This ethnography explores the practice of sex tourism in Negril, Jamaica, and its sociocultural, economic, and health impacts on the popular tourist destination. Transactional sex with female tourists has become a popular income generator for some young Caribbean males who are excluded from formal employment in the region's leading industry. Like other resort locales, Negril draws both men and women from various parts of the country who choose to engage in sex work in order to benefit from the tourist dollars spent in Jamaica's third most popular resort area. Through the analysis of observations, interviews with residents, tourists, government officials, and health practitioners, as well as life histories of men involved in sex tourism, this study seeks to contribute to current literature on the practice and reveal its impact on the people of this particular locale. Additionally, relevant health data is utilized to examine the connection between sexual health and sex tourism locally, and to offer recommendations for effectively targeting male sex workers through risk reduction programs. This research takes a political economy perspective and applies relevant theoretical contributions from the anthropology of tourism, Caribbean gender theory, and gender performativity.

This exploratory study examined links between health communication and other constructs affecting health promotion and disease prevention among Haitian mother-daughter dyads living in West Central Florida, and the risk or protective factors for HIV. Risky sexual behaviors can be reduced with accurate and effective information provided through parent-adolescent communication (Coetzee et al, 2014; Ogle, Glasier & Riley, 2008; Hadley et al., 2009). In Haiti, a country that bears a disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS, women are the most vulnerable (UNAIDS, 2016a); In the United States (U.S.), foreign-born Haitian women in the state of Florida experience health disparities in many areas and bear a disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS relative to their non-Haitian peers but little is known about (Florida Department of Health [FLDOH], 2017; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion [ODPHP], 2017). Indeed, the state of Florida recently reported that newly diagnosed cases of HIV increased for foreign-born Haitian women and in 2016, the latter represented 3.64% of all cases (Florida Department of Health, Bureau of Communicable Diseases, HIV/AIDS Section, 2017a). Recognizing that Haitian mothers traditionally bear the primary responsibility for transmitting traditional norms, values, health beliefs and practices, a concept referred to as poto mitan, this qualitative study examined risks and protective factors for HIV that may emerge in health and sexual health communication among Haitian mothers and daughters. This study comprised a two-phase process in which purposive sampling was first used to recruit and interview a focus group of seven health care providers and Haitian-descendant community leaders who engage Haitian-descendant clients in West Central Florida, after which findings from the focus group were used to strengthen a semi-structured interview guide that would be used to interview 10 Haitian mother/daughter dyads in the area. This study addressed a gap in the scientific literature related to health and sexual health promotion and disease prevention communication among Haitian immigrant women in the U.S., particularly surrounding HIV risk. Specifically, it sought to discover what constitutes specific methods that Haitian mothers use to communicate health and sexual health and the contents of such conversations, as well as the intention of daughters to transmit information that they received from their mothers, even here in the U.S. This study applied a constructivist grounded theory approach, in which Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model (IMB) were triangulated as a framework. ATLAS.ti® 7.0, a software that supports analysis of textual data, was used to analyze transcripts from the focus group and from the interviews. Findings indicate that (a) Haitian mothers intentionally transmit specific and valued traditional knowledge about health and sexual health to their daughters, specifically in the areas of vaginal health, post-partum rituals, and abstinence as the acceptable mode of HIV prevention; (b) Haitian mothers in the study sample lack adequate and accurate knowledge about HIV/AIDS as well as the time to learn more that they can share with daughters; (c) Haitian mothers in the study sample do engage in direct communication about HIV prevention, taking advantage of teachable moments, using popular music and television programs; (d) there is a strong reliance on religious leaders and school systems to address health and sexual health instruction; (e) Haitian mothers in the sample reported and daughters confirmed that there is extremely limited conversation between the mothers and daughters surrounding sex, HIV risk reduction methods outside of abstinence. (f) Symbolic Interactionism is a useful framework for understanding the process of communication between Haitian mothers and daughters in this study; (g) IMB is useful to understand that the information being provided by Haitian mothers in this sample is at times insufficient and inaccurate, thereby limiting the ability of daughters to effectively and intentionally engage in conduct that protects their sexual health and reduces HIV risk. This study has several implications for social work education, research, practice, and policy. First, social work students must be taught to conduct comprehensive assessments of Haitian women in the context of valued Haitian family dynamics, and to engage in life-long learning regarding protective as well as risk factors for Haitian mothers and daughters. Second, Haitian and non-Haitian health providers who serve Haitian clientele could be surveyed regarding knowledge of health beliefs and practices and its potential impact on the health of their constituents. their Haitian patients. Third, researchers may use this study’s findings as a foundation for developing interventions that enhance strategies aimed at establishing rapport with Haitian clients and for assessing potential interactions between hidden health practices and prescribed medications. Fourth, findings suggest the need to develop interventions that empower trusted religious leaders to gain accurate HIV knowledge and to deliver empowering information effectively to their congregants. Fifth, findings suggest a need to develop outreach programs aimed at heightening HIV awareness and increasing HIV testing for Haitian women who are similar to this study’s sample. Sixth, social workers engaging Haitian female clients can make intentional efforts to include Haitian mothers in treatment. Seventh, this study’s findings underscore a need for social workers to advocate on behalf of Haitian immigrants’ efforts to be properly counted in the census, and to be counted as a culturally distinct group in other surveillance data. Social workers can benefit from understanding the strengths of relationships between Haitian mothers and daughters and to enhance their awareness of the heterogeneity among Haitians in general when working with Haitian clients. To work effectively with Haitian immigrant females overall requires cultural humility to mitigate the likelihood of bias towards them based on known or hidden traditional health beliefs and practices and gender roles.

Since the release of the new iPad in 2010, few studies have explored the idea of tablet- based menus in restaurants. Since this is a new topic in the hospitality industry, there has not been literature that explores how personal traits influence the adoption intention of tablet-based menus. This study aims to explain the impact of innovation characteristics and individual differences on customer intentions to adopt tablet-based menus in restaurants of different service levels. With a random sample of 430 participants collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a regression analysis and an ANOVA test were performed. The results confirmed that only three variables (relative advantage, compatibility, and restaurant type) make a statistically significant contribution to predicting the adoption intention of tablet-based menus. It was also found that adoption intention of tablet-based menus differs across three restaurant types (quick-service restaurant, midscale restaurant, and upscale restaurant). The findings of this study provide an important insight to restaurant managers who may consider implementing tablet-based menus at their establishments. Limitations and ideas for future research are discussed.

In the face of competition and competing demands on organizations, employees are taxed to exert more effort with fewer resources. The type of environment can create the recipe for increased levels of occupational stress and an environment of increased workplace incivility.Therefore, it is not surprising that research has begun to look at the interaction between occupational stress and workplace incivility. The current work environment requires employees to exert more effort or face negative consequences from supervisors and peers. All too often, the salary increases, bonus structure, career progression, job security and mobility that might be reasonably expected from producing such extra effort do not align with organizational reality. The vexing situation creates workplace settings in which employees would be more likely to release their frustrations generated by unmet expectations through engaging in uncivil behaviors. Andersson and Pearson (1999) define workplace incivility as a “low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target, in violation of workplace norms for mutual respect” (p. 457). The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the relationship between occupational stress and instigator workplace incivility, as moderated by personality, to select organizational outcomes (i.e., perceived physical health and intent to turnover). Data were collected from 206 fulltime working adults in the healthcare industry utilizing Amazon MTurk. Moderated hierarchical regressions were conducted to test the possible moderating role of personality on the stress-incivility relationship; the results demonstrated partial support for H1-H4. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted also to explore the degree stress and incivility predicted the outcome variables of perceived physical health and intentions to turnover; the data indicated support for the notion that greater stress and incivility positively predicted turnover intent. The findings suggest that personality did play a role in the stress-incivility relationship. Conscientiousness and agreeableness dampened the relationship, while neuroticism and extraversion strengthened the relationship. Further, this study found that intent to turnover increased as workplace incivility also increased, even after controlling for stress. Future research was proposed to test the models examined in this study in different settings, with additional moderators, and longitudinally. The practical findings suggest the possible utility of stress reduction training to reduce the likelihood of uncivil behavior.

While the National Park Service is charged with interpreting and preserving areas designated as park resources, they must also manage environmental issues such as erosion resulting from climate change. This research sets out to narrate how Palo Seco, Puerto Rico, a neighboring community of the San Juan National Historic Site, perceives similar environmental conditions and motivations for addressing these issues. My research sits at the intersection between the park’s charter and understanding community implications of environmental changes that affect local heritage. Using Authorized Heritage Discourse and environmental justice as theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the National Park Service should include the observations of climate change from Palo Seco community to broaden Park Service’s understanding and preservation policies. I also recommend the National Park Service utilize cultural resource management guidelines to develop programs that facilitate collaborative research projects with the Palo Seco community to not only address mutual issues of climate changes but also document local heritage knowledge that can enhance the Park’s interpretation and preservation efforts.

This study explored the relationship between people who play massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) and their avatars, as well as the impact on players’ self-esteem and perceived social capital in the real world. To examine these influences of online video gameplay, this research investigated gamers who play the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft (WoW). This study employed an online survey made available on Reddit, a widely-used news, entertainment, and social-networking website, in which all the content is user-generated. The research questionnaire was intended to reveal the bond between MMORPG players and their avatars; the study examined how this relationship could influence MMORPG players’ confidence in themselves and advance their network of relationships in the real world. The strength of the WoW players’ identification with their avatar did have some impact on their self-esteem in the real world; however, there was no significant relationship between avatar self-identification and perceived social capital in the real world. Additionally, this research did reveal a substantial correlation between self-esteem and perceived social capital in the real world.

In the field of HIV, more than 30 years into the epidemic, the need to ensure that what researchers learn makes its way into tangible actions in the real world is especially poignant. This dissertation addresses the critical divide between research production and its translation into practice. It advances ways to measure the investments of citizens and stakeholders in qualitative studies and offers new perspectives on the losses inadvertently caused by particular investments in health research and services. Unfortunately, many of the problems in how we practice and disseminate research are rampant throughout the health and development research sector. Therefore, while this anthropological dissertation focuses on HIV and Lesotho, several of the findings are applicable in other geographical and topical settings. This dissertation explores how the practice of conducting qualitative research becomes a type of disease prevention intervention itself cutting across systems. Using a large qualitative HIV sexual, social, and behavioral health research project, as a case study, I illuminate how health research knowledge makes its way (or not) to the populations for whom it is intended. Following up four years later, using in-depth semi-structured and structured interviews, I probe practical and theoretical issues involving the original research assistants, a comparison group, and representatives from organizations targeted to be most likely to use the research findings. I pilot a communication diffusion measurement tool that visualizes the researchers’ ability to apply what they learned from the research experience in talking to their families, partners, acquaintances, work colleagues, and students/trainees. The results indicate significant differences between the original team and the comparison group’s communication diagrams, demonstrating the tool’s usefulness in visualizing who is talking to whom, with what magnitude, and the types of life moments that trigger opportunities to have quality conversations about HIV, sex, and Multiple Concurrent Partnerships (MCP). As evidenced in this study, team members are part of the larger social system. They have the potential to influence the formal dissemination of HIV prevention information into policy and programming as well as the informal diffusion into their own life and in the lives of those they encounter in their social network. Nowhere in translation and dissemination research descriptions are the research team members discussed. Based on this research, I argue that, in addition to greater involvement of the public and stakeholders in translational research, there is a need to include the “implementers” of research beyond that of the principal investigators: the research staff. There is a need to further conceptualize the role of the “research team” in the translation of research to practice paradigm. Data have been collected from grey documents, project reports, scientific papers, newspapers, and websites establishing current points of focus for well-funded global entities in context with our understanding of transmission and prevention dynamics and debates. Analysis of these sources reveal strong rhetoric for combined biomedical, social, behavioral and structural approaches but programming and funding reports reflect much more weight and financing to biomedical solutions. The findings from organizational representatives interviewed in this study reveal that the creation of research and diffusion of information will follow the funding. Similar to Lesotho, many researchers and health professionals in developing countries are hired into biomedical or clinical projects for employment. This project explores the HIV response as part of economic, social and health development in Lesotho supported by the aid industry, and presents data on how the investments of money influence the ways in which local leaders and everyday citizens define, communicate, and conceive solutions to the problem of HIV. In the mid-term, translating biomedical findings into real world realities requires qualitative research. Ethically sound and well-trained qualitative researchers are fundamental in the creation and diffusion of knowledge. As the findings in this study indicate, the qualitative experience provides an opportunity to understand the epidemic that leads people to change their own behaviors, influence those around them, and have the desire to facilitate conversations to provoke social action and change. However, this study also demonstrates how people can go years talking, studying, and working in HIV without ever having an “awakening” or deeper understanding of HIV in their local reality. Study results delve into the long-term effects on the local researchers, furthering our understanding of the different ways in which “capacity” is built in the local involvement. The dissertation also explores critical questions about qualitative research methods and ethics within a context of investigating a disease where everyone—researchers and the researched—are either infected or affected. Based on this research, I argue that true education about HIV is a dialogical perpetual process of interrogating what we know, imagining what should be done and trying: Praxis. This heightened awareness of how our daily research practices link to larger systems will help us not to allow our do-gooder attempts to blind us to the harm we may inadvertently do, or to the lost opportunities we squander. Instead, we must capture and maximize our investments in research and people as agents of change and not only as patients, participants, or employees.

The focus of this study is on media reporting of police involved shootings in Florida. Given that knowledge of killings committed by law enforcement are frequently restricted to what people get from news sources, it is important to investigate the way these messages are being communicated. An exploratory analysis of 199 articles and transcripts covering 86 cases relevant to deadly use of force by police officers as reported from 2013 to 2015 provided the primary data source. The analysis engaged a critical examination of media content and goodness of fit models to identify commonalities used by the media when reporting police involved shootings. The goal is to determine the potential impact of race, age and gender of a victim with regard to the media’s portrayal of events that result in lethal use of force by police. It is expected that exposure of the discoveries in this study will influence future law enforcement reporting systems for a more transparent relationship between police, news and the community. The demographics characteristics race, sex and age that were assessed in this study were not significantly associated with the length of media coverage on police involved shootings. However, further analysis using different modeling approaches are required for a better understanding as to whether a relationship exists.

South Asia has the highest absolute number of women with an unmet need for contraception in the world. The total number of women with unmet need is 142 million. Of this, Asia accounts for 84 million followed by Sub-Saharan Africa at 32 million. Within South Asia, some countries have seen unmet need decrease and the contraception rate increase; however, Pakistan remains the exception to the rule. Pakistan has a low rate of contraception use, high rate of contraception discontinuation, high unmet need and high rate of unwanted fertility. A number of theories have hypothesized that community-level factors influence a couple’s fertility decisions. Yet until recently, studies of contraceptive use dynamics have focused on individual and household-level determinants. Within Pakistan, this focus on individual and household level has not been able to explain the changes in use, which goes beyond socio-economic and cultural boundaries. As a result, there is impetus on researchers to shift focus and look at the interaction between and within the individual and the community. This study aims to address this gap in the literature by examining the association between community contextual factors and modern contraception use in a developing country using multilevel modeling. The Commission on Social Determinants of Health and the Determinants of Fertility framework were used to test five research questions, on the association between modern contraception use and socioeconomic and political context, social position, social class, health system and overall community contextual factors. Community contextual factors tested were found to be associated with modern contraception use and explained 32% of the variance in the outcome. Specifically, the variables that played a significant role and showed a strong association with modern contraception use were related to public policy; community knowledge of the presence of a lady health worker, community access to a family planning service outlet, and community region of residence, and women’s autonomy; community women’s education, community women’s ability to choose a spouse and own land or home. This study moves the discussion from a focus on individual level factors that impact contraceptive us to community-level factors. Numerous studies and anecdotal evidence have pointed to the importance of community context in contraceptive use; however, there has been a paucity of research investigating this realm. This study bridges this gap by providing evidence for existing programs and policies, strengthening the call for more community-based initiatives and helping to understand individual behavior as it relates to the community in which the person resides.

In the face of future uncertainties, many places are struggling with decisions about how to prepare for and adapt to climate change. The purpose of this research is to shed light on the concept of resilience, and uncover lessons for resilience-building exposed by a past disaster, Hurricane Wilma. The dissertation begins with an introduction (Chapter 1) detailing the research problem, key terms and overall research design. The study was conducted in three distinct phases. The first phase (Chapter 2), explored the concept of resilience to understand how it was defined in three South Florida communities. Content analyses of city and county documents were conducted to extract explicit definitions of resilience as well as implicit definitions based on carefully selected keywords. Results showed the engineering resilience concept was most prevalent across all three study areas. Furthermore, keywords related to the dimension of the built environment were most common in Broward and Lee Counties. While this may indicate a need for communities to shift toward more progressive, social-ecological conceptualizations of resilience, a more central conclusion was that local applications of resilience frameworks need to be more explicit about how they define resilience, and what resilience-building looks like in that particular context. Phase two (Chapter 3) explored the interplay between specified resilience, addressing resistance to known disturbances, and general resilience, addressing a system's capacity to deal with less predictable shocks. This phase entailed a content analysis of 172 Sun-Sentinel newspaper articles about Hurricane Wilma. Prominent themes that emerged included distribution of benefits and risks, social learning and memory, cross-scale issues, vulnerability and social networks. This chapter concludes with four specific recommendations for Broward County to enhance resilience to future storms and less predictable disturbances, like climate change and sea level rise. During the third phase (Chapter 4) a modified resilience activation framework was applied to analyze social factors that may limit or promote adaptive capacity in South Florida. Focus groups with homeowners were used to gain insight about past experiences with Hurricane Wilma, as well as perceptions and expectations regarding local climate adaptation efforts. Results showed that risk perceptions, insurance practices, and social networks may influence the willingness and ability of individuals to prepare for and adapt to disasters. Social limits to adaptation among participants included inaccurate risk perceptions based on past experiences and feelings of helplessness, and a lack of political trust at the state level. Social resources that can be leveraged to enhance adaptive capacity included knowledge reserves of long-term residents, strong bonding capital, and trust in local, non-elected government employees. Results from each phase of research were synthesized to create a novel procedural roadmap to guide how communities integrate resiliency into their planning documents.