This research project investigates the ways in which six Indian boys who have been officially proclaimed failures in grade 11 construct their masculinity in Meadowlands Secondary School, a predominantly Indian technical secondary school in a working class area of Chatsworth. The way in which failing Indian boys construct their masculinity is under-researched in South Africa. When boys are officially declared academic failures by the school, they often take other ways to validate their masculine identities. This study focused on the complex relationship between their academic failure and the formation of their masculinities. Drawing from semi-structured in-depth interviews with six boys who failed grade 11 in 2003 and are currently repeating grade 11 in 2004, the study shows the complex relationship between school failure, and the formation of boys' masculinities in three areas. These areas are the formal academic dimension of schooling, the informal social dimension of schooling and outside school activities. The major fmdings from the interviews indicate that boys construct their masculinity by resisting the demands placed on them in schools and engage in disruptive activities. They find alternate power and prestige in wearing brand name clothes, wearing jewellery, carrying cellular phones, having girlfriends, clubbing, taking drugs and joining gangs. They find school boring and equate academic achievement with being feminine and thus being gay and resist doing school-work. They are thus able to construct their masculinities in ways that are anti-school and anti-authority. The study concludes by suggesting that failing boys at MSS are in trouble and that schools and teachers must be more alert to why failing boys behave in the ways that they do. At MSS it is suggested that the school encourages the development of sport as a way of exposing boys to different ways of being a boy. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

This thesis explores the ways in which a group of boys who belong to gangs enact their masculinity. The focus is on African boys' construction of their masculinities within gang cultures at a primary school in Inanda, Durban. The school is an exclusively African co-educational school and predominantly African teaching staff. Data collection involved qualitative methods that primarily include observation and unstructured interviews. These research tools were used to investigate the interrelatedness between violence, gangs, and masculinities. This study demonstrates that young boys in gangs enact violent masculinities which are bound up with issues of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and context in the making of young gang cultures. The performance of violent gang masculinity produced the exaggerated quality of masculine protest, in which violence is employed as a compensation for perceived weakness. This study reveals that gang of boys are enacting masculinity that is oppositional to school's authority by contravening school rules and regulations in multiple ways. This research has indicated that modes of masculinities are shaped, constrained or enabled by gang cultures. Gang boys acted out their protest masculinity in multiple ways. They are anti-school authority, anti-social and undisciplined. The study also demonstrates that there are many socio-economic and political factors that impact negatively on the school such as unemployment, poverty, and violent gang crime. The social, economic and political contexts are therefore crucially important in understanding a multiplicity of masculine identities amongst gang boys at the school under study. Schooling is an important arena where masculinities are enacted in various forms including violent (gang) masculinities. The overall conclusion stemming from the research project is that attempts to reduce violent gang masculinities in the school need to include a gender strategy that tackles gender inequality. In South Africa this could form part of the Life Skills curriculum. Much greater attention needs to be given, in the life skills curriculum and through the ethos of the school as a whole, to promote gender equality and in particular models of masculine identity not predicated on force and violence. / Thesis (M.Ed.) -University of Natal, Durban, 2004.

This study examined the influence of maturation on the oxygen uptake efficiency slope (OUES) in healthy male subjects. The variables comprising the OUES are known to be affected by metabolism which in turn is influenced by maturation. The subjects performed a graded exercise test on a cycle ergometer to determine the OUES and VO2max. Subjects were divided into groups based on maturation status: early-pubertal (EP, n = 15), mid-pubertal (MP, n = 20), late-pubertal (LP, n = 17), and young-adult (YA, n = 19) males. Cardiorespiratory fitness (measured as VO2max mL·min-1·kg-1) was not significantly different between groups. OUES values in absolute terms were higher in groups LP and YA versus MP and EP. Scaling OUES relative to body mass failed to eliminate between group differences whereby LP and YA had lower mass relative OUES values compared to LP and YA. Scaling OUES relative to fat free mass also failed to eliminate between group differences with EP group values being higher versus LP and YA, but only MP values being higher than YA. Differences in OUES values between male across maturation status remained after accounting for differences in body size, suggesting an affect of maturation on this measurement. / School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science

The purpose of this study is to determine physiological adaptations in trained male high-school runners before and after high-intensity training associated with a crosscountry season. Testing occurred on five separate occasions at the Human Performance Laboratory. After the first familiarization session, the subjects performed a treadmill graded exercise test in which maximal oxygen consumption and ventilatory threshold was measured. Submaximal oxygen consumption and blood lactate concentration at three running speeds (10, 12, and 14 km'hf 1 at 0% grade) was determined in a second testing session. After the cross-country season (13 weeks) the subjects returned to the laboratory and performed the same graded exercise and submaximal exercise tests. VO2max significantly increased, VT tended to increased, however, not significant. There were no changes in submaximal economy or lactate except for significant decline in blood lactate at 14 km hf' . Although these variables are associated with endurance performance in adults, there is very little information available regarding the effects of endurance training on these variables in the adolescent age group. Knowing the extent of the adaptations will help to optimize the training programs for age group. / School of Physical Education

This study looks at the masculinity of teenage boys living in an impoverished community in Bacolod City, Republic of the Philippines. Through the use of ethnographic methods of participant observation, interviewing, and photographic techniques, this study assesses what it means for a group of teenage boys to become men. This study finds that the boys negotiate a complex set of demands and constraints on their becoming men resulting from influences of poverty and unemployment, dynamics of hegemony and subordination, and intergenerational relations of power. This study concludes that the inability of the boys to fulfill hegemonic notions of masculinity based on economic attainment may contribute to the boys' feelings of emasculation and problems of substance abuse, may widen the gap between hegemonic masculinity practised in the Philippines and forms of manhood available in this community, and may be instrumental in more firmly entrenching these males as an underclass in Philippine society.

The purpose of this investigation was to examine whether sports in which boys participated spontaneously (i.e., not organized as a treatment) could be associated with the retrenchment of later adolescent delinquent behaviours. The objectives of this particular investigation were to: (i) observe how this participation might alter a negative behavioural developmental trajectory; and (ii) study the possible effects of transition in sports activity (i.e., increases or decreases in participation in sports from year to year) on current and later risk for delinquency. / This investigation utilized data obtained from the Montreal Longitudinal-Experimental Study of Boys which started in 1984 when the boys were six years old. Seven-hundred-eleven of the subjects met the inclusion criteria necessary to participate in the present study. Each year, from 1989 (age 11) to 1995 (age 17) the subjects were asked to complete the Self-Report-Delinquency questionnaire, a 27-item scale detailing their involvement in antisocial behaviour over the previous 12-month period. The scores of four of these years were retained for study; namely, those for 1989 (age 11), 1991 (age 13), 1993 (age 15), 1995 (age 17). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-138).

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-153). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1994. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-142). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-130). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.