No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Measuring spouses’ ages allows us to explore larger sociological issues about marriage, such as whether narrowing gaps signal gender progress or if a rise in female-older unions reveals a status change. Using Census and American Community Survey data, I test the merits of beauty-exchange and status homogamy theories as explanations for how heterosexual marital age gaps changed over a 40-year period of social and economic revolution. Analyses address questions about how age gaps compared for people with different characteristics, whether similarly aged couples exhibited greater educational and socio-economic homogamy than others, and if the odds of being in age-heterogamous marriages changed. Chapter 4 provides the historical context of U.S. marriages from 1910 on, and shows that while disadvantaged groups retreated from marriage, the percentage of individuals with greater education and income who married remained high. Age homogamy rose over 100 years due to a decline in marriages involving much-older husbands rather than increases in wife-older unions. Results in Chapter 5 show that mean age gaps decreased significantly over time for first-married individuals by most—but not all—characteristics. Gaps narrowed for those who were White, Black, other race, or of Hispanic origin; from any age group; with zero, one, or two wage earners; with any level of education; and from most types of interracial pairs. One exception was that mean age gaps increased between Asian wives and White husbands, and Asian women’s odds of having a much older husband were higher than the odds for racially homogamous women. Those odds increased over time. Findings lent support for status homogamy theory, since same-age couples showed greater educational homogamy than others in any decade, but showed mixed support for beauty exchange. In 2010-14, the median spousal earnings gap was wider in husband-older marriages than age-homogamous ones; however, the reverse was true in 1980. Women-older first or remarriages exhibited the smallest median earnings gaps in 1980 and 2010-14, and women in these marriages contributed a greater percentage of the family income than other women in 2010-14 (43.6% vs 36.9%, respectively). The odds of being in age-heterogamous unions were significantly higher for persons who were remarried, from older age groups, from certain racial backgrounds, in some interracial marriages, less educated, and from lower SES backgrounds. Age and remarriage showed the greatest impact on odds ratios. While age homogamy increased overall, the odds of being a much older spouse (11+ years older) increased dramatically for remarried men and women between 1970 and 1980, and then remained high in 2010-14. Remarried women’s odds of being the much older wife versus a same-age spouse were 20.7 times that of the odds of first-married women in 2010-14. Other results showed that Black men’s odds of being with a much-older wife compared to one around the same age were about 2.5 times that of the odds of White men in each decade. Hispanic men’s odds of being in a first marriage with a much-older wife versus one of the same age were also twice the odds of White men in 1980 and 2010-14. Analyses demonstrated that marital age gaps have, indeed, changed significantly since the second-wave women’s movement, and that while age homogamy increased, the odds of being age heterogamous also shifted for people with different characteristics. / Sociology

The 2006 Congressional elections included some of the closest elections in recent history. Party control was on the line in both houses of Congress. As a result, candidate message strategies were subject to intense scruntiny by media and voters alike since each election played a significant role in determining which party would control the Senate. This thesis employs a content analysis of ten candidate-controlled blogs from five 2006 U.S. Senate elections to evaluate candidate issues, incumbent and challenger strategies, and message tactics used by the candidate to reach a wide classification of voters. The entire population of posts from the ten candidate blogs (N = 474) was included in this analysis. The thesis assesses candidate blog strategies and candidate gender difference through the theoretical perspectives of the issue ownership framework, agenda setting, and incumbent and challenger strategies. Findings show little evidence of intercandidate agenda setting through blogs, general adherence to assumptions of the issue ownership framework, and offer foundations for future communication research focused on candidate blogs. Recommendations for future research include a more expansive study of all campaign blogs as well as an intermedia agenda setting study to measure systematically the influence of blogs on other media. / Master of Arts

In the aftermath of the rampage at Virginia Tech, the community experienced a surge of social solidarity. Using a longitudinal study of 478 students, this thesis examines the impact of attitudinal solidarity on well-being nine months after the shootings. In particular, this study focuses on the interaction effects of sex and solidarity on later well-being, providing a theoretical and empirical basis for understanding the connections between these factors. Quantitative analysis, conducted using linear regression with interaction variables, found that social solidarity four months after the shootings positively and significantly predicted well-being nine months after the shootings. The predictive power, however, was stratified by sex; women experienced diminished benefits of solidarity relative to their male counterparts. The literature suggests that this disparity may be attributed to additional social burdens placed on women after traumatic stressors. Other negative predictors of well-being include knowing victims and conversations with the media in the week after the attacks, This research has the potential to shed light on effective methods of responding to community-level trauma and may provide guidance to future policy-makers in when faced with these challenging situations. / Master of Science

Recent technology developments have made possible the creation of several commercial devices and a selected number of development platforms for the inclusion of haptics (the sense of touch) in virtual environments (VE). This thesis sought to investigate and develop a better understanding of whether or not haptics or sound substitutions improved manipulation performance or usability in VE applications. Twenty-four volunteers (12 males and 12 females) participated in a 2 (haptics) x 2 (sound) x 2 (gender) mixed factorial experiment in which they completed a VE manipulation task involving the assembly and disassembly of 5 interconnecting parts. Performance for the manipulation task was measured through completion time and the number of collisions made, as well as subjective measures of usability. Results indicated that completion times were slower and collision counts were higher for males with the addition of haptics (ptime = 0.03; pcollisions<0.05), while females exhibited a smaller increase in collision counts and no increase in completion time with the addition of haptics. Nonetheless, there were improved usability attributes when haptics were incorporated, more specifically, an increased sense of realism, perceived helpfulness and perceived utility in a design task (p<0.05 for all). Sound was found to be an effective substitute for haptics in most measures taken while the combination of sound and haptics versus either alone, did not demonstrate any signs of improving performance or any usability attributes. It is therefore recommended that sound substitution be used in VE manipulation tasks where the extra haptic information is desired, and minimizing completion time or collisions are the overall goal. Finally, for the utility of the feedback towards a design task, users ranked haptics as being more useful than sound, but ranked the combination of sound and haptics as being the best feedback condition (p<0.05). Further research is required to determine whether this belief is consistent with objective measures. / Master of Science