The purpose of the current study was to examine delinquent pre-adolecents. It was hypothesized that both predictor variable [exposure to community violence (number of events; preception of events) and stressful life events (number of events)] would impact delinquent behavior (violent thoughts, violent behaviors, and promiscuity).

This study looked at the environmental factors present during testing for the spring 2004 administration of the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in an attempt to quantify some of the factors that were previously only qualitatively reported. Five factors were examined for their ability to predict passing percentages of students on the CASHSEE at the school level. The results indicated that socioeconomic status was the only significant predictor.

The purpose of this thesis is to reveal some of the behavioral characteristics of a specific type of laughter that I term "feigned laughter," and how it is used in the context of face-threatening-utterances (FTUs), or utterances that threaten the face needs of an individual.

This work critically examines the justiciability of the Sudan model of constitutionalising socio-economic rights (SER) and the legal implications of this model. Discusses the following questions: (1) What is the scope and extent of the Sudan Bill of Rights? (2) What is the effect of section 27(3) on section 22 of the Sudan Interim National Constitution? (3) Does the Constitution provide for justiciable SER, if yes, can the South African model of rendering SER justiciable and their standard of review provide a useful guide to the Sudan? / Mini Dissertation (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Professor Julia Sloth-Nielsen of the Community Law Centre, University of the Western Cape / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

This thesis focuses on Catholic Charities (Hereafter CC), a non-profit agency that provides pregnancy and adoption support to families in times of crisis. Research and agency data reflect a positive association between the amount of time clients engage in services and the resolution of crises. Both theoretically and empirically, a key determinant of the depth and breadth of clients' engagement with both for-profit and non-profit services is their satisfaction with such services. In 2009-2010, CC's in-house, client surveys reported a decreasing level of client engagement with services. One clear trend was that clients discontinued services after thirty days or less. Against this trend, CC aims to provide social services for an extended period of time (i.e. longer than thirty days) in order to insure that clients have fully recovered from crises. In order to understand possible reasons for clients' low or short engagement rates, this thesis analyzes clients' satisfaction with CC services. Using a grounded-theory approach, twenty semi-structured interviews with former and current CC clients were analyzed for communication-based themes involving clients' satisfaction with services. Four macro-themes emerged: (1) Positive Caseworker Personality, (2) Feeling Emotionally Supported, (3) Feeling Helped, and (4) Positive Counseling Environment. Findings have implications for both theories of satisfaction and the offering and practice of CC services.

Sociologists of punishment generally agree that the American prison exacerbates social inequality, but the mechanisms by which it does so remain somewhat fuzzy. This thesis pulls from the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), a canonical theorist of power and inequality, and specifically his three "thinking tools" of field, capital, and habitus, to unveil these mechanisms. Empirically, I turn to ethnographic data I collected in a minimum-security men's prison that is generally reserved for convicts who will be released to one of the three most populated counties in Oregon. I explore how soon-to-be-released prisoners (i.e., prisoners who will be released within six months) understand and prepare for their exit. Data suggest most prisoners approaching release want to adopt an honest working class style of living, and that many take proactive steps they perceive as likely to increase their chances of accessing this lifestyle (sometimes called the "straight life"). However, I argue that any (re)integrative potential emerging from these conscious and interest-oriented strategies are at risk of being trumped by two processes I title "capital erosion" and "habitus adjustment." I frame these as unintended, but nevertheless strong, consequences of imprisonment. Ultimately, I suggest imprisonment worsens existing patterns of inequality by means of draining power from the nearly powerless and disintegrating the poorly integrated.

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Recent years have witnessed a proliferation in the number of products receiving specialized ethical certification labels, even though scholars have underscored that the actual effects of such labels are not well understood. (Luetchford 2012) In the area of coffee in particular, case studies have highlighted that Fair Trade labeling seems to operate in unexpected ways, beyond its straightforward financial incentives. This has led to a call for deeper investigation into the specific mechanisms—particularly the extra-economic and social processes—through which Fair Trade acts on coffee growers and their communities. This is seconded by recent studies that have noted a lack of equality between men and women members of Fair Trade co-operatives, in stark contrast to the label’s advertised aims of advancing gender equity and women’s development. (Bacon 2010; Lyon 2008) This friction has contributed to the emergence of separate, all-women’s Fair Trade co-operatives in coffee-growing regions around the globe, and the specialty marketing of their coffee (e.g., Café Femenino and Las Hermanas from Nicaragua) as specifically empowering for women. (Fair Trade USA 2012; Bacon 2010; Lyon 2008) Yet, as with other ethical labels, the actual processes through which these women’s co-operatives affect their members is under-studied and in need of deeper ethnographic investigation. (Hanson et al. 2012; Lyon 2008) In order to address these gaps in the literature, this study captures the complex social processes set in motion by Fair Trade through a comparative ethnography of a traditional mixed men and women’s co-operative and a newer, all-women’s co-operative in neighboring coffee-growing communities in northern Nicaragua. This research positions the sociological construct of social capital as a robust theoretical lens capable of illuminating diverse dynamics within these groups and their larger structural contexts. The use of social capital theory not only allows access to critical and unexplored insights into the “associational life” created by Fair Trade co-operatives, but also presents an opportunity to explore a “strategic site” of social capital in action and extend the theory by addressing debates surrounding its oft-contested definitions and relationship to gender. (Putnam 2000:60; Portes 2010:2; Burawoy 1998) Specifically, this research examines three perspectives on social capital: Bourdieu’s (1986) resource framework, Coleman’s (1988:108) description of social capital as a platform or “appropriable social organization,” and Putnam’s (2000) notion of social capital as trust. Further, this study critically interrogates the characterization of social capital as a kind of “women’s capital,” and its promotion as both a means and an ends to gendered empowerment. (Maclean 2010:498) In pursuit of these aims, this research both draws on and adds to the literature in the areas of ethical consumption and Fair Trade studies, economic sociology, the sociology of globalization, gender theory, gender and development, men and masculinities, local and transnational feminist movements, empowerment frameworks, and the social determinants of health. This extended case method ethnography links microprocesses to macroforces, through a localized understanding of globalization—in this case the impact of Northern ethical consumption practices and ideologies on producer communities in the Global South. In addition, as an applied ethnography in the tradition of public sociology, this study provides analysis that is useful not only to scholars, but could directly inform further setting-appropriate development efforts.

Economic sociologists have long produced rich accounts of the economy’s embeddedness in social relations and the hybridity of contemporary governance architectures. However, all too often, they contented themselves with merely disenchanting a liberal ontology that divides the social world into neatly differentiated spheres, such as the state and the economy or the public and the private. In this dissertation, I argue that this is not enough. If we want to understand actually existing economic government, we also need to attend to the consequences of its persistent violation of the precepts of liberal order. This dissertation does so by accounting for the simultaneity of the Federal Reserve’s rise to the commanding heights of the US economy and the repeated, multi-pronged controversies over it. I contend that together, the Fed’s ascendance and the controversies surrounding it are symptomatic of the contradictions inherent to a liberal mode of governing ‘the economy’ which, on the one hand, professes its investment in a clear boundary between the state and the economy but which, on the other hand, operationally rests on their entanglement. Its embeddedness in financial markets exposes the Fed to attacks that it is either colluding with finance or that it unduly smuggles in political considerations into an otherwise apolitical economy. In response, to secure its legitimacy as a neutral arbiter of market struggles, the Fed needs to invest in autonomization strategies to demonstrate that it is acting neither in the interests of capital nor on behalf of partisan politicians but in the public interest. Its autonomization strategies in turn feed back onto the modes of embeddedness and governing techniques the Fed deploys, often resulting in new controversies. Combining insights from economic sociology and the sociology of expertise, the perspective developed in this dissertation thus foregrounds the persistent tension between embeddedness and autonomy and the sequences of reiterated problem-solving it gives rise to.Based on extensive archival research and interviews with actors, I reconstruct three such sequences in the Fed’s more-than-a-century long quest for embedded autonomy in three independent but related empirical essays. The first focuses on the decade immediately following the Federal Reserve System’s founding in 1913. It traces how the confluence of democratic turmoil in the wake of World War I, its hybrid organizational structure, and an alliance with institutionalist economists led Fed policymakers to repurpose open market operations from a banking technique into a policy tool that reconciled different interests. This made it possible to take on a task no other central bank had attempted before: mitigating depressions. This major innovation briefly turned the Fed into “the chief stabilizer” before it failed to fulfill this role during the Great Depression. The essay thus adds a critical, oft-forgotten episode to the genealogy of the Fed’s ascendancy and the rise of central banks to the foremost macroeconomic managers of our time. The second essay most explicitly develops the theoretical argument underlying this dissertation and applies it to a practice that has been all but ignored in the scholarship on central banking and financial government: bank supervision. Emphasizing its distinctiveness from regulation, I reconstruct how the Fed folded supervision into its project of governing finance as a vital, yet vulnerable system over the course of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. I especially focus on the Fed’s autonomization strategies in the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and its internal struggles which resulted in a more standardized, quantitative, and transparent supervisory process centered around the technique of stress testing. However, the Fed’s efforts to reassert its autonomy and authority have in the meantime become attacked themselves. The essay traces these controversies, and subsequent reforms, to the present day, further demonstrating the recursive dynamic of the Fed’s quest for embedded autonomy. The third essay finally zooms in on a single event during the Great Financial Crisis: the first major public stress test run by the Fed and the Treasury between February and May 2009. By reconstructing its socio-technical assembling in detail and comparing it to the failures of stress tests run by European agencies between 2009 and 2011, I show that the stress test’s success rested on a reconfiguration of the state’s embeddedness in financial circuits, allowing the Treasury’s material and symbolic capital to back the exercise and the Fed to function as a conduit that iteratively gauged and shaped its audiences’ expectations as to what a credible test would look like. This made it possible to successfully frame the test as an autonomous exercise based on expertise. Probing the structural, socio-technical, and performative conditions of the Fed’s claims to legitimacy, the essay thus resolves the ‘mystery’ (Paul Krugman) how a simulation technique could become a watershed event in the greatest financial crisis in a lifetime.

This thesis comprises three chapters on topics in development economics. The first chapter studies access to maternal healthcare in markets with vertically differentiated public and private providers. The second chapter studies the efficacy of induction stoves in reducing indoor air pollution in rural households when faced with erratic power supply. Finally, the third chapter studies the role of financial incentives in correcting disparities in sex ratios. All three chapters study the context of India but are representative of important development issues in low-income countries. The first chapter titled "Equilibrium Effects of Subsidizing Public Services" studies one of India's largest welfare schemes Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) that incentivized pregnant women in India to access institutional maternal care at public hospitals. We argue that governments can make complementary investments to improve welfare gains from large scale policies. JSY did not improve health outcomes despite a substantial increase in the take-up of institutional care. We document three equilibrium responses that explain this policy failure. First, JSY led to a mismatch of risk across health facilities -- high-risk mothers sorted out of highest quality care at private facilities. Second, in line with the literature, public sector quality deteriorated as a result of congestion. This resulted in lower quality care for both marginal as well as infra-marginal patients at public hospitals. We show that only mothers with high socio-economic status adapted to the worsening quality of care at public hospitals by sorting into more expensive private hospitals. Third, despite increased competition, private hospitals maintained high prices, crowding out riskier and poorer mothers. We do not find evidence that private hospitals improved healthcare quality to justify higher prices. The second chapter titled "Electric Stoves as a Solution for Household Air Pollution" is an interdisciplinary field-based research study that studies the role of reliable electricity in inducing rural Indian households to switch away from dirty cooking fuels towards a clean cooking technology, induction cookstoves, thereby reducing the exposure to high levels of indoor air pollution. We collected minute-by-minute data on electricity availability, electric induction stove use, and kitchen and outdoor particulate pollution in a sample of rural Indian households for one year. Using within household-month variation generated by unpredictable outages, we estimate the effects of electricity availability and electric induction stove use on kitchen PM2.5 concentration at each hour of the day. Electricity availability reduces kitchen PM2.5 by up to 50 ??/?3, which is between 10 and 20 percent of peak concentrations during cooking hours. Induction stove use instrumented by electricity availability reduces PM2.5 in kitchens by 200-450 ??/?3 during cooking hours. The final chapter titled "Can Large-Scale Conditional Cash Transfers Resolve the Fertility-Sex Ratio Trade-off? Evidence from India" studies a large-scale conditional cash transfer (CCT) scheme Ladli Laxmi Yojana that offered cash incentives to households upon the birth of girl children. The policy also offered substantial incentive for investing in girls' education. In my evaluation of the Ladli Laxmi Yojana in Madhya Pradesh, India. I find that financial incentives aimed at the girl child increased average fertility by about 0.15 children per household (on baseline average of 0.93 children) children per household and improved sex-ratio by 3%. This points to the well known fertility-sex ratio trade-off. Moreover, these effects are quite opposite to a similar CCT scheme in Haryana (Anukriti, 2018) suggesting context dependence of such policies.