abstract: Criminologists have directed significant theoretical and empirical attention toward the institution of marriage over the past two decades. Importantly, the momentum guiding this line of research has increased despite the fact that people are getting married far less often and much later in the life course than in any point in American history. The aim of this dissertation is to address this disconnect by focusing attention to nonmarital romantic relationships and their instability during emerging adulthood. To do so, it uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, a longitudinal study of 1,354 at-risk males and females who were adjudicated from the juvenile and adult systems in Phoenix and Philadelphia between 2000 and 2003. The project focuses attention to the following issues: (1) the effect of romantic dissolution on aggressive and income-based offenses; (2) the extent to which strain/negative emotionality and peer influence/exposure account for the effect of romantic dissolution on crime; and (3) the extent to which certain relationship and individual circumstances moderate the effect of romantic dissolution. The models reveal a few key findings. First, romantic dissolution is strongly related to an increase in both aggressive and income-based crime, but is more strongly related to income-based crime. Second, the effect of romantic dissolution is reduced when measures of strain/negative emotionality and peer influence/exposure measures are added to models, but the peer influence/exposure measures account for the strongest reduction. Finally, romantic dissolution does not serve as a positive life event among these at-risk youth, but its effect is exacerbated under a number of contexts (e.g. when an individual is unemployed). This study closes with a summary of these findings as well as its key limitations, and offers insight into potential policy implications and avenues of future research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Criminology and Criminal Justice 2013

This dissertation begins from the classic anthropological observation that how we age is culturally specific, and examines how Ecuador’s “educational revolution” has changed what aging looks like in that country. As Quito's public schools underwent rapid and wide-ranging transformations from 2009-2017, its students and their families also adjusted to new ""youth"" rights and responsibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork on how high school students and their families negotiated these changes in school and at home was analyzed through a life course lens encompassing phenomenological and governmental approaches to time and identity. Here, age identities are shown to emerge from the efforts of formal schooling to define what it means to be a good citizen across the life course. The result is an ethnographic study of a particularly modern relationship between time and youth identity that joins intersectional work on gender, race, and class in considering how categories of social differentiation govern populations. This dissertation theorizes the “age horizon” to analyze age identities through informants’ encounters with a wide variety of temporal guideposts, which subjects use to locate their own identities. It develops the concept of the “citizen life cycle” as the normative life course trajectory that emerges from understanding age as a technology of citizenship. It also contextualizes the citizen life cycle as a single “path” towards national belonging within a much wider and more variable “age horizon.” The concept of the citizen life cycle emphasizes how “youth becoming” gets constructed as a “life stage” within a larger normative “life cycle.” I pay particular attention to the effects of policies, infrastructures, and practices that my informants encounter in their daily attendance in high school.

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Work and family are the central and salient domains in one’s life. Juggling work and family life has become a challenge for many employees and families (Hammer et al., 2005). This study proposed a theoretical model in which work to family enrichment functioned as the mediator between work support (support from supervisor, co-workers and organization) and work well-being (job satisfaction and psychological health), and also examined whether work demand buffered the impact of work support on work well-being. The inclusion of work to family enrichment extends prior research on Job Demands – Resources model (Demerouti & Bakker, 2007), and allows for a more detailed assessment of the effects of work support on work well-being from a perspective of positive organizational behavior. A total of 978 employees in Chinese society were recruited. An exploratory factor analyses and a confirmatory factor analyses supported a 10-item Work Support Scale measuring supervisor support, co-worker support and organization support. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and Sobel Test results showed that work to family enrichment partially mediated the influence of work support on job satisfaction and full mediated the influence of work support on psychological health, whereas the regression results showed that work demand indeed buffered the positive relationship between work support and job satisfaction. Implications for future research on work-family enrichment were discussed.

This study provides evidence for the psychometrics of a 25-item instrument that measures divorcing individuals' perceived level of interparental conflict. The Level of Conflict Assessment (LOCA) was administered to 484 individuals who were attending a state-mandated parent education seminar for divorcing or separating parents. The unique feature of this instrument is that it was designed to measure perceived levels of conflict at the time of divorce. The internal consistency reliability of the scale was very high (α = .94). Through generalized linear modeling regression (specifically Gamma with log-link), five out of eight items were statistically significant, establishing a level of scale validity.

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This study was conducted to examine the relationship between religion and child sexual abuse. A self-report survey questionnaire was administered to 397 freshmen students at a southern university. The students were asked about several social background factors, including involvement with church and religious activities. They were also asked to disclose whether they had been sexually abused as a child. The present study found significant relationships between religiosity and victims of child sexual abuse by both relatives and non-relatives. Persons sexually abused by a relative were much more likely to be affiliated with fundamental Protestant religions. Persons sexually abused by a non-relative were much more likely to rarely or never be involved in church and religious activities and were affiliated with liberal religious denominations or indicated they were atheists or agnostics.

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