The meanings women attribute to pregnancy and prenatal care and the manner in which those meanings affect decisions to utilize prenatal care services are examined. Using an Integrated Model of Prenatal Care Utilization based on concepts from Poole & Carlton, Ginsburg and Polkinghorne, a qualitative research design was used to examine how women entering the prenatal care program think about pregnancy and prenatal care, to examine the context of prenatal care services where patients and service providers interact, and to examine the delivery of social work services as an enabling factor within that context. The results indicate that the prenatal care service delivery system is embedded in a cultural infrastructure that may operate to constrain utilization in some instances and to enhance utilization in others. Recommendations are made to address those factors that operate to restrict utilization. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0949. / Major Professor: Shimon Gottschalk. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

When older Americans face a need for long term care, they face a crisis that is all but unresolvable. Long term care is specifically excluded under Medicare policy, and few insurance packages adequately protect the elderly from catastrophic long term care costs. Only Medicaid, the means-tested health care program for all ages, provides coverage of long term care. By default then, we have a poverty-based long term care system in the United States. / What are the effects of a poverty-based long term care system? Class-based theories of the welfare state suggest that targeted benefits stratify society along class lines. This study suggests that the effects of targeted benefits can be devastating to the elderly and their families, and that the negative side-effects fall disproportionately on women and nonwhites. Targeted benefits do create class cleavages, but they also divide society along dimensions that transcend class lines, namely race and gender. / This dissertation examines Medicare and Medicaid policy, as well as the National Nursing Home Survey of 1985 and the National Long Term Care Survey of 1982-1984. Specific topics analyzed include spenddown, Medicaid use in nursing homes and in the community, the uncovered poor, the Medicaid gap, Medicaid's revolving door, spousal impoverishment and informal caregiving. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 3096. / Major Professor: Jill Quadagno. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

The dissertation developed a conceptual framework for analyzing the impact of environmental variables on the capacity (or ability) of delivery systems, especially substitute care delivery systems, to provide services to emotionally disturbed children, and attempted to empirically validate a portion of the framework. The conceptual framework was organized into a general environment level and a task environment level. Both levels were viewed as a series of variables that could potentially influence (facilitate or constrain) a delivery system service capacity outcome variable. General environment variables included economic, sociodemographic, political/legal, cultural, and technology variables. Task environment variables included (a) contextual variables (i.e., belief-value, strategy, organizational rationale, organizational authority structure, and organizational legitimation/power variables), and (b) delivery system variables (i.e., organizational, individual, group, and interorganizational variables). / The dissertation research study asked two questions: (1) What are the relationships between the general environment economic variable (operationalized as the amount of public money expended on childrens' programs) and the capacity of substitute care delivery systems to provide available and accessible services to emotionally disturbed children? (2) What are the relationships between selected task environment organizational program attribute variables (i.e., auspice, age, and size variables) and the capacity of substitute care delivery systems to provide available and accessible services to emotionally disturbed children? / Following Evan's (1966) focal organization approach, a purposive sample consisting of eighteen residential treatment programs (and their associated substitute care delivery systems) located throughout the state of Florida that primarily served emotionally disturbed children was derived. Data were assembled from two basic sources, that is, mail/telephone survey questionnaires, and public and private organization document information. The Spearman rho statistic was used to assess research question relationships. The study results indicated support for the associations between public or private delivery system program auspice and the availability and accessibility of several delivery system services (i.e., adjunctive, behavior evaluation, education evaluation, medical evaluation, and placement/post placement/day services). Recommendations for future research pertaining to both the conceptual framework and the research study were presented. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 3096. / Major Professor: Michael L. Frumkin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

Over the last decades there has been a growing proliferation of international regulatory institutions (fora) with overlapping mandates and ambiguous boundaries. Some international relations scholars argue that institutional density spurs forum shopping - states may choose from among multiple options the one that best meets their policy preference, may play institutions against each other and even replace institutions with which they are dissatisfied. Such patterns have been observed across the global governance system, raising fears that global institutions are losing relevance and that the international system is becoming increasingly anarchic. However, successful forum shopping is rare within global environmental governance despite its high institutional density and often high level of states' institutional dissatisfaction. / This dissertation asks how states respond when their policy preferences are not being met within a global environmental forum and how state responses affect this forum over time. It develops a theoretical framework that conceptualizes forum shopping along a continuum of possible state actions taken when states disagree with the primary forum. This framework proposes that a state's institutional response depends on the institutional design of the primary forum, the state's national interest, and its capabilities. It is tested against empirical evidence from three cases: climate change, trade in endangered species and whaling. Methods comprise structured focused comparison, congruence and process tracing. This dissertation finds that institutional density indeed generates additional opportunities for state action, but finds there is an unwillingness to use them. Global environmental fora exhibit an "engagement pull" on states -- structurally, they have a high level of revisability and there are multiple constraints on the use of other fora. It is demonstrated how arguing and bargaining conducted by the actors at the center of institutional debates help reconstruct challenged institutions as focal points of cooperation; how state dissatisfaction causes institutional proliferation and how states and other actors can pursue a more effective and sustainable governance system.

Public service motivation theory argues that people in the public sector hold different values than their private sector counterparts. However, little is understood about how public service motivation may be affected over time and as the result of organizational experiences. Similarly, the validity of the public service motivation scale using secondary data has largely been unexamined. This research uses longitudinal data to track the effect of participation in the national service program AmeriCorps on participants and compares these results to a similar comparison group. It is posited that public service motivation may be cultivated through participation in service-oriented activity in the nonprofit sector. Findings revealed that antecedent conditions of PSM, including prevalence of seeing family members and mentors help others as well as participation in student government weakly (but significantly) predict whether someone joins AmeriCorps programs. Additionally, Perry's original public service motivation construct appears to hold when using secondary data among people who are interested in national service. Longitudinal analysis of an adapted public service motivation construct reveals that participation in AmeriCorps programs positively affects participants' levels of commitment to public interest and their knowledge of their communities. Participation also positively affects participants' levels of attraction to public policymaking; however a comparison group demonstrates a similar jump in these measures. Finally, members' levels of openness to new ideas appear to be negatively related to service in AmeriCorps. Additionally, it is found that nonparticipants experienced significant declines in their levels of commitment to public interest, openness to new ideas, and knowledge of their communities over an eight year period.

For hundreds of years, countries have engaged in diplomatic relations in order to advance their national interests. Most people think of diplomacy in the traditional sense, which is characterized by government bodies or officials communicating with each other. Since the last century, however, there has been increased emphasis on the practice of public diplomacy, which involves governments communicating with foreign citizens in order to alter their attitudes. The United States still uses traditional means of diplomacy, as well as twentieth-century tools of public diplomacy, such as the use of radio broadcasts, specifically by means of the Voice of America, but recent events such as the Arab Spring suggest that embracing new forms of media is an effective means of conducting public diplomacy. This thesis shows how the United States government has used new media in public diplomacy, and how it currently uses social media to advance its soft power, which according to Joseph S. Nye, Jr., is "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments" and "arises from a country's culture, political ideals and policies."¹ The social media to be examined consist primarily of social networking sites, weblogs, and social videos. The effectiveness of new media throughout history will be compared to the new media of today, demonstrating how social media is among the most important component of contemporary discussions on US public diplomacy. / ¹Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), x.

Grassroots studies of the implementation of the federal antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s are showing that the War on Poverty did not operate in a vacuum; rather, it was profoundly shaped by a multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, local elites, grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers, civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In Houston, grassroots activists created a local context in which to implement the War on Poverty that was much more diverse in its intellectual and political influences than the rather narrow confines of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The moderate liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal War on Poverty certainly helped galvanize local antipoverty activists in Houston, but even more prominent in their antipoverty philosophy were Prophetic Christianity, radical civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. This local context created a favorable environment for these activists to use the War on Poverty to advance an agenda of social change by empowering the poor and helping then engage in confrontations with the city's elite. By the same token, the diversity of ideas that fueled the implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston---and especially the small victories that grassroots activists were able to achieve in their quest to empower the city's poor---provoked a swift and powerful backlash from local public officials and conservative defenders of the status quo. In Houston, therefore, local political conditions and contests, even more than federal politics, determined how the War on Poverty was fought, and the interaction between the federal antipoverty program and a broad range of local ideas gave the War on Poverty a distinctive flavor in Houston that both created opportunities for grassroots activists to bring about social change and set limits on what those activists could accomplish.

Relationships Between Political Competition and Socioeconomic Status in the United States

<p> Contrary to conventional wisdom, the structural determinants of transnational and domestic terrorism are not necessarily synonymous. A domestic terrorism event population was derived by applying definitional criteria to the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database. Economic, political, systemic, and social structural determinants were tested with a negative binomial regression on 194 states between 1970 and 2010. Results suggested an inverse U relationship between wealth and the incidence of terrorism. Interestingly, short term economic growth had the opposite effect. It depressed terrorism. Political regimes were categorized into three different types - autocracies, anocracies, or democracies. Autocracies were the least susceptible to terrorism. Anocracy was the regime type most conducive to terrorism. Democratic regimes occupied the middle space. They suffered more terrorism than dictatorships but less than anocratic regimes. Cold War bipolarity systemically encouraged terrorism compared to the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era, suggesting superpower rivalry manifested in more terrorist violence. Social tension effects varied depending on type. Linguistic fractionalization increased the incidence of violence. Paradoxically, ethnic fractionalization impeded terrorism. Religious fractionalization had little impact on terrorism. Among control variables, population and a history of terrorism were directly related to terrorism. Mountain terrain and urbanization were not significantly related to it.</p>

<p> Targeted U.S. domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples has been documented since the time of Custer (Deer 2010, Smith 2005, Smith 2003). According to a few, geographically specific studies this practice continues today (Juran, et al 2014, Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition 2011, Pierce and Minnesota Indian Women&rsquo;s Resource Center 2009). The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA), it&rsquo;s subsequent reauthorizations and the Violence Against Women&rsquo;s Act (VAWA) 2013 reauthorization have encouraged activists in Indian Country, defined broadly, to believe that a change is possible within the system if they continue to raise the issue. But what if that strategy is flawed? Despite increasing awareness, it is clear that the United States policy environment has not yet experienced any significant change since the introduction of anti-trafficking law in 2000&mdash;especially for Native America. Using a tribal, feminist, critical race perspective alongside Native Nation (re)Building theory and a grounded, interdisciplinary focus, this study explores prominent public policy perceptions about how widespread the targeted domestic sex trafficking of Native peoples is in the United States. The first of its kind, this study reaches across broad geography and perspectives to locate synergies and ruptures that may also present opportunities for Native self-determination in creating effective Indian Country solutions. It also offers United States public policy suggestions helpful in addressing anti-trafficking legislative inefficiencies beyond Indian Country generally.</p>