As the population ages and income disparities increase, issues affecting older adults and marginalized individuals are examined more frequently. Despite this, little attention is paid to the community experiences of women over the age of fifty who face marginalization, criminalization and homelessness. This study is an institutional ethnography of older marginalized women in Ottawa, focusing on their identities, lives and their experiences of community life. Its findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews with 27 older marginalized women and 16 professionals working with this group. The women described their identities, social networks, daily activities and navigations of their communities as well as the policy and discursive framework in which their lives are situated. Regardless of whether the women had housing or were staying in shelters, upheaval, uncertainty and change characterized their experiences in the community, reflecting their current circumstances, but also their life courses. Their accounts also revealed how, through social support, community services, and personal resilience, older marginalized women negotiate daily life and find places and spaces for themselves in their communities. As an institutional ethnography, this research foregrounds participants’ responses, framing these with theoretical lenses examining mobilities, identity, social capital, governmentality, and stigma. Specifically, it uses the lenses of mobilities and identities to understand the nature of their community experiences, before moving outward to examine their social networks and the world around them. Governmentality theory is also used to describe the neoliberal context framing their community experiences. The study concludes with a reflection on the research and a set of policy recommendations arising from the study.

This research used a deductive post-hoc statistical design and Statistics Canada’s 2009 General Social Survey on victimization to explore the social control function of cyber victimization and determine whether this is gendered. Social control was operationalized as a composite measure of self-responsibilization. A multiple regression analysis identified predictors of social control and additional multiple regression models were used for a gender specific examination of social control. A total of 14 predictor variables were entered into three blocks: cyber victimization; sociodemographic characteristics; and violent victimization in physical space. The results reveal that cyber victimization remains a significant predictor of social control in addition to gender, a number of other sociodemographic characteristics of respondents, and physical space victimization types. The findings suggest that the theory of social control, which has been applied to violence against women in physical space, can also be applied to cyber space victimizations. This study also provides insights into the compound effects of physical space and cyber space victimizations on women and identifies implications for policy, methods, and theories for addressing and examining violence against women in cyberspace.

This thesis articulates a conceptual understanding of police power in North America, identifying how this power manifests itself on the street, in hopes of illuminating the power dynamic that enables instances of misconduct to occur. The works of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Louis Althusser are deployed as the theoretical frameworks through which police power is analyzed. The Foucauldian perspective presents police power as a function of juridico-scientific disciplinary forces in society. This analysis is supplemented with an examination of police power as a post-colonial phenomenon, drawing on Fanon's work as a framework through which discriminatory police practices are examined. Finally, police power is examined within the context of capitalist production, and the repressive and ideological state apparatuses, as theorized by Althusser, to identify the class dimension that influences policing in North America. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Contemporary American capital punishment contains many processual elements, such as the prisoner's last meal and the cleansing of his body immediately before death, that serve no concrete, practical purpose but share a nature with ritual practices. In this project, I utilize a hermeneutic phenomenological lens to identify and list these ritual elements. I also use concepts drawn from the structural functionalist tradition to both analyze the specific purposes the elements serve within individual parts of the death penalty and to discuss the overarching result of the inclusion of these elements within the process as a whole. Ultimately, I find that the ritual elements present in the capital punishment process serve a social control purpose, insulating and reinforcing the death penalty as a whole. Ritual works to do this by controlling the behavior and image of the prisoner and emotionally soothing both participants of the process and the public at large.

abstract: Blalock’s (1967) minority threat perspective is one of the most empirically investigated theories of crime control in criminological literature. A large body of research has tested this perspective and established a link between minority context and increased criminal justice controls. The perceived threat mechanisms hypothesized to facilitate this link, however, have received relatively scant attention. In addition, no multidimensional scale of perceived minority threat has been developed. These oversights have significantly impeded the advancement of research testing the empirical validity and generalizability of Blalock’s premises across racial and ethnic groups. Against this backdrop, this dissertation extends prior work by conducting three separate but interrelated studies. The first study focuses on the development and validation of a multidimensional Perceived Latino Threat Scale (PLTS). The second study investigates how the PLTS can inform the relationship between Latino context and punitive border control sentiment. The third and final study assesses the psychometrics of another multidimensional scale of perceived threat—the Perceived Black Threat Scale (PBTS), and examines the structural invariance and distinctness of the PBTS and PLTS. Using data collected from two college samples, I relied on a variety of different methods across the three empirical studies, including confirmatory factor analyses, bivariate and partial correlation analyses, and ordinary least squares regression. Overall, the findings suggest that both the PLTS and PBTS are multidimensional constructs that are structurally invariant and empirically distinct. In addition, perceived Latino threat significantly influenced punitive border control sentiment, but did not surface as a mediating mechanism linking ethnic context to immigration attitudes. Furthermore, whereas objective Latino population context did not demonstrate significant effects on either perceived Latino threat or punitive border control sentiment, the results emphasized perceived Latino context as a key moderator in the relationship between perceived Latino threat and punitive border control sentiment. Thus, the findings support the multidimensionality of perceived threat, as well as the hypothesized link between perceived threat and punitive controls, but raises key concerns about the generalizability of Blalock’s perspective to explain the threat-control process of Latinos. Implications for theory and research are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Criminology and Criminal Justice 2020

This study was designed to determine the predictive validity of a police officer selection program and identify the contribution made by each major selection device to the total program. Police officers employed by the Portland Police Bureau who had completed three years of post-probationary employment were randomly assigned to a validation group and a cross-validation group on a two for one basis respectively. Beta weights were computed for the written test, interview and psychological scores in the validation group. The regression formula was then applied to the data in the cross-validation group. A cross-validation R of 0.12 was obtained between the predicted performance criterion scores and the actual performance scores. When the interview variable was removed from the equation the cross-validation R increased to 0.16. Neither validity coefficient reaches statistical significance. Reasons were offered for believing that the low magnitude of the coefficients was attributable to restriction in range in the predictor variables and the unreliability of the criterion variable.

This study examined the influence of social control and differential association on an individual\'s alcohol consumption.  It was hypothesized that the four bonds of social control: attachment, involvement, commitment, and belief will decrease the likelihood of engaging in excessive drinking behaviors (Hirschi 1969). Hawdon\'s (1996) revised version of involvement that accounts for differences in the visibility of activities will be used instead of the traditional idea of involvement. This study compared the drinking behavior of college and non-college students. It was also hypothesized that having peer groups that engage in excessive drinking behaviors will influence the amount of alcohol that an individuals consume, because they are attempting to remain a part of that peer group (Sutherland 1947). This study used the Add Health  data set to tests these hypotheses. / Master of Science

No description available.

No description available.

This research evaluates how contextual variables such as knowledge of the rules, the perception about punishment and formal enforcement levels, perception of social control, fishers’ attitudes about legitimacy of rules, and social/economic factors, affect compliance with fisheries regulations. The analysis is carried out in Old Providence Island [OPI]. A survey of 100 fishermen was completed and data from that survey is used to econometrically estimate a model of compliance choices. Results suggest that reports on compliance change depending whether the interviewed is asked about compliance or about violation. I argue that this seemingly inconsistency, reveals an implication on methodological approach. Contrary to the main literature on compliance behavior, in this research deterrence variables were not statistically significant in the econometric estimations. This result may be because sanctions and fines are not clearly established, reflecting the existence of structural problems in enforcement activities in the island. The results indicate that fishers adjust their violation with respect to other fishers’ behavior, and the knowledge about regulations. The probability of being a violator is higher for divers, and this fact is recognized by the fishers themselves.