Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-103).

M.Ed. / This study researches the working mother's experience of her world in order to explore and describe it. The aim of the study is to make recommendations to the educational psychologist (who is involved in the development and education of the child) resulting from the experiences of the different mothers. The research report starts with the contextualization of the study in Chapter 1, by creating a social- and theoretical framework. The theoretical framework places the woman in a system of interdependent relations, placing her internal experience and her external participation in society, in context. In Chapter 2 the exploratory, descriptive, contextual and qualitative study that was done, is described. To collect the data, phenomenological interviewing was done. The interviews were taped and then transcribed. The test sample consists of five women with professional careers or who used to have professional careers. The collected data was processed with a combination of Tesch's method, Kerlinger's method and categorisation.

Past literature suggests that working mothers are at an increased risk for experiencing role strain compared to other employed adults. The current study investigated attitudes and beliefs of 783 working mothers of 15-month-old children using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Working mothers' levels of role strain was associated with perceived social support, attitudes toward maternal employment, job and parental role quality, financial stress, and depression. Negative attitudes toward maternal employment predicted maternal separation anxiety, while positive attitudes toward employment did not affect separation anxiety. These findings have implications for the importance of decreasing role strain in working mothers.

As multiple regions in the global south urbanize and transform, their social-environmental challenges also reshape. Climate change and ecological degradation intertwine with these processes in ways that have an uneven impact on people and firms with various degrees of vulnerability. In this dissertation, I look at such issues through the lens of sustainable development, with a regional emphasis on Mexico. Standard economic analyses of environmental policy focus on either reducing pollution externalities through mitigation or reducing the harms from exposure by encouraging adaptation. In practice, these issues are both critical, particularly when looking at the health effects of local air pollutants, which can be acute, and policymakers often pair information provision with short and long-run mitigation actions. In Chapter 1, I explore whether, in the context of the Mexico City air quality alert program, information policy is more effective when paired with mitigation. I find that the policy did not improve air quality or health outcomes until the mitigation component, which limited transport emissions, was introduced. I also use sensor-level traffic data, geo-tagged accident reports, and search data as a measure of awareness of the policy to unveil the mechanisms through which considerable short-run improvements in air quality and health are achieved after issuing an alert. I find that the alert reduces car usage even before the driving restrictions enter into place, suggesting that, due to an increased awareness of pollution, people reduce their trips. Chapter 2 studies the effects of regional exposure to extreme temperatures on credit delinquency rates for firms in Mexico. Our exposure variable is defined as the number of days in a quarter that minimum and maximum temperature are below 3°C and above 36°C, respectively, which correspond to the bottom 5 percent and top 5 percent of daily minimum and maximum temperature distribution in the country. We find that extreme temperatures increase delinquency. This effect is mostly driven by extreme heat, and it is concentrated on agricultural firms, but there is also an effect on non-agriculture firms. The impact on non-agricultural firms seems to be driven by general equilibrium effects in rural areas. Chapter 3, provides the first estimation of child penalties in the Mexican labor market. Using an event study approach and an instrumental variable as a robustness check, we estimate the impact of children on employment and wages, unpaid labor, and transitions between informal and formal sectors. We are the first to show that a child’s arrival significantly affects mothers’ paid and unpaid work, and it impacts members of the extended family unevenly, reinforcing traditional gender roles. While low- and middle-income women account for most of the effect of childbirth on wages, all mothers increase time spent on unpaid work.

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

<div>This dissertation addresses the overarching question, “What are the processes, antecedents, and outcomes of first-time mother’s pregnancy disclosures to their supervisors?” Two new theoretical disclosure models, the antecedent pregnancy disclosure model (APDM) and the outcome pregnancy disclosure model (OPDM), were empirically tested to address this question. Utilizing longitudinal data, these models examined the direct, mediation, and moderation effects associated with expecting women’s pregnancy disclosure experiences. </div><div><br></div><div>The APDM and OPDM drew upon disclosure theories (e.g., Afifi & Steuber, 2009; Greene, 2009), the interpersonal process model (Reiss & Shaver, 1988), and work-life literatures to extend disclosure theorizing through an examination of the work-related predictors of disclosure decision making and the interpersonal, relational, and career outcomes associated with expecting mother’s disclosure experiences. The APDM identified both individual-level (e.g., perceived career risk) and organization-level (e.g., structural support) predictors for the specific types of disclosure strategies women used to inform their supervisors that they were pregnant.</div><div><br></div><div> The APDM also tested two mechanisms (i.e., disclosure efficacy and anticipated disclosure strategy) as potential mediators between predictors and enacted disclosure strategies at T2 (see Figure 2). The OPDM built upon findings of the APDM to examine the association between enacted disclosure strategies and relational, psychological, and career outcomes while testing the role of perceived supervisor responsiveness as both a moderator and mediator to these effects (see Figure 3). Results of data analysis (N = 131) revealed that perceived organizational support and perceived risk influenced expecting women’s engagement in specific disclosure strategies at T2 through differing mechanisms (see APDM). Additionally, results suggest that the different disclosure strategies that women enacted at T2 were significantly associated with expecting women’s career, relational, and psychological outcomes (see OPDM). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. </div><div><br></div>

Working mothers may encounter difficulty combining work and family, particularly as this interface involves child care arrangements. This research investigated the effects of various dimensions of child care support on stress and role conflict in employed mothers. It was hypothesized that as job support, affordability, spousal support, and satisfaction with child care increased, that child care stress, job stress, and role conflict would decrease. The data were derived from a survey (Lane County Dependent Care survey, Emlen, 1990} of women employed in 15 companies in the Lane County, Oregon area. The study sample consisted of 825 full and part-time employed mothers with children under the age of eighteen living in the home. This research analyzed the women's responses to questions pertaining to each of the four dimensions of child care support (four questions}, and two questions on stress (one on child care stress and one on job stress} and one on role conflict. The questions were formatted into Likert-type scales, ranging from three to six points. Crosstabulations were calculated to examine eight hypotheses, four with stress as the dependent variable and four with role conflict as the dependent variable. Hypotheses with job support as the independent variable were supported with moderate positive correlations. Hypotheses involving spousal support were tested using only married women. The independent variable showed no statistically significant correlations with either stress or role conflict. Hypotheses involving affordability were supported by moderate positive correlations between low levels of affordability, and child care stress and role conflict. The last hypotheses used dissatisfaction with child care arrangements as the independent variable. These were supported by moderate correlations regarding child care stress and weak correlations regarding role conflict. Further directions in the examination of relationships between help with child care and the reduction of stress and role conflict for women are suggested.

Thesis (M. Soc. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 236-248). Also available on the Internet.