Resume The thesis is focused on the usage of statistical and substantive significance in the Czech social science. The thesis consists of four articles (3 published, 1 unpublished yet), introduction and conclusion including practical recommendations. The aim of the thesis is theoretically describe the current " standards" in the use of statistical and substantive significance and through research (content analysis) of articles published in the three leading Czech journals (Czechoslovak Psychology , Pedagogy and Czech Sociological Journal) empirically assess whether the published articles adhere to the " standards" in the field of statistics and the substantive significance of the results . Basic research question was: How are current " standards" followed in the use of statistical and substantive significance in the Czech social science production? In addition to the basic research questions were additional (auxiliary) research questions: What are the basic limits of statistical significance, i.e. in which cases statistical tests are not appropriate to use? What are the shortcomings of statistical significance itself, and what are the most common problems in the practical use of it by researchers? What are the alternatives to the concept of statistical significance? How is it possible to assess the...

The rise of on-demand platform work typified by Uber has intensified a decades-long trend away from standard work relationships and toward contingent work structures, characterized by the unbounding of work in space and time. Yet many workers have always toiled outside of a traditional workplace and “standard” schedule. My dissertation examines how contingent workers in four different industries navigate unstable work schedules across unsettled work geographies, drawing on 120 interviews with agricultural and oil and gas workers in Texas and on-demand delivery workers and university adjuncts in New York City. Across these “old” and “new” cases of contingent work performed across rural and urban landscapes, work processes restructure space and time in such a way that workers do not know when, for how long, or where they will have work. I call this temporal and spatial instability positional uncertainty – repurposing an oilfield term for the inability to pinpoint precisely where one is at any given moment in the drilling process. The experience of positional uncertainty forces workers to subordinate the rhythms and geographies of their own lives to the temporal and spatial imperatives of their respective labor processes, leading to time struggle (unpaid periods of waiting or “zombie time” and overwork) and challenges in space (related to the bifurcation or unbounding, respectively, of the spaces of work and home). Workers respond, first, by doing boundary work, and second, by telling both critical and anchoring stories in attempts to bring coherence and meaning to the day-to-day and the long-term. The dissertation highlights the integral role of time and space in structuring social life, the active maneuvers by which workers struggle to re-configure time and space to produce coherence and make a life for themselves, and the short- and long-term costs of the transfer of risk onto workers through positional uncertainty. The strategic comparison reveals parallel strategies across disparate cases in response to the warping of time and space and illuminates how positional uncertainty exacerbates deep-set structural inequalities.

This study focuses on the association between patient characteristics, which include both demographic and contextual factors, and patients' experiences with health care. The pre-existing literature provides rich information about patients' various demographics related to patient experience. Despite the abundance of empirical evidence showing that patients' demographics do affect how they perceive their health care. However, there is little to no empirical knowledge explaining the significance of such factors. As the existing literature points out the need for taking into contextual factors such as patient's beliefs, attitudes, skills that are pertinent to dealing with health care, my study proposes patient activation as such a contextual factor that explains the association between patient demographics and patient experience. Findings suggest that patient activation is a strong predictor of two patient experience measures: patients' rating of doctor-patient communication and their self-reported difficulties in getting needed care. However, it is also observed that the mediating effects of patient activation vary by the two dimensions of patient experiences. Though this study demonstrates that promoting patient activation may be able to normalize how patients report the quality of doctor-patient interaction, further research is needed to address access to care issues.

This dissertation asks: what has happened to the children and grandchildren of former industrial workers, those who came of age in the shadow of industrial ruination in the Rust Belt? It draws on 105 interviews with working-class descendants who grew up in or near the Mon Valley in Pennsylvania, to explore how those descendants engage with industrial ruins. For most, the ruins recalled the breakdown of the employer-employee social contract, a sense of betrayed tradition, and the current (abysmal) state of affairs for the working class. Most advocate for the destruction of the ruins, as the loss and failure embodied by industrial ruination acts as a trap, imprisoning them in the past. Their attempts to build a new working-class identity require letting go of industrial work and the memories of the lost past. For a wider range of perspectives, two other groups of descendants were interviewed—fifteen arsonists and four cultural producers (novelists). The arsonists, who set fire to abandoned buildings, draw on regional fire symbolism and maintain their inherited association between work and identity as they struggle to resurrect industry. The novelists, who have all published in the vein of American Gothic literature, are seeking to reinterpret the past to serve the needs of the present, using supernatural figures alongside ruins in their novels in order to allow the main characters to identify, recover, and reinterpret a hidden past, which allows for mourning and the formulation of a new class identity. Each of these groups of descendants is cobbling together different versions of working-class identity, but all show that navigation of economic restructuring is a process of continual transformation. Descendants’ imaginative constructions are emblems not of solidity or permanence, but rather revision and reinvention.

Education is a crucial site and primary driver of elite status maintenance and reproduction. Decades of research highlight how elite colleges and universities use various forms of gatekeeping to admit and represent the interests of dominant groups. This body of research explains that most elite private schools served White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant upper-class children, preparing them to be the country's future leaders. These schools and colleges work together, creating well-trodden pipelines for young elites. However, there is limited research considering how parents think about securing their child's place in elite schools or how organizations external to the educational institutions facilitate this decision-making process. What logics of justification and frameworks do parents and organizations use to secure their child's place in the proven pipeline for elites? This dissertation investigates how parents and organizations decide to socialize children in elite independent schools, beginning at preschool or kindergarten. The empirical context for this work is the early admissions process for independent schools in New York City. I draw on 52 interviews with parents, ten interviews with expert service providers, and 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a for-profit educational consulting firm that supports families in the elite independent school admissions process. By centering parents and early childhood admissions, I examine a critical moment when parental decision-making and organizational maneuvering have the potential to impact life-long outcomes. I also highlight how social positions of race, class, and gender complicate parental and organizational logics. The first chapter introduces this dissertation’s motivating research questions and situates it within the broader literature on elites, parental investments during early childhood, rising inequalities and the fear of downward mobility, and the literature on educational admissions. In Chapter 2, I examine the parenting logics of justification during the early childhood admissions process. I argue that parents have "speculative projects" for their children, defined as ideas parents have about their children's imagined futures that underlie parents' day-to-day choices. I examine how parents allocate resources to these speculative projects and how education shapes the projects. Chapter 3 illustrates how organizations facilitate and influence parental decisionmaking. I present research on how brokers of the educational marketplace – in this case, educational consultants – regularly realign the moral boundaries of their work to justify profiting off their chosen commodity – in this case, the potential outcomes of young children. I also demonstrate how educational consultants make tremendous non-economic gains through their line of work, gaining trust and being seen as “experts” in a high-status social field. Chapter 4 examines how parents feel about their decisions one year later. I review their range of outcomes and show how other social positions mediate their ability to access privileged spaces and identities. Finally, I end with Chapter 5, highlighting the broader implications of this work and directions for future research. Together, these chapters illuminate how parents of young children attempt to understand, navigate, and manage elite educational admissions processes under conditions of uncertainty. This work has broader implications for understanding the cultural meaning and the social value of children in the 21st century, a time when parents are placing a premium on education amidst a landscape of unprecedented economic inequality.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The Ideology of Stadium Construction seeks to define the application of community power in the process of building sports stadiums. Using data culled from a literature review, this project examines the recent construction of sports venues and the political, economic, and social ideas driving their proliferation. A three dimensional approach to applied power provides a theoretical tool to illustrate and analyze the blueprint of stadium construction. Taking a more broad view of the culture of business in the United States suggests the public funding of stadium construction arching towards Antonio Gramsci’s sense of hegemony. Beyond attempting to merely define the political process driving stadium construction as a significant social problem, this project introduces potential alternatives to the organizational method currently in place.

The study focuses on the important issue of young adult female sexuality in an age of HIV/AIDS. The research question explores the influence of the parental home, the church and young black women's own belief on their sexual behaviour. Sexuality is influenced by societal voices that override religious and parental voices. Parents are hesitant to speak out, the church is burdened with an antiquated and unworkable sexual ethics and the young women's belief is overpowered by social discourses. Male domination and infidelity exacerbate female vulnerability and contribute to the powerlessness of young women in sexual relationships. Feminist theology puts forward an embodied theology that demands integrated embodiment and full humanity for women. This can be achieved when relationships are mutual, reciprocal and empowering. This study proposes an accountable sexual ethics that will renew and recreate the lives and relationships of young people in a confusing and perilous environment. / Sys Theology & Theol Ethics / MTH (SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY)

A question addressed in this study is; how are identities of children constructed using narratives and photographs in humanitarian discourse? This study is a sociological exposition of ethical issues that arise from representations of children within humanitarian discourse. Humanitarian discourse is treated as a special type of cultural representation. This discourse entails uses of a special form of language that constructs represents and portrays stereotypical identities of children. Such cultural representation illustrates how children’s identities are socially constructed realities. Constructions of realities of children are shaped, influenced and ‘controlled’ by intentions of humanitarian professionals as social actors. Humanitarian professionals’ actions as agents are also located within socio-cultural structures and contexts that give rise to the humanitarian discourse. This means reality is not ‘unified’ but a product of intentional and conscious inter-subjective human actions in specific contexts. Such is an assumption of phenomenological sociological theory that situates this study. This assumption also influenced qualitative research methods of this study. Qualitative methods emphasise the significance of individual perceptions and interpretations when analysing social issues. Identified ethical issues arise from practical program situations causing humanitarian professionals to collect children’s narratives and photographs in the first instance. Those situations include; conducting child focused researches, designing children’s programs, writing child rights advocacy articles and policy briefs, marketing children’s issues, media publishing, writing project proposals, monitoring and evaluating projects. Ethical issues that arise from the above include; violations of children’s privacies, lack of informed consent to collect and use children’s narratives and photographs, uses of enticements to induce information from children, disclosures of sensitive data, exaggerations, sensationalising and manipulations of children’s identities. Based on study findings, knowledge or academic contribution situated within phenomenological sociology is proposed. The study’s knowledge contribution is that constructions of children’s identities reveal how perceptions and interpretations of identities create socially determined realities within humanitarian discourse. / Sociology / D. Phil. (Sociology)

Sociology / M.A. (Sociology)

Thesis (MA (Political Science))--Stellenbosch University, 2009. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Over the past few decades the secular world has witnessed an increasing assault, specifically from the monotheistic religious fundamentalist community, on their beliefs and values. The undeniable intolerance shown by the religious fundamentalist community has often translated into violent terrorist attacks against the secular world. The fact that religious beings can resort to such atrocious acts of violence has certainly baffled many onlookers. It surely comes as no surprise that religious fundamentalism is generally viewed as a ''hard-to-understand‟ phenomenon. This literature review will describe the ''hard-to-understand‟ phenomenon that is religious fundamentalism by employing social identity theory. The social identity of religious fundamentalists is generally derived from sacred texts and what they consider to be absolute truths. These presumed absolute truths not only provide ample opportunity for the development of the ''us‟/''them‟ duality, but also provide a platform for an intense intolerance of the ''other‟, also referred to as the out-group. Of course, the ''us‟/''them‟ duality can be created on many social dimensions, but religion has proven to bring quite an extensive, even murderous, intolerance to in- and out-group characterizations. The ever increasing actions of religious fundamentalist groups over the past few decades have certainly illustrated this point with some conviction. The importance of social identity has been recognised in many major traditions of the social sciences, not excluding political science. Social identity forms the basis of any group‟s actions or reactions. Therefore, its significance stretches far beyond simply providing an identity to a social group. Social identity also acts as a preamble to how a social group, in this case religious fundamentalists, chooses to deal with invidious comparisons. By employing social identity in this particular way we can go beyond investigating how religious fundamentalists act and react to the point of understanding why they act and react the way they do. In this study it was found that although a number of options to deal with invidious comparisons are available to social groups, only a few of these options are likely to be pursued by religious fundamentalists in order to remain a relevant and competitive social group within the social hierarchy. This approach will provide important insights into a formerly ''hard-to-understand‟ phenomenon namely religious fundamentalism. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Oor die laaste paar dekades het die sekulêre wêreld 'n toenemende aanslag op sy oortuigings en waardes waargeneem, spesifiek vanaf die monoteïstiese godsdienstige fundamentalistiese gemeenskap. Die onloënbare onverdraagsaamheid wat deur hierdie godsdienstige fundamentalistiese gemeenskap getoon word ontaard dikwels in geweldadige terroriste aanvalle op die sekulêre wêreld. Die feit dat godsdienstige individue hulself begwewe tot sulke wreedaaardige dade van geweld het verseker baie toeskouers verydel. Dis is sekerlik dan nie 'n verrassing dat godsdienstige fundamentalisme gesien word as 'n ''moelik-om-te-begryp‟ fenomeen nie. Hierdie literatuur oorsig sal die ''moelik-om-te-begryp‟ fenomeen wat godsdienstige fundamentalisme is beskryf deur gebruik te maak van die sosiale identiteits teorie. Die sosiale identiteit van godsdienstige fundamentaliste spruit oor die algemeen uit heilige teks en absolute waarhede. Hierdie absolute waarhede bied nie slegs ruim geleenthede vir die ontwikkeling van die ''ons‟/''hulle‟ dualiteit nie, maar bied ook 'n platform vir 'n intense onverdraagsaamheid van die 'ander‟, wat ook verwys word na as die buite-groep. Natuurlik kan die ''ons‟/''hulle‟ dualiteit op grond van baie ander sosiale dimensies ontwikkel word, maar godsdiens het telke male al gedemonstreer dat dit 'n omvattende, selfs moordadige, onverdraagsaamheid na binne- en buite-groep karakterisering bring. Die al ewige toenemende aksies van godsdienstige fundamentalistiese groepe oor die laaste paar dekades illustreer sekerlik hierdie punt met oortuiging. Die belangrikheid van sosiale identiteit word erken deur verskeie tradisies van die sosiale wetenskappe en politieke wetenskap word nie hier uitgesluit nie. Sosiale identiteit vorm die basis van enige groep se aksies en reaksies. Vir hierdie rede strek die betekenisvoheid ver verby die feit dat slegs 'n identiteit aan 'n sosiale groep verskaf word. Sosiale identiteit tree op as 'n voorrede vir die manier waarop 'n sosiale groep, in ons geval godsdienstige fundamentaliste, verkies om onbenydenswaardige vergelykings te hanteer. Deur sosiale identiteit op hierdie besondere manier aan te spreek kan ons verder gaan as om slegs ondersoek in te stel in hoe godsdienstige fundamentaliste optree en reageer tot die punt waar ons kan verstaan hoekom hulle optree en reageer op hierdie spesifieke manier. In hierdie studie is gevind dat alhoewel daar 'n aantal opsies beskikbaar is vir sosiale groepe om onbenydenswaardige vergelykings te hanteer, is daar slegs 'n paar van hierdie opsies wat mees waarskynlik nagestreef sal word deur godsdienstige fundamentaliste ten 'n einde 'n relevante en kompeterende sosiale groep binne die sosial hïerargie te wees. Hierdie benadering sal belangrike insigte bring tot die voormalige 'moeilik-om-te-begryp‟ fenomeen genaamd godsdienstige fundamentalisme.