This study looks at prosecutors and the criteria they use when determining whether or not to charge a criminal case as a hate crime. By conducting in-depth interviews of prosecutors in California, I explore how decisions concerning hate crime cases are made by those who daily determine, without oversight, which crimes will be prosecuted and which will not. I look at how prosecutors make their decisions, what factors they consider in making their determinations, and how their personal characteristics and feelings may impact their decisions. I collected personal data from the respondents including race/ethnicity, marital status, parental status, sexual orientation, religiosity, and political affiliation. I also gathered information pertaining to the prosecutors reasons for working hate crimes, their political and professional aspirations, if any, and what factors they consider when deciding if they will charge a case as a hate crime. As a result of my research, I have identified two distinct types of prosecutors that I have labeled procedural prosecutors and personal prosecutors. Procedural prosecutors typically see their roles in the administration of the criminal justice process as upholding the law, interpreting the chances of a cases success in the court system and focusing more on the crime and the suspect than on the victim. Personal prosecutors, however, are more likely to file a case that they find interesting or where they have a personal interest in the characteristics of the person who was victimized or feel personally outraged at the victimization.

In this paper, I examine the relationship that exists between work arrangements and co-worker relations. The current literature does not posit any kind of connection between the way workers do their work and how they relate to their co-workers. The research conducted here finds through regression modeling of 2002 GSS data that jobs where worker autonomy is encouraged through increased individual decision making and setting of the way things are done have a negative impact on co-worker relations. However, this negative impact can be lessened when uncertainty, through knowledge of promotion procedures and a smooth-running workplace, is controlled for. Work arrangements that encourage worker autonomy through flexibility can have negative effects on both co-worker relations and the individuals connection to their job. This paper calls for more research regarding the work arrangements and co-worker relations relationship and its connection to the modern workplace and current economic circumstances.

This dissertation examines the substance use risk associated with pubertal development among adolescent girls, focusing on the reasons why and how this relationship occurs. Three empirical studies are presented using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The first study examines the moderating role of body weight on the association between pubertal development and adolescent girls substance use, and emphasizes the changing relationship between pubertal development, substance use, and body weight as girls mature from early adolescence to late adolescence. The second study investigates why pubertal development is positively associated with adolescent girls substance use, focusing on the mediational role of intrapersonal self-appraisals and interpersonal social bonds. Finally, the third study examines the complex moderating roles of neighborhood contexts and race/ethnicity in the relationship between pubertal development and adolescent girls substance use. Results from the three studies highlight the importance of social interactions and social contexts in understanding why pubertal development is positively associated with adolescent girls substance use. Theoretical and policy implications of the studies include a more nuanced understanding of specific causal pathways of risk, population and developmental specificity of risk, and finally the importance of construct measurement.

Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, this thesis presents a collective sense-making model of homeless life in order to address a dearth of scholarly attention paid to the ways in which homeless individuals collaborate to learn, share, create, and tell stories about themselves and the nature of their life-circumstances. This model is based on 6 in-depth interviews with veterans of a homeless self-help group and over 200 hours of participant observation both within a homeless self-help group, and in other urban locations group attendees frequented. This collective sense-making model conveys the manner in which group members collaboratively construct self-narratives pertaining to the nature, causes, and grievances of homeless life. More specifically, the model shows how veteran members of this self-help group socially control and shape group newcomers constructions of self-narratives by invoking a subcultural narrative model comprised of an implicit group ideology centered on the life-prescription of personal accountability. Veteran group members invoke this subcultural narrative model via one or more of three basic interactive strategieslooping, doubling, and direct rebuke. Group newcomers respond to the social control of their self-narratives in one of three waysovert resistance, silent resistance, and narrative congruence-making. The social implications of the ways in which this subcultural narrative model contains subversive elements of newcomers self-narratives are also discussed.

This paper proposes a modified research design for moral panic research and research investigating the importance of social problems generally. The paper argues that a more appropriate research design for the importance of social problems should test the theories of constructionism and objectivism separately. In order to accomplish this, a generalized theory of constructionism, rather than an intermittent theory of moral panics regarding the disproportion between the prevalence and importance of a social problem, should be used to test the correlates of the importance of social problems. In presenting this research design, this paper investigates correlates of the importance of the social problems of drugs (from 1975-2006) and unemployment (from 1970-2007). The theory of objectivism is tested with the prevalence of drug use and unemployment. The theory of constructionism is tested with the number of news stories and drug arrests. Both tests use time series analysis. The results show conflicting conclusions: the objectivist hypothesis is supported for the problem of unemployment while the constructionist argument is supported for the problem of drugs. As a result, this paper suggests a need to modify, and presents possibilities for modifying, both the objectivist and constructionist hypotheses.

For a variety of reasons, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the role of gender, race, and ethnicity and away from social class during recent decades. This paper argues that through class identitys influence on salient political orientations, social class remains relevant in contemporary American society. Using data from the General Social Survey, I demonstrate net of a host of theoretically important conditions, a significant positive relationship between class identity and conservative political orientations for white respondents, as measured by political party identification and views on particular government spending issuesincome gap, social security, and welfare. My analyses also indicate a significant race-class identity interaction effect, with class identity and conservatism remaining independent of each other for black respondents. Moreover, I contend that neither the argument for the increase in class politics nor the argument of the decrease in class politics (both typically based on objective class measures) is applicable to the effect of class identity on political orientations, with my analyses demonstrating a rather stable positive effect for white respondents over time as well a rather consistent independence between class identity and political orientations for black respondents. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for debates on the role of class in contemporary American society and suggest additional directions for research.

Following reforms in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, a large environmental movement erupted across the nation. At the time, it was the largest and most powerful critical group in the repressive regime. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the environmental movement fell back into abeyance. This paper investigates the reasons for the collapse of the Russian environmental movement using a revised political process model that emphasizes cognitive liberation as a principle variable. I suggest that cognitive liberation is based upon grounded knowledge and social trust: as corruption and lawlessness increased in the post-transition years, peoples sense of efficacy decreased. Moreover, I argue that the political opportunity structure operates dialogically with cognitive liberation. Elites were able to close political opportunities in the 2000s because cognitive liberation among the general population had already been demoralized in the 1990s.

This dissertation examines the relationship between structural-level frames and individual behaviors using the case of breastfeeding in the United States and Canada. More specifically, it examines macro-level breastfeeding activism and the ways in which messages promulgated by breastfeeding activists affect how the intended recipientsmothersconstruct infant feeding in their own lives. This dissertation employs a comparative multi-level research design consisting of content analysis and in-depth interviewing and it straddles gaps in the existing literatures on health social movements, social movement framing, and motherhood. The study examines the relationship between strategic risk framing at the national level, in the United States and Canada, and individual responses to these messages in Nashville and Toronto. Findings demonstrate the importance of discursive opportunities given the heterogeneity in framing strategies across organization type (i.e., medical, government, or lay activist) and geographical location. Interviews with mothers illustrate the struggle women experience balancing the hegemonic expectation of breastfeeding and the challenges of their lived experiences.

This project is concerned with the abrogation of granny midwives in South Carolina from 1900 to 1940. Using exploratory qualitative analysis, I analyzed journal articles for persecutory comments or opinions and South Carolina medical practice acts and Sanitary Codes governing birthing work in order to note if and when midwifery regulations became more exclusionary. In this dissertation, I investigated physicians written advocacy for the elimination of the granny midwife in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The Journal of the South Carolina Medical Association (JSCMA) for the presence of three themes: racism, sexism, and inter-occupational conflict. The presence of the racism and sexism themes were identified by explanations medical doctors and administrators created that utilized racist and sexist biases. The theme of inter-occupational conflict is identified within physicians statements in which grannies lack of formal education and their use of practices was labeled archaic or superstitious as evidence of medicinal ineptitude in an effort to ban granny midwives. I argued that their persecution and prosecution was due to the medicalization of birth by health organizations, officials and the legal system; the professionalization of American medicine; and the restructuring of American healthcare which created surges of inter-occupational conflict within the field of birthing work between obstetricians, general physicians, and granny midwives. I learned that physicians writing in these journals did not often condemn granny midwives using racist and sexist commentary. Rather, physicians offered an oblique condemnation of blacks and women by castigating the entire race and by defining themselves as heroes to the weaker female sex. Additionally, I learned that doctors used what some would consider improvements in midwifery care (e.g. midwifery education, midwifery supervision) as a means of reducing the number of midwives participating in birthing work. Lastly, my research notes that professional writings did not reflect a strategic effort to target black midwives specifically but rather substantiated doctors as veritable experts in birthing work.

Sweeping changes in 1996 to the national welfare system prioritized work first policies and restricted educational opportunities for mothers in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. The purpose of my dissertation is to understand why some mothers on welfare choose to pursue education as a route out of poverty, despite the fact that the opportunity for higher education decreased greatly under TANF. I conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with 63 CalWORKs mothers who are enrolled in, or have recently completed, higher educational programs in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as a subset of this group who are involved with a specialized welfare and education advocacy organization. This research explores why single mothers on TANF pursue higher educational programs as their welfare-to-work activity, their narratives about their experiences in higher education and the welfare system, and how being involved in a grassroots advocacy organization affects womens narratives. This research traces the pathways which mothers take to pursuing higher education while participating in the welfare system and their survival narratives and strategies for completing their degrees. Next, the meaning that higher education has for low-income mothers is explored and contrasted with expectations surrounding the American Dream. Finally, this research examines the way that CalWORKs mothers engage in grassroots politics to challenge welfare policy and work towards a policy that better reflects the realities of their struggle.