This dissertation is an examination of the social structural determinants of rural suicide rates. Examining rates of white male suicide in rural and urban counties of the U.S. Gulf States Region, this research adds to the existing literature by examining the theoretical and empirical implications of rural-urban location within sociology's Integration-Regulation Hypothesis of Suicide. Drawing upon suicide research from sociology, criminology and social psychology this study tests the differential explanatory power of three alternative theoretical and empirical predictor models of rural and urban suicide rates. Overall findings from this study underscore the need to examine suicide rates as distinct outcomes of location-specific social processes. Longitudinal trends (1968-2001) in county suicide rates demonstrate a relatively recent change in the direction of the rural-urban suicide differential within the study region. Starting in the mid 1990's this study shows total, male, and white-male suicide rates are disproportionately higher for rural compared to urban counties. Descriptive analyses further indicates a high level of significant variation in predictor variables across rural and urban counties. Regression analyses show a mixed pattern of significant associations between predictor variables for both rural and urban counties, but do not indicate clear support for a single theoretical explanation of elevated rural suicide rates. Specifically this study finds rural county white male suicide rates are primarily explained by the older age structure of rural counties. Economic dependency on farming and mining were associated with higher rural suicide rates. Findings also indicate a significant reduction in rural suicide rates associated with elevated and rising levels of household income inequality.

The Internet has emerged as a catalyst for global knowledge production. This is supported by its positive impacts in the First World. A progressive assessment argues that the Internet will be the "elixir" that brings immediate visibility and relevance to scientific communities in the periphery. Yet, Internet diffusion is often framed by past technology failures that further widen global divides. This characterizes an "affliction" argument. The "teething argument" suggests that adoption within the Third World is tentative at best with benefits unfolding over time in some regions but not others. This dissertation is a qualitative and quantitative study that tests these three technology arguments (elixir, affliction, and, teething) in a Latin American region. It considers the relationship between scientific communication, collaboration, and productivity in Chilean science, focusing on the role of Internet practice. Results are presented through the qualitative analysis of 29 video taped interviews, followed by a quantitative analysis of a communication network survey administered to 337 Chilean researchers. Qualitative findings suggest that despite Chilean regional leadership in economic output, political disruptions and a paucity of local resources motivate many researchers to seek training abroad. This creates new, exterior contacts that are maintained through email communication. These cyber links, though, may also be creating technology dependencies. Quantitative results confirm that Chilean scientists are well connected when compared to past region studies. Yet, the Chilean scientific community reports an inverse relationship between domestic and foreign contacts, mirroring the disjointed network profile found in other developing regions. Other results suggest that Chilean scientists frequently publish in foreign journals. And in contrast to findings from other developing areas, collaboration is consistently related with increased domestic publications. Although Chileans seldom report problems, those they do report are associated with working with more collaborators and having geographically heterogeneous networks. Email shows no effect toward reducing research problems; and in some cases, email is associated with more intensive reports of problems. Taken as a whole, this author's findings support a "teething" argument for Internet influence on professional networks and activities within the Chilean scientific community.

This dissertation examined the relationship between employment conditions and property-crime arrest rates of working-aged individuals, using gender-specific state-level data from 1979-2001, complied from raw arrest data of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports and the Census Bureau's annual March Current Population Survey. These data were analyzed using Ordinary Least Squares Regression. The data was disaggregated by gender and underemployment indicators such as percent unemployed, percent subunemployed, percent low wages, and percent low hours, were utilized to test the unemployment-crime relationship. Controls for race, age, and region were also included in this analysis, as they may influence the U-C relationship. The analysis revealed labor market indicators influence male and female property crime arrest rates differentially. Specifically, none of the labor market indicators were significant for males, while two were significant for females, namely, percent unemployed and percent low wages. This indicates increases in unemployment and low wages have a more detrimental effect on females. The control variable, percent minority proved to be significant in multiple models for males and females. This indicates that areas with substantial minority populations will have increased property crime arrest rates for both male and female offenders. These findings verify the supporting literature as well as some theoretical assumptions of this dissertation. This dissertation also empirically illustrated that the gender gap in property crime arrest rates between 1980 and 2000 has narrowed. Specifically, during the period of 1980, the mean property crime arrest rate for males was 3.8 times more than that of females, 3.14 times more than that of females in the 1990 period, and 2.37 times more than that of females in the 2000 period. Essentially, a trend was detected. This indicates the mean difference between male and female property crime arrest rates declined between 1980 and 2000. Thus, a primary research question of this dissertation, concerning trends, has been empirically satisfied. While the analysis for this dissertation yielded mixed and inconclusive results, as far as identifying key predictors for property crime arrests rates for male and female offenders, this study established the groundwork for an operational model in gender difference research in criminology.

Research investigating the relationship between segregation and crime has been extensively examined in the literature. Although numerous studies have looked at segregations influence homicides, most have focused on African Americans. This study extends current research by focusing on Hispanic segregation and homicide victimization. Using a 236 city sample, homicides are shown to rise when Hispanics are segregated from Whites. In comparison, a 208 city sample finds that segregation also contributes to a rise in African American homicides. It was also expected that the more homogeneous Hispanic population would reduce homicides, but such an association was not present in the full Hispanic model, only in the individual Mexican analysis. This study also goes beyond previous research by using ethnic specific measures to examine homicide. By analyzing homicides on the basis of a specific ethnic group, the findings illustrated that segregation measured as dissimilarity consistently effected homicides for all groups, while segregation measured as exposure shows inconsistent results. This analysis also explores segregation disaggregated by social class. Among Hispanics and African Americans, although segregation increases with social class, its impact on homicide is only significant in the lower class. Changes in segregation from 1980-1990 and 1990-2000 were also expected to have a significant impact on homicides, but contrary to the expectations, only the change in exposure from 1980-1990 is significantly related to homicides for African Americans and Hispanics. Finally this study examines the direct and indirect effect of female-headed households on homicides. For all Hispanics, female-headed households are not associated with homicide, but it is significant for Mexicans specifically. It was also significant for African Americans

ABSTRACT Research investigating the relationship of structural factors to homicide abounds in the literature. There is also extant research on female perpetrated intimate partner killings (IPK). However this literature for the most part has examined the phenomenon itself, or has disaggregated the rates by race, where it was discovered that there is a racial anomaly in intimate killings, Black females kill their partners at a higher rate than White females. This research sought to determine how structural factors function to differentially amplify this rate, using classic controls for homicide and adding measures for the presence of female kin, the presence of children not related to the male, and doing this in a race specific manner. Using a sample of 234 MSAs, Supplementary Homicide Report data was utilized to create these race and relationship specific models, which were analyzed with Poisson regression. Contrary to expectations, the presence of children was only found to have an effect on White spousal killings, and no effect in the other three models. Support was found for Sampson and Wilsons (1995) racial invariance hypothesis in that the most significant findings in the Black models related to the confluence of high density housing and dissimilarity measures. This spatial conflux served to explain the anomalous findings in regard to the Gini coefficient, in Black IPK models as the Gini decreased, homicides went up. Contrary to other studies, female headed households, as well as other standard predictors of homicide were not found to be significant in relation to IPK.

Despite major advances in equality of rights, women still earn less money than men. Social science researchers see sex-based income inequality as an issue of discrimination. While the problem has been identified, its causes are a matter of debate. In this study I offer one possible influence on this discrimination. I theorize that conservative Protestant culture has a strong effect on local norms and business practices. Those norms are a part of the institutional environment, and manifest themselves as allocative and valuative discrimination, keeping women out of high paying jobs or paying women in high skilled jobs less than men in similarly skilled positions. I test my theory using Hierarchical Linear Modeling techniques and data from the U.S. Census and the Association of Religious Data Archives. My results show a significant association between the proportion of the population that belongs to conservative Protestant congregations and the sex-wage gap. However, the amounts involved are relatively small.

This study examines married womens employment status and the factors associated with their being full-time housewives between 1989 and 2004 in urban China. I argue that the transition from a command economy to a market-oriented economy since the early 1980s has had negative impacts on married womens labor force participation. Using six waves of the Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey (1989, 1991, 1993, 1997, 2000, and 2004), I find that the percentages of full-time housewives in urban China tripled in just 15 years, and the largest amount of growth occurred in the most recent period. Regression analyses confirm that married women are more likely to be full-time housewives in 2004 than in other years. The results also show that whether married women become housewives or stay in the labor market depends on three micro-level factors human capital, husbands income, and the presence of pre-school children. Married women with lower educational attainment, who were not previously employed, and those with pre-school children are more likely to be housewives. In addition, it appears that some married women are full-time housewives because they can afford this kind of lifestyle, such as those with higher income husbands. These results suggest a polarization process in urban China, that some married women are forced to leave the labor market because of their lack of human capital or/and their child care responsibilities, while others in more affluent households may choose the lifestyle of being housewives.

This study explores the relationships between the social environment of the academic institution and the self-destructive behavior of the students within it. My approach combines elements of strain and social control theories to expand the concept of social integration and its importance in influencing adolescent deviant behavior; I include theories of identity, efficacy and locus of control, and self-concept in my theoretical model. My primary focus is on the importance of social integration in anchoring the individual into the social environment, providing him/her with pro-social sources for identity, efficacy, and social support. For students, the social environment of the school serves as a stage for public performance and construction of the adolescent identity. Regression analyses of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 reveal that students who participate in any extracurricular activity during their sophomore year are less likely to commit light delinquency, are less likely to get into fights at school, less likely to use marijuana and cocaine at school, and are more likely to experience feelings of empowerment and personal control during their senior year. Even after we consider differences in race, gender, SES, school characteristics and location, academic performance, student employment, student church attendance, parental involvement in school, and student involvement in the community, delinquent behavior during the senior year is greater for students who did not participate in any extracurricular activity during their sophomore year. Furthermore, these relationships are even stronger among students who also experienced feelings of powerlessness and negative self-concept during their sophomore years. Over the course of their high school career, these students stand to gain the most from participation in the school environment. Social integration in the school anchors students in a structured, ordered existence; the social support, norms, routine, and identity enhancement that accompany social integration provide buffers against sources of strain and outlets through which to cope with the stressful environment of the school.

This dissertation examines the gendered nature of the scientific career for researchers in universities and national research institutes in Ghana, Kenya, and Kerala India. Employing panel data, I analyze three issues related to the diffusion of ICTs in the scientific communities of less developed areas: 1) access; 2) interaction; 3) and involvement. More specifically, I examine the way in which human capital, family structure, travel experiences, contextual factors, and technological antecedents interact with gender to influence access to and use of personal computers, email, and the Web. From there, I incorporate technological behavioral changes to predict interaction within professional networks. In the last step, I incorporate professional network measures to examine the gendered nature of research outcomes in the form of scientific productivity. The results suggest that over time ICTs have rapidly diffused within the three locations. At the same time, women continue to report less long-term access to email and the web. Furthermore, men and women are distinctly different in terms of intensity and extent of email and web use with women emerging as less technologically oriented. In spite of the differences on these measures, men are not earlier adopters of the technologies than women. It does not appear, however, that there is a consistent relationship between greater email use and integration within professional networks. Gender, on the other hand, emerges as one of the most consistent predictors of network outcomes, particularly in terms of absolute network size, geographic and gender diversity, and the proportion of male contacts reported. Finally, men and women are equally productive in domestic venues, but women are less productive in foreign venues. Furthermore, network structure is not as strongly related to productivity as are changes in technological use behavior. Respondents using email for a wider variety of reasons over time produce more in foreign and domestic venues, but intensity of email use is actually negatively related to productivity, suggesting that it is not technology use in general that matters when predicting outcomes, but the type of technology use. Network structure on the other hand, is only a significant predictor of domestic productivity.

The integrating capacity of social institutions on community organization and the consequential benefits of community cohesion are well-known, i.e. lower crime rates, better health outcomes, economic and social stability. Drawing on the civil society and civic community literatures, this study applies the theory of social capital to study of suicide. Rather than focus on individual level data, macro-level data are analyzed to determine the relationship between the social capital of an area and the prevalence of suicide. Negative binomial regression is used to examine U.S. counties of 100,000 residents or more (urban) and counties of 1,000 to 25,000 residents (rural) to determine the effect of six community social capital measures on race, gender, and age specific suicide rates. The results indicate much variation among social groups. Urban areas are found to be more responsive to community social capital than are rural areas, although not all social capital indicators had the effect of reducing suicide rates. In the initial analyses, bonding and bridging social capital are associated with reductions in suicide more often among whites, whereas only bonding social capital is associated with reductions in black suicide. Upon further analysis the theory of social capital garnered much more support once age was accounted for in the analyses. In urban counties, 3 of the 5 social capital indices are associated with reductions in suicide across social groups and age categories. However, in rural counties, this relationship is only maintained among rural whites.