Thèse--Lausanne. / At head of title: Université de Lausanne. Includes bibliographical references.

<p> Post-secondary student retention and persistence is on the minds of professionals at various higher learning institutions due to the disparities in educational attainment. These disparities may lead to inhibited social mobility, and lack of cultural and social capital. This study examined what factors Southern Connecticut State University sophomore students perceived as aiding or impeding their degree path. It questioned how underrepresented students shaped their perception on their educational attainment and how this compares to the existing research and literature on the success practices of underrepresented students in higher education. The study was conducted using open-ended semi-structured interview questions administered to second year sophomore students at Southern Connecticut State University. Specifically, they were underrepresented students defined as being low-income, racial minority, and first-generation students. This study aimed to explore the narrative of underrepresented students by exploring why college access doesn&rsquo;t necessarily result in college completion. </p><p>

The contemporary homeschooling movement sits at the intersection of several important social trends: widespread concern about the effectiveness and safety of public schools, feminist challenges to the patriarchal family structure, anxiety about the state of the family as an institution, and challenging economic conditions. The central concern of this dissertation is to make sense of homeschooling within this broader context. Data were gathered through interviews with forty-five homeschooling parents, approximately half of whom are religious and half of whom are secular. The interviews were organized around three central questions: (1) What are the frames that parents use to justify homeschooling? (2) What are their particular tactics or methods for homeschooling? (3) What are the components of homeschoolers' collective identity? I argue that homeschooling bears the imprint of broader changes regarding the gender system and contemporary family life, as well as other economic and cultural changes. Both religious and secular parents come to homeschooling out of shared concerns about schools being ineffective and incapable of catering to their children.s individual needs. They also share concerns about the state of the family and the general moral decline of society. Religious and secular parents differ in their actual practice of homeschooling, depending on their particular conceptions of childhood, but they are alike in the fact that it is women who do most of the homeschooling work. These parents are also different in their collective identities. Religious parents regard homeschooling as just something they do. However, secular parents characterize homeschooling as part of who they are as moral people and this compels them to employ various strategies of identity work. In the end, I argue that this movement is unlikely to contribute to meaningful social change. I base this conclusion on the fact that the homeschooling movement contains two major contradictions: (1) This movement is simultaneously resisting one alleged failing institution – schools - while reproducing another highly criticized institution – the patriarchal nuclear family. (2) This movement offers individual solutions to social problems. While the participants have many concerns about social institutions, their answer is to withdraw their participation and retreat into their own families.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 301-316). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis--London. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Sociology." Includes bibliographical references (p. 233-243).

Thesis--London. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Homosexuality is universal -- as universal as man himself. The practice has been recorded in the literature of most societies. Although homosexuality has at times been accorded a place of special respect, occasionally regarded as the prerogative of a particular class, more frequently it has been subjected to societal punishment. This study analyses the pattern of social relationships among homosexuals under conditions of repression characteristic of American urban society. It is the object of his sexual drive that distinguishes the homosexual from other men. Society condemns such behaviour and subjects the sexual deviant to severe social sanctions. Thus the homosexual finds himself defined as a criminal by the law makers, as a perpetrator of unnatural and ungodly acts by the churches, and a pervert by the ordinary men and women of society. These evaluations of his behaviour create the particular set of social problems which confront the homosexual. The general vulnerability of his position within society imposes the limitations upon his activities and determines to a great extent the type of adjustment which he is able to make to the larger social environment. In an attempt to solve his social problems. the practising homosexual has become involved in a distinctive, separate, and somewhat secret set of social relationships which we shall call “homosexual society”. This distinctive society is a response to the need to communicate with others for the satisfaction of sexual drives under conditions of social repression. The emergence of homosexual society is therefore an adaptation to the limitations and restrictions imposed by the larger heterosexual culture. [...]

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New School for Social Research, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 257-268). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--New School for Social Research, 2003. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 399-422). Also available in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Access restricted to users affiliated with the licensed institutions.