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This study argues that gender is a significant factor to consider in investigations of political opinions and presents evidence of the relevance of gender to support for various issues and in the social construction of opinion. Moreover, it argues that the patterning of women's and men's opinions, and differences in the sources of those opinions, point to a difference in political cultures: a women's political culture and a men's political culture. Using survey evidence gathered at the time of the 1988 Canadian federal election, the study follows three separate investigative paths in an attempt to uncover the existence of distinctive political cultures. The first path investigates gender gaps in opinions at the time of the election and links these findings to earlier work suggesting the existence of a women's agape ethos, their weaker hawkishness, and their weaker support of continentalism. It is shown that controls for women's lower average incomes, their lesser educational attainment, their greater support of feminism, and gender roles do not fully account for differences in women's and men's attitudes. Moreover, evidence is addressed of women's greater religious fundamentalism, which often works in such a fashion on attitudes as to attenuate gender gaps in opinions. The second path investigates the social structure of women's and men's opinions and finds that despite the similarity of opinion on a number of issues, divergence appears in the sources of opinion. The influence of economic self-interest, age cohort, region, social group memberships, religious fundamentalism and feminism are found to vary between women and men across a number of issues. The third and final path elaborates on opinion structure by the investigation of women's and men's belief systems, that is the connections between various opinions and the manner in which these connections are hierarchical. Although women's and men's belief systems are very similar, the positioning of feininist belief differs by gender. For women, regardless of their level of political sophistication, feminism is connected to the most basic ideological belief, economic liberalism. For men, however, ferninism is only connected with ideological belief among the politically sophisticated. The study links this evidence to the existence of a women's political culture and argues that it stems partially from each gender's socialization, but that it is a culture in transition. The weakening of religious belief generally is likely to result in larger gender gaps in opinion in the future.

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The limited body of research on the emotional tone of women's and men's written sexual fantasies has relied on qualitative and/or subjective measures of affect. In this study, the Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell, 1989) was used to obtain two quantitative measures, Activation and Evaluation, of the emotional tone of sexual fantasies written by male (n=71) and female (n=119) university students. It was hypothesized that men would score higher than women on Activation, which is associated with arousal and action, and women higher than men on Evaluation, which is associated with pleasant feelings. Only the latter hypothesis was confirmed. Men scored higher on a measure of erotophilia-erotophobia than did women (although not on a measure of sex guilt), but controlling for erotophilia did not eliminate the observed affective difference in written sexual fantasy. Limitations of the study and other possible uses of the Dictionary in sex research are discussed. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

The preponderance of female depression is a widespread phenomenon that emerges as early as adolescence. Two diverse lines of psychosocial research were explored in the present study with the aim of helping to explain these gender differences. The first concerned the role of two interpersonal problems, feeling overly responsible for the welfare of others and feeling unassertive in relationships, which have been linked to psychological distress in adolescents (Aube, Fichman, Saltaris, & Koestner, 1997). The second focused on the differential response styles of males and females, rumination and distraction (Nolen-Hooksema, 1987). Results demonstrated that feeling overly responsible for others, and engaging in a ruminative response style were most predictive of psychological distress. As well, gender differences emerged among the older adolescents in psychological distress, feeling too responsible, and in rumination. Overall, the present findings suggested that, between the ages of 16 and 18, females become more likely than males to feel overly responsible for the welfare of others and to adopt a ruminative response style, which appears to make them more vulnerable to psychological distress.

Australian boys' and girls' educational performances and achievements have been continuously on the educational agenda since the early 1970s. Then the prime concern was for girls whose educational opportunities were so limiting that their performances vis-a-vis boys' were significantly lower. In the last 30 years, however, there has been a growing and pronounced reversal of boys' dominance and this reversal has prompted educational debate often in terms of a 'boys' crisis' requiring prompt attention. In contrast to the educational debates of the early 1970s many Australian educators' and writers' attentions in the last decade have been on boys' allegedly inferior performance, retention, and participation. Boys have become more noteworthy for their disengagement and disappearance than for their achievement.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1992. / Bibliography: leaves 63-75.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Murdoch University, 1992. / Thesis submitted to the School of Humanities. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 270-285).