abstract: Studies on what shapes public perceptions of ex-prisoners are abundant. One omission is the detailed investigation of how perceptions of former inmates might vary by the amount of time since their last incarceration term. More specifically, it remains unknown whether increased length since an ex-prisoner’s last incarceration spell is positively linked to higher levels of trust. This study (N = 448) uses a factorial vignette design to test the perceived trustworthiness of former inmates across two hypothetical scenarios. Time since last incarceration spell is used as the independent variables in a series of ordered logistic regression models. The role of gender is also explored. Results show that trust perceptions of ex-prisoners minimally vary by time since last incarceration spell when personal victimization is at risk, but the magnitude is small and shows no clear pattern of declining risk over time. Less support is observed in situations where property victimization is at risk. These findings illustrate the complexity of how people perceive and feel about ex-inmates in situations of trust. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Criminology and Criminal Justice 2018

This study aimed to examine previous empirical literature indicating that death penalty support contains a divide among Blacks and Whites and a gap among males and females. Previous literature has indicated that there has been a persistent racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support that has spanned over 60 years of research. Attempts to attenuate these divides have failed to fully explain why Whites are more likely than Blacks to support the death penalty and men are more likely than women to support the death penalty. This study proposes the use of empathy to control for these divides because research has indicated that those who are more empathic tend to be less punitive. Using data collected from a survey conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a paid task website, this study attempted to attenuate the racial divide and gender gap by controlling for empathy. The sample consisted of 403 usable surveys that contained questions that measured sociodemographic characteristics, three measurements of empathy (cognitive, affective and ethnocultural), death penalty support, and attribution styles. The results indicated that there was not a racial divide or gender gap in death penalty support despite over 60 years of research indicating otherwise. Furthermore, this study failed to find a significant relationship between cognitive and affective empathy with death penalty support. This study did find a relationship between attribution styles and death penalty support as well as ethnocultural empathy with death penalty support. Individuals who scored higher on the situational attribution style were less likely to support the death penalty. Those who scored higher on the ethnocultural empathy scale were also less likely to support the death penalty. Future research should refrain from testing with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as was not generalizable to the United States population. Research should be continued on different samples that have been shown to be more reliable than online surveys. Finally, research should be continued beyond empathy to examine what effects other controls have on the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support.

This study develops and tests a group conflict model as an explanation for international immigration beliefs in the United States and Canada. Group conflict is structured by evaluations concerning group relationships and group members. At a conceptual level group conflict explains a broad range of policy beliefs among a large number of actors in multiple settings. Group conflict embodies attitudes relating to objective-based conditions and subjective-based beliefs.

M.A. (Industrial Psychology) / South Africa is a diverse country with people from different races, cultures, and socio-economic backgrounds. Yet the differences that exist amongst its citizens are neither embraced nor accepted by all its people. Alexandra Township was chosen as the research site to investigate the xenophobic attacks of May 2008 as this was where the attacks first started. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of Alexandra residents towards the attacks of May 2008 in order to determine their attitudes towards black foreigners. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted in different sections of Alexandra. Interviews were conducted with twelve males and eight females. The findings revealed that lack of service delivery and competition for scarce resources was the major factors that contributed to xenophobic attacks on foreigners. Other factors that played a role included frustration and anger by residents about a feeling of entitlement, i.e. things they felt were owing to them but they had not received such as houses and employment. The study found the views differed between perpetrators of the attacks and observers of the violence. It is clear that xenophobic sentiments are rooted in multiple factors.

This thesis investigates the state of Canadian public opinion concerning the war in Vietnam from the time of Canada's initial involvement on the International Control Commission in 1954, to the final pullout of Canadian observers in 1973. The Canadian Institute of Public Opinion polls will form the basis of this examination, but various media publications and government statements will also be used to portray the nature of public debate on this issue. This study is broken down into two periods; from 1954 to 1964 and from 1965 to 1973. The conclusions reached show that fear of communism contributed to significant Canadian public support for American intervention i n Vietnam in the early years of the conflict. It was only near the end of the war, when Canadians began to consider U.S. actions as more dangerous to world peace than revolutionary communism, that support for American policy declined. However, throughout the entire period of this study there was always a large percentage of Canadians who were undecided about the war. This most likely reflects the general apathy of Canadians when confronted with foreign policy questions that had little direct impact on their daily lives. Nevertheless, there was a considerable percentage of the population that was strongly opposed to the American intervention and to what was considered the Canadian government's complicity in prolonging the war. Overall, Canadian attitudes changed slowly and even then only very little. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Unlike many western democracies, Canada has a party system which is not polarized in terms of class. Particularly since the early 1930's many writers have attacked "brokerage politics" on the grounds that it has enabled a small elite to control political debate, and in particular has prevented the party system from presenting meaningful alternatives for the social and economic development of the country. To people such as Frank Undorhill, Gad Horowitz and Charles Taylor, "the politics of polarization" is essential to an efficient democratic political system. Another writer, Robert R. Alford in Party and Society, has concluded that the trends in Canada towards industrialization, urbanization and secularization are bound to encourage an increase in class-oriented voting behaviour. The large numbers of people working in the cities, coupled with a decline in the salience of regional, religious and ethnic issues, will increase working class consciousness to the point where a change in the substance of political debate is feasible. The thesis examines the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup) surveys for the 1962, 1963, 1965 and 1968 elections to see if Alford’s forecast is substantiated. There are many shortcomings in both the data, and the approach used, but the analysis would suggest that the overwhelming importance of religious and linguistic factors has not significantly declined, and as far as this thesis can detect, there has been little increase in class voting. A concluding chapter suggests other research approaches to the problem under investigation, which might well have produced different conclusions. However, a brief examination of the early political history of Canada would seem to indicate that the absorption of the working classes into the existing party system was done in such a way as to permanently restrict the extent to which a working class consciousness is likely to develop. While there are signs indicating that class-oriented voting will probably increase, it is unlikely that the polarization will ever occur to the extent possible in countries which have developed, politically and econonacally, along different lines. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

This study examines the impact of perceived personality traits of the political party leaders on voting decisions in the 2000 Canadian federal election, replicating Richard Johnston's research that is based on the 1997 election. Employing data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study (CES), the research uses Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis to estimate how evaluations of leader personality traits over two aggregated dimensions - competence and character - moved votes. The changes in the design of the 2000 CES from prior years created many difficulties in assessing voters' evaluations of the party leaders and limited the comparability of the results from the study. The key methodological differences are: (1) leaders were not evaluated individually; (2) it did not measure the degree of applicability of the trait labels; (3) it included significantly fewer leader personality questions, and (4) the "new ideas" variable does not fall squarely into either the competence and character domains and seems to favour the new Alliance Party leader. This study finds that leader effects are more critical to the parties struggling for their political survival. A counterfactual party leader-switching exercise suggests that the distance between the frontrunner parties and the others was too great for leader-switching effects to make a difference in determining which parties would form the government and the Official Opposition and whether the winning party would form a majority or minority government. Joe Clark improved his party's standing during the campaign and helped it to retain its official party status while evaluations of Stockwell Day declined. The relevance of judgements of Day and Clark on pre-election vote intentions moved in the same direction as voters' respective evaluations of the leaders over the campaign. This study confirms that campaigns can have an effect on voters. The study supports earlier research findings that suggests that Canadian elections are vulnerable to leader effects. Conventional wisdom that is driven by the media's focus on the personalities suggests that leaders are significant factors in Canadian federal elections, but the empirical research reported in this study and others before it suggest otherwise. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

This study is centered around examining the impact that the recent welfare reform has had on front-line workers in the welfare bureaucracy and the clients of the welfare system. In 1993 the government in British Columbia began implementing sweeping policy and procedural changes that altered the way in which welfare services were provided and limited the services available to the poor. The impetus for these changes is situated in the widespread media coverage of welfare fraud and abuse throughout 1993 and 1994. The media, by targeting certain sub-groups of the welfare client population, was able to substantiate their claim that the welfare system was not only being undermined but that it was also operating on the basis of policies that were flawed and therefore easily abused. This study begins with a presentation of the policy and procedural changes that have occurred within the Ministry of Social Services in British Columbia from 1993 to 1996. The second section of this study examines the media's response to the "welfare fraud crisis" and the way in which a moral panic was created around the "problem" of welfare fraud. This analysis draws upon moral panic and social constructionist theory to examine not only the media's presentation of the "crisis" but also the government's response to the public concern that had been generated. The final section of this study presents a discussion of the front-line worker's response to the changes that have taken place within the Ministry of Social Services over the last four years. The analysis is centered around examining how these front-line government workers cope with the restrictive and regulatory policies they are responsible for enforcing. The study concludes with suggestion for further research on this topic. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

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