questions of Hungarian politics during the dualistic era (1867-1918) was the policy towards national minorities. The population of five nationalities reached or even exceeded one million each. These minorities were not only large in population, but they were also touched by nationalist ideologies, as a result, they declared themselves nations which the Hungarian legislation was not willing to accept. In addition, most of these minorities had federative, or even separatist aims. The 19th century also saw the birth of history as a scientific discipline. Professional historians all over Europe had a crucial task: by construction a national history narrative, they had to legitimize the existence of their nation. This meant that the pas had to be presented as a process which inevitably led to the formation of the 19th century's nation sate. Additionally, history served as a basis for both the Magyars and the nationalities in their argumentation. The central question of the paper is how Magyar historians integrated the national minorities of the country into a national history narrative. The problem is studied in five syntheses on Hungarian history...

Conventional wisdom portrays ethnic minorities as likely victims of democratization who often fall prey to nationalist aggression fueled by power-seeking elites. Yet, history is replete with newly democratic states that have not only avoided targeted violence against ethnic "others" but also sought to reconcile with aggrieved ethnic minorities through concessions over self-determination. In light of conventional wisdom, this picture is puzzling and raises two important questions: 1) Why is self-determination reform so frequently observed during democratization periods? 2) Why do some democratizing states accommodate minority demands for self-determination while others continue to neglect minority grievances, or worse, become a breeding ground for exclusionary nationalism and minority repression? This dissertation is dedicated to addressing these questions. To answer the first question, I develop a novel theory of self-determination reform that explains the conditions under which government leaders develop both the capacity and incentives to introduce policies that devolve some degree of autonomy to separatist minorities. The theory pinpoints early democratization as a critical juncture where two key conditions necessary for self-determination reform - limited institutional constraints to rule and threats to elite survival - are most likely to be observed together. During early democratization, newly democratic governments are able to push forward radical policy changes without the meddling of institutionally empowered veto players, who typically gain more leverage as the democratic regime consolidates. Matching this capacity for reform are democratizers' strategic incentives to co-opt ethnic separatists. The source of these incentives, I argue, is the emergence of threats to elite survival during the early democratization period, which may be posed by a number of anti-democratic forces including the loyalists of the authoritarian regime and coup-plotting military factions. Amidst political instability, extending an olive branch to separatist minorities helps threatened democratizers strengthen their hand vis-a-vis imminent threats to their survival by containing separatist violence in the periphery and preventing tactical alliances between center-seeking and separatist rebel groups. In certain paths to democracy, democratizers also develop reputational incentives for self-determination reform, which helps establish democratic credentials through signaling a clean break with authoritarian practices. I test my hypotheses using a mixed-method research design, combining statistical analyses of large-N data with a detailed case study of the Philippines-Moro relations during the country's transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. The quantitative findings confirm my hypotheses about the domestic political conditions that are most conducive to minority accommodation, as well as the relationship between democratization and self-determination reform. The Philippines chapter illustrates how strategic and reputational incentives for minority accommodation drive self-determination reform in early democracies, drawing on evidence from secondary sources and semi-structured interviews conducted during fieldwork in Manila. In later chapters, I turn to my second research question and explore the variation in transition outcomes for separatist minorities across democratizing states. The key insight is that conciliatory steps towards ethnic separatists is a likely outcome in all types of transition paths marked by political instability, with the exception of coerced incumbent-led transitions where the incumbent views electoral competition as the primary threat to its survival prospects. In addition to this exception, non-conciliatory outcomes may also be observed in top-down transitions led by powerful autocrats who democratize voluntarily and do so without allowing the transition process to generate any threats to their survival. Case studies of Spain, Nicaragua and Turkey introduced in the last chapter help probe the generalizability of the theory and illustrate how different transition paths shape democratizers' policies towards separatists disputes. Altogether, my dissertation project presents a novel theory of self-determination reform, as well as undertaking the first systematic analysis of the conditions under which democratization paves the way for state-minority reconciliation. More broadly, the theory and findings also add nuance to current thinking about democratization and ethnic minorities, providing evidence that transition processes are not closely associated with minority victimization and ethnic violence as is commonly assumed.

The importance of older adults' health is increasing with extending lifespans. Despite a large amount of research conducted on older adults' health, little is known about sexual orientation differences. Although some studies have examined sexual orientation differences in health, many of them tended to focus on young and middle adulthood or paid little attention to life stage contexts. When studies do focus on older adulthood, they tend to focus solely on differences by sexual identity, and a very few studies have focused on reporting of same-sex contact (SSC) as a measure of sexual orientation. Using a population-based sample of older adults, the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, this dissertation focused on two major areas of comparison between SSC and non-SSC older adults that have received limited attention in past research: STDs as a sexual health outcome (Chapter 2) and alternative medicine usage as a treatment seeking behavior (Chapter 3). I argue that sexual orientation is associated with older people's health status and treatment seeking behavior. Analyses based on negative binomial regressions and propensity matching models found that older adults who report any SSC in their lifetime have higher lifetime rates of STDs and are more likely to use alternative medicine as a type of treatment seeking behavior. Primary analyses were based on negative binomial regression models, and supplemental analyses included propensity score matching models, stratified regressions, zero-inflated negative binomial regression models, sensitivity analyses, and additional tests based on alternative measures of the focal variables. These findings extend the sociological literature on sexual orientation differences in older adult health by examining outcomes of health status and treatment seeking behaviors that have previously been overlooked despite their important theoretical and policy implications. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 6, 2017. / alternative medicine, health, older adults, quantitative analysis, sexual minority, STD / Includes bibliographical references. / Koji Ueno, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Charness, University Representative; Miles Taylor, Committee Member; John Taylor, Committee Member.

My thesis body of work offers a bridge into the physical, emotional, and spiritual scarring caused by global intolerance towards the LGBTQIA+ community and oppression embedded by patriarchal power. This body of work is a collection of resurfaced history and experiences transformed physically by intentionally subverting hyper-masculine materials into knots. My objective is to deconstruct individual knotted cords that make up the fabric of my identity and reconstruct them into an installation. Renascence offers a visceral experience for the audience that aesthetically explores the body’s transformation as it heals. This thesis asserts a place within a reflective, fluid, transitional identity expressing the intersection of the temporality and body that I occupy as a Queer, Latinx artist of color. Working across media, Renascence incorporates performance, photography, paper, paint, projection, mirrors and built environments. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The British population is made up of three main ethnic groups: Caucasian, Afro- Caribbean and South Asian. The history of Britain is littered with a series of invasion and colonisation events, potentially resulting in a variety of different genetic influences shaping the native population. More recent immigration trends have lead to over 11 million people within the UK describing themselves as belonging to an ethnic minority. The aim of this research is therefore to characterise these three population groups for a series of genetic markers, in the process gaining an insight into the genetics and origins of the individuals within these groups and ultimately developing a robust population-of-origin classification system for a DNA sample of unknown origin. To this end, three distinct areas of the genome were investigated. This comprised the development of a suite of PCR multiplex reactions to analyse 11 Y chromosome short tandem repeat (STR) markers, sequencing of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, and analysis of a number of autosomal Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) known to show population specific allele distributions. The results from these studies led to the development of simple (Y chromosome and mitochondria) or complex (SNPs) classification systems enabling unknown DNA samples to be categorised into one of these 3 ethnic groups with a high degree of certainty: the YSTR population-of-origin classification algorithm had a success rate of 80%, the mitochondrial version a 90% success rate while correct prediction was achieved over 94% of the time with the autosomal SNPs.

Since the 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has increasingly impacted minority groups in the United States, particularly African Americans. Why is this happening? Comparative studies of developing nations have convincingly established a relationship between concentrated poverty, ethnic boundaries, and lack of effective governmental response as contributing to high levels of infection in those countries. To date, however, no study has sought to apply these insights to the American context. This dissertation endeavors to show that, first, marginalization of U.S. sub-groups most at risk of infection is largely a product of poor health outcomes associated with concentrated urban poverty and economic stratification. Second, this sub-group marginalization is exacerbated by the politics of retrenchment which increasingly privatizes risks onto individuals, states, and non-governmental providers. The net result of these changes is a U.S. health care system too fractured to recognize and respond to changes in HIV/AIDS demographics.