Previous suicidal ideation and attempt are the strongest predictors of subsequent completed suicide, which is the second leading cause of death among youth today. Research shows that the risk factors for adolescent suicidal behaviors can be grouped into demographic, social, and psychological categories, so a broad theoretical framework is needed to examine the range of these factors effects. In this study, Agnews general strain theory is tested to explain those suicidal behaviors among adolescents in Istanbul, Turkey. Agnew argued that specific strains were more likely to lead to deviance, therefore a corresponding set of strains are selected. He also argued that these strains lead to deviance through negative affective states. The effects of these strains on suicidal ideation and suicidal attempt including tests of mediating effects of negative affective states on relationships between strains and these suicidal behaviors are investigated using data from the 2008 Youth in Europe Survey. Separate logistic regressions indicate that almost all of the strain measures were significantly associated with adolescent suicidal ideation and suicidal attempt, and negative affective measures partially mediated the effects of strains on Turkish adolescents suicidal behaviors. In general, findings are consistent with previous research that have identified various risk factors for suicidality, but also adds to the literature by incorporating multilevel factors into a single theory. Other results, implications, and limitations of the study are discussed.

This project analyzes the influence of history and myths in the construction of ethnic identity narratives by intellectuals and elites, as well as the appropriation and negotiation of these identities among contemporary youth in Serbia and Croatia. By analyzing the multiple meanings assigned to identity at both the elite and individual level, I argue that none of the present theoretical models allows us to build a complete understanding of how ethnic identity actually works on the ground. This project moves away from treating ethnic identity as a given, instead examining how it is constructed and reconstructed at the “top” level, how it is lived and negotiated on the “bottom,” and how these understandings change over time. I first examine the identity narratives and dominant myths articulated by elites, leaders, religious institutions and intellectuals during Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the late 1980s and 1990s, utilizing discourse analysis of official history textbooks, key works of intellectuals, and rhetoric of political elites. I argue that identity is constantly in the process of construction, reconstruction and fine-tuning; attention should thus be paid to the content of dominant myths that weave together various narratives, and to strategies of myth articulation. Second, I examine the extent to which these narratives have persisted among contemporary youth. Relying on two years of ethnographic research, including 160 in-depth interviews, 1200 surveys, focus groups and participant observation in Serbia and Croatia, I find that “lived” identity narratives are contextual, frequently contradictory, and have important generational, class, gender, and regional cleavages. This research has broad implications for theories of ethnic identity construction, in addition to calling for a reconsideration of the methodology commonly used in studying ethnic identity. / Sociology

How do nations deal with their difficult, shameful, and traumatic past? I tackle this question by examining how the history of apartheid is taught to--and understood by--South African high school students. I further examine the consequences of these understandings for contemporary race relations. To address these questions around the production, reception, and consequences of history education in schools, the study draws on data collected during 18 months of fieldwork in two racially and socioeconomically diverse public high schools in Johannesburg, South Africa. The data collection involved a multi-method research design that included: 1) five months of daily observations in 17 distinct classrooms; 2) content analysis of official curricular documents and materials used in classes; 3) interviews with teachers (N=10); and 4) interviews with two samples of students: one prior to, and one following, exposure to apartheid history education (total N=160). I find that teachers present the country’s racially divisive past in ways that limit its salience for understanding contemporary social issues. I show that this is driven both by broad national imperatives concerning racial reconciliation and by more local imperatives related to minimizing race-based conflict in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I demonstrate that the narratives presented in class leave students without the cultural tools they need to understand, identify, and respond both to contemporary racism and to the structural legacies of apartheid which they encounter on a daily basis. Theoretically, the study contributes to literature that focuses on schools as sites where racial inequalities are reproduced by highlighting the importance of attending to messages transmitted through the formal curriculum. In so doing, it identifies both institutionalized representations and micro-level understandings of racially divisive pasts as important loci for examining contemporary race and ethnic relations. / Sociology

<p>Comparative social scientists have offered rich insights into how macro-level political factors affect stratification processes such as class, gender and racial inequality. Medical sociologists, on the other hand, have long emphasized the importance of stratification for health and health inequalities at the individual level. Yet, only recently has research in either field attended to the macro-level factors that impact health. This dissertation contributes to the growing scholarship in that area by investigating the influence of public healthcare social policies, organized labor and Left party power on infant mortality, life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at age 65. I do so using the framework of power resources, a theory which has been only sparsely applied to the study of health. </p><p>The analyses include country-level pooled time series models of 22 rich democracies between 1960 and 2010. Data is drawn from the Comparative Welfare States dataset (Brady et al 2014), which provides information on indicators of welfare state development, its causes, and its consequences between the periods 1960 to 2011. I use fixed effects regression models to examine the influence on health of two forms of healthcare spending, six forms of non-health social welfare transfers and the triad of union density, Left parties and socialized medicine. I also supplement with a variety of alternatives to test the sensitivity of results to estimation technique.</p><p>Chapter 1 discusses the foundational literature on the social determinants of health and political economy of health. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of public healthcare effort and socialized medicine as predictors of countries' infant mortality and life expectancy at birth and at age 60. I show that socialized medicine (as represented by the ratio to total health spending) improves all population health outcomes in addition to, and adjusted for, the effect of healthcare effort (as represented by the ratio to GDP). Moreover, socialized medicine is a better predictor of population health than healthcare effort and its effect sizes are comparable to those of GDP per capita. Chapter 3 examines the association of infant mortality and life expectancy with old age-survivor transfers, incapacity transfers, family transfers, active labor market transfers, unemployment transfers, housing transfers and education transfers. For infant mortality, overall and educational spending matters, whereas for life expectancy, incapacity does. Family transfers matter only for life expectancy at birth. For all outcomes, unemployment transfers are beneficial and housing and aging-survivor benefits are not significant. Chapter 4 investigates the association of organized labor with infant mortality and life expectancy and devotes additional attention to the potential role of Left parties and social policy in this relationship. Results suggest that in nations where a greater proportion of the labor force is unionized, more lives are lost below the age of one and individuals live shorter lives. These results are contrary to the hypotheses generated by the theory of power resources and allied research. </p><p>This dissertation contributes to literatures in medical sociology, sociology of inequality and political sociology. This dissertation highlights the pertinence of power resources theory to the subject of health and further encourages its application to this relatively new domain. Additionally, by highlighting the importance of institutions and politics for health, it extends research on macro-level sources of inequality to the outcome of health and complements the existing emphasis in medical sociology on the fundamental, distal causes of health.</p> / Dissertation

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