The purpose of this study is to understand and analyze why individuals develop and manage to leave drug abuse. The material consists of interviews with eight individuals who have gone through a life of addiction and managed to change their lifestyle. We contacted the participants through the organization called KRIS (Criminals Redress with Society). The results indicate that the participants have had a troublesome upbringing and been labeled by society as outsiders which have led them into addiction. The results also show that they have all gone through a social conversion from the life as an addict to become sober. The results of our study are analyzed with Jonsson and Bergström’s theory on social in heritage and Becker and Andersson’s view of outsiders and qualifications for drug abuse. The results are also analyzed with Ebaughs theory on role-exit. What we would like to contribute is an understanding of how an individual enters addiction and how they manage to leave drug abuse.

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No description available.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of litigiousness on the information role of accounting conservatism. Prior literature documents the information role of accounting conservatism, measured by the positive association between earnings conservatism and information asymmetry between inside managers and outside investors. Prior literature also demonstrates that shareholder litigation concerns motivate managers and auditors to be conservative in preparing financial statements because conservatism shields managers and auditors from allegations that they overstated earnings and net assets. In a more litigious environment, both managers and auditors have incentives to be more sensitive to expected litigation costs, which increase with the level of information asymmetry. I hypothesize that higher levels of litigiousness enhance the information role of accounting conservatism. Overall empirical results are generally consistent with the hypothesis. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-29 17:59:20.556

The focus of this research was to examine whether the Medieval Kingdom social role topology, as devised by Adcock and Segal (1983), could be applied with kindergarten children, and to assess the association between the social roles children assumed and seven non-behavioral variables. One hundred and seventy-three children from ten kindergarten classes in two schools participated in the study. Hypotheses that the Medieval Kingdom could be distilled from a sample of kindergarten children and that specific non-behavioral variables including cognitive ability, physical attractiveness, self-esteem, and chronological age were related to the assumption of leadership roles within the topology were confirmed. Children's gender, birth order, and number of siblings were not found to influence status within the social hierarchy. The findings suggest that the Medieval Kingdom is a potentially useful heuristic for understanding the peer relationships of kindergarten children.

This thesis explores issues of subjectivity and gender around ritual activity in Xianyou county, Fujian Province, China. It focuses on three groups of women: Buddhist nuns, mediums and village women engaged in the ritual caretaking of their families. It also examines a spirit writing text from the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911). It is suggested that subject positions and kin positions are to a certain extent coextensive and that participation in certain rituals is what constitutes one as a gendered subject (as a "woman") and in certain kin roles (as wife, daughter-in-law, etc.). Other gendered subject positions (such as that of melancholic lover) are explored in an attempt to complicate any simple determinism that might accompany to easy a correspondence of kin position with sex role.

The goal of this thesis is to question conventional definitions of work through the detailed study of a professional group---specifically rural clergy---whose work falls outside the parameters of accepted definitions of work. According to the feminist literature, work and non-work are differentiated typically by dichotomies which privilege a masculine model of work and devalue women's experience; thus, "real work" is defined as an activity which is paid rather than unpaid, public rather than private, instrumental and intellectual rather than emotional. Professional work definitions also obscure the way in which "work" relies on activities which are linked with the feminine in these dichotomies. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with rural clergy, I explore the extent to which women and men draw on these gendered dichotomies to define work. In some ways, the approach of clergy counters conventional work norms: for them, emotional labour is a priority, work is not limited to a specific time or place, and public and private lives frequently overlap. I demonstrate how clergy define their work in terms of obligation, context, visibility, and time. Furthermore, I also argue that clergy delineate work in terms which still reflect a masculinized work norm specific to their profession. This "clergy masculinized mode" professionalises emotional labour by separating it from the facilitating work of female volunteers; it assumes a worker free from domestic demands in order to fulfil professional obligations within a flexible time frame; and it overlooks how the overlap of the public and private spheres is sustained by the work of wives. Thus, delineating work is particularly problematic for female clergy because professional demands are confounded with demands for adjunct work typically performed by women. My findings (1) highlight alternative markers of work which are suggestive for feminist theory; (2) point to a gap in theorizing about the gendering of work when con

<p>The call centre industry has been one of the fastest growing industries in South Africa. Call centres have for most companies become a basic business requirement for servicing customers. Zapf, Isic, Bechtoldt and Blau (2003: 311) argue that there are high levels of stress amongst employees in call centres, which they believe to be the result of both the work tasks and the interactions with customers. The aim of this study was to establish whether call centre work design and structure contributed to role stress amongst client service representatives (CSRs). It was also the aim of this study to establish whether role stress affected the CSRs‟ levels of job satisfaction and their intentions to quit from their jobs.</p>

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the phenomenon of role models for younger girls. Girls aged 5 to 12 years were asked who they chose to look up to, how significant their role models were to them, why they had chosen them and if they thought they thought that they could achieve their chosen model‟s achievements. Socio-cultural framework provides a useful perspective for understanding the significance of role models as they act as powerful transmitters and reinforcers of the tenets of socialization. In Social Cognitive Theory, it is claimed that children largely learn through modelling, observing and imitating significant others. Interview and task sessions including a field-mapping activity and the sorting of peer-generated photographs were conducted with 12 girls aged from 5 to 12 years from one urban school. In analysis of the interview data, it was found that family members or family substitutes were the most significant people that these girls chose and, despite the alleged pressure from popular culture, young girls in this study were able to make discerning judgements about the „hollowness‟ of characters of popular culture. They identified skills or attributes that their role models demonstrated rather than physical attractiveness, their popularity or the amount of money their fame had brought them. This study is a valid representation of what mattered to a group of young girls at one specific point in time and could indicate the value of further investigation of how to maximize the benefits of role models for young girls.

How can role be used to impact upon the motivation of student’s writing? Can learning in a creative context cause change in students’ writing? There is a body of literature that examines the use of drama to facilitate development in literacy, and some of it addresses writing. However, most of the classroom based studies in this literature have been undertaken by drama specialists who have extended their curriculum interests to broader fields such as social studies and literacy. Their work has offered a challenge to classroom teachers who are not drama specialists to explore and adopt relevant process drama approaches. This study has been conducted by one such teacher and as such it brings a new and different perspective to the research and to the growing body of knowledge. The current education system has placed strong importance on managing student levels of achievement in writing with the National Standards being introduced as a way of reporting student progress in this area as well as that of reading and mathematics. The Standards aim to make parents more aware of where their children sit in regards to the National levels. Consequently this thesis adopted an assessment format that incorporated the National Standards to assess change in surface and deeper features of writing. The students involved in the study were from one Year Five and Six classroom in a decile ten contributing school in Christchurch. They completed questionnaires at the beginning of the study and were interviewed at the end to survey their thoughts on writing and drama. The classroom teacher was also interviewed to gain her views on student levels of motivation in writing and their needs in the classroom. A series of lessons were then facilitated involving the use of process drama to encourage the students to think independently and tell a story through action before they put pencil to paper. Observations were written during each lesson documenting student responses and interactions to the drama and writing samples and student journals were also collected. A systematic analysis was completed on students’ writing to measure change in their writing features over time. These methods were also followed by the classroom teacher in order to measure reliability of the assessment. Writing samples and student feedback indicated strong improvement in motivation levels and engagement in each task through increased lengths of writing and use of subject-specific vocabulary and emotive language. Results also showed a creative teaching approach can be an effective facilitator of certain aspects of writing in children working at different levels and that the National Standards can be incorporated smoothly and reliably within this type of assessment. Overall, the findings from this study highlight the use of drama as an instructional tool in writing and support the conclusion that these strategies can be incorporated into the teaching of writing for more effective instruction.