Individual specialization occurs when individuals selectively consume a subset of their population's diet. Intraspecific diet variation can stabilize population and community dynamics, promote species coexistence, and increase ecosystem productivity. Ecological variation also provides the variability necessary for natural or sexual selection to act. Individual threespine stickleback select different prey from a shared environment, and this variation is not simply a result of sex, size, or spatial heterogeneity. I use longitudinal observation of stickleback foraging microhabitat to support more commonly used cross-sectional metrics. Among recaptured individuals there were correlations between microhabitat use and functional morphology, and microhabitat use and long term dietary differences between individuals. I quantify individual specialization across populations using cross-sectional sampling to understand how and why ecological variation may itself be variable. All populations showed significant individual specialization. Specialization varied between populations and this variation seems to be a long-term property of populations. Overall morphological variance was positively correlated with ecological variation. Ecological variation, like all types of heritable variation, provides raw material for evolutionary change. For example, lacustrine populations of stickleback are commonly under disruptive selection due to intraspecific competition for prey resources. Speciation with gene flow may be driven by a combination of positive assortative mating and disruptive selection, particularly if selection and assortative mating act on the same trait. We present evidence that stickleback exhibit assortative mating by diet, using the isotopes of males and eggs within their nests. In concert with disruptive selection, this assortative mating should facilitate divergence. However, the population remains phenotypically unimodal, highlighting the fact that assortative mating and disruptive selection do not guarantee evolutionary divergence and speciation. There are several not-mutually-exclusive mechanisms by which assortative mating by diet may occur in these populations, such as shared microhabitat preference among individuals of similar diet. Stable isotopes reveal diet differences between different nesting areas and among individuals using different nest habitat within a nesting area. Spatial segregation of diet types may generate some assortative mating, but is insufficient to explain the observed assortment strength. We therefore conclude that sticklebacks' diet-assortative mating arises primarily from behavioral preference rather than from spatial isolation. / text

<p> Over the last several decades, Mexican origin immigrants have dispersed across the United States (Massey, Durand and Malone 2002). One community that has experienced particular growth in its Mexican origin population is Sunnyside, an agricultural city in the Yakima Valley. In this new destination community, Mexican origin families confront problems of gangs, violence, concentrated poverty and drug abuse, along with the challenges of surviving in a community that offers few pathways for mobility to Latinos. </p><p> In this study, I draw on 43 qualitative interviews and participant observer data to consider how Mexican origin parents, in two parent homes, go about the act of parenting in the context of Sunnyside. I query couples' parenting styles, with attention to how they develop aspirations for their children and to what models they use to inform their parenting. I look at how the structure of the community helps to perpetuate gendered parenting practices. Finally, I explore how these parenting approaches operate in the school system. </p><p> I argue that while much of the parenting that I observed deviates from that advocated by child development specialists (e.g. Baumrind 1968; 2012), the parenting was well designed to protect children from the particular forms of risk that were prominent in Sunnyside. The parenting was typically authoritarian and drew on models that families brought with them from Mexico. Other research on immigrant acculturation suggests this was probably an effective way to keep children safe by promoting selective acculturation (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Zhou 1997). The parenting, however, was ill-designed to help the children to succeed educationally. Although parents wanted their children to get an education, they could offer little direct help to their children around educational tasks. Instead, they used discipline and engaged their children in physical labor to encourage the children to want to do well in school. This descriptive study helps to demonstrate how the characteristics of one particular new immigrant destination shape family life, parenting styles and children's life chances. </p>

<p> The present study identified and quantified five main barriers to treatment categories, deducted first from the qualitative dataset, then consolidated with the results of the quantitative dataset. Clinicians (<i>N</i>=36) that worked with youth and their families participated. The main findings suggested five parent themes (<i>practical obstacles, poor alliance with the therapist, therapist&rsquo;s perceptions, socioemotional, and cultural </i>) and seven concept groups (<i>transportation, financial, logistical, attendance, therapeutic relationship, lack of communication, and lack of engagement </i>). Implications provide strategies to ratify some of these barriers, such as gathering data on youth clients and their families. For the purposes of this study, the terms <i>children, adolescents</i>s, and <i> youth</i> will be used interchangeably and will be defined as any individual under the age of 18.</p>

<p> <i><b>Objective:</b></i> Intimacy is an essential part of marital relationships, spiritual relationships, and is also a factor in well-being. There is little research simultaneously examining the links among spiritual intimacy (defined as positive religious coping and a relationship with God), relational intimacy, and well-being. Data from the Adventist Health Study-2&rsquo;s Biopsychosocial Religion and Health Study (AHS-2 BRHS) were analyzed to first examine these links, and then to examine whether religious variables predict positive and negative perceptions of one&rsquo;s spouse.</p><p> <i><b>Design:</b></i> Structural equation modeling was used to examine associations among spiritual intimacy, relational intimacy, spiritual meaning, and well-being in a cross-sectional study of 5,720 married adults aged 29-100 years. Also, positive and negative spouse characteristics were regressed on control variables and 16 religious variables. This sample included 6,683 married adults aged 29-100 years.</p><p> <i><b>Results:</b></i> In the original structural model all direct associations between spiritual intimacy, relational intimacy, and well-being were significant and positive. With spiritual meaning as a mediating variable, the direct connections of spiritual intimacy to relational intimacy and to well-being became weakly negative. However, the indirect associations of spiritual intimacy with well-being were strongly positive through spiritual meaning. </p><p> Positive spouse characteristics were most strongly related to higher gratitude and lower negative religious coping; and negative spouse characteristics to greater negative religious coping and less gratitude. The higher participants rated their spouse&rsquo;s religiosity the better they rated their spouse. Conversely, the higher participants rated their own religiosity the worse they rated their spouse. For some religion variables there were gender and ethnic differences in prediction of spouse characteristics.</p><p> <i><b>Conclusion:</b></i> These findings suggest the central place of spiritual meaning in understanding the relationship of spiritual intimacy with marital intimacy and to well-being. They also suggest that individual religious variables have a strong association with how one views one&rsquo;s spouse, and thus need to be considered as important factors in relational intimacy. They also affirm the interplay of spiritual intimacy with relational intimacy and the need to consider both gender and ethnicity as contributing factors.</p>

<p> The context of this project is Community Outreach Ministry in Riverside, California, interviewing six families caught in the cycle of incarceration. The problem was no stories addressing the children's needs by the children of incarcerated parents existed in the literature. The objective included apprehending and analyzing fifteen stories in eight weeks. The hypothesis accepted the children's stories as a research tool informing interventions for breaking the cycle of incarceration. A qualitative research narrative case study was implemented. The findings tested that the qualitative insights from the stories informed the model and resources as effective interventions to break the cycle of incarceration.</p>

concept and its application in various parts of the world; and (ii) investigate the problems and prospects for an open university in Nigeria. The term "open university" is defined as distance teaching university systems created to offer programmes of study exclusively to external students. The concepts of "distance education" and "open learning" are examined and their precise usage in this thesis clarified. A distinction is also drawn between Western, indigenous and Koranic education. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part (Chapters 1 - 3), examines the concepts and the methodologies chosen for the study and provides a political, economic and educational background to Nigeria, with emphasis on the problems of higher education. Part two (Chapters 4, 5 and 6), provides a general illumination to the particular problems of the open university system and current trends in established open university institutions. In Chapter 4, a review is made of the distance education provision in Nigeria while Chapter 5 is devoted to a review of the literature. Chapter 6 is concerned with the Open University of the United Kingdom (aU-UK), especially its original concept, practices in the institution and the implications of applying the British experience elsewhere. (xi) The third part of the thesis (Chapters 7 and 8), investigates the particular problems and prospects for an open university system in Nigeria, through a study of the perceptions of a cross-section of the country's policy-makers and potential open university candidates. Chapter 7 focuses principally on the analysis of the collected empirical data on policy-makers while Chapter 8 is concerned with the personal characteristics of potential open university candidates, interpretations of their personal circumstances, their perceptions and the implications for university level home-study. The last Chapter (9) is concerned with conclusions on the findings of the thesis, their policy implications, suggested open university models for Nigeria and fruitful areas for further research.

The present study examined both self and cross-partner associations between personal, moral, and structural commitment, maintenance behaviors, and relationship maintenance schema. Participants were both partners from 180 heterosexual couples in dating, engaged, and marital relationships who were between the ages of 18 and 35 years old with no children. Partners independently completed self-report questionnaires, which included measures of relationship commitment (Stanley & Markman, 1992), relationship maintenance behaviors (Canary & Stafford, 1992), and relationship maintenance schema (Sternberg, 1998). Results suggest that individuals' personal, moral, and structural commitment are associated with their own maintenance behaviors and that some maintenance behaviors, especially assurances, are also associated with their partner's personal, moral, and structural commitment. In addition, having a relationship maintenance schema which states that relationships require effort to be successful is positively related to maintenance behaviors. These results provide some support for Johnson's contention that the different types of commitment have different implications for relationship maintenance.

This study argues that domestic skills--accumulated, transferred, and elicited by different aspects of the life course--act as a major influence on men's household labor participation. Specifically, I argue that as men increase their skills via independent living, as they are presumed to have more relevant skills when raising older biological/step male children, or as they become more proficient in skills relative to other household workers, they are more or less likely to assume (or be assigned) different responsibilities in the household. First, I tested to what extent the years a man lives without some kind of caregiver--whether that caregiver is tied to him through consanguinal, romantic, or institutional ties--affected the amount of housework he does once married. I discovered that men who live independently for long periods of time are responsible for creating less housework than men who are not. They do not do any more or less housework than their peers who are married, cohabiting, or in military service longer, but their wives have less of it to do. A man's years of independent living is unrelated to his own contribution to housework. I also tested whether a husband's holdings of particular occupational characteristics--namely, high levels of female sex composition, a service orientation, and routine and repetitive work tasks--affect the amount of housework he does in the home and his share of the overall housework that is done. I found mixed effects of these characteristics on household division of labor. Men whose jobs are especially routine and repetitive create more housework and do more of the additional housework they create. Conversely, wives do spend more time doing housework when their jobs are more masculine in composition and/or less service oriented than their husbands' jobs. Finally, I investigated the relationship between children's characteristics--sex, age, birth order, and relationship to the father--and their father's contributions to both housework and childcare interactions. I found no effect of children's characteristics on men's housework particiatipation and limited effects of children's characteristics on men's childcare interactions; men spend more time in unorganized play/non-play activities when they have male children.

To understand variations in the stress response, two separate research traditions have developed: one that focuses on appraisal and the other on stressors. Research on stressors informs our understanding of the social conditions that expose individuals to potentially stressful situations, whereas research on appraisal informs our understanding of why different people respond to stressors in different ways. The present study seeks to integrate findings from these two research traditions and extend our understanding of the stress process by investigating the possibility those variations in sources of stress trigger different appraisals. In addition, this study also attempts to untangle the separate effects of appraisal and stressor by examining each construct at a more granular level than has previously been undertaken. Finally, this study examines the relationships between stressors and appraisal to understand how they may, in combination, influence distress. The data for these analyses are merged from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) and the National Study of Daily Experiences (NSDE). The MIDUS participants are a representative sample of 3032 adults aged 25 to 74 obtained through a random-digit dialing process. The NSDE participants are a subsample of 1031 participants from the MIDUS. The participants for the present study are the 534 men and women who participated in the NSDE who experienced at least one interpersonal tension during the 8-day telephone diary. Results from multilevel modeling analyses indicated that there was more within-person variability in appraisal of interpersonal tensions than between-person variability. Findings from this study also provide empirical support that stressors and appraisal are separate constructs with independent effects on distress. Further, there are multiple pathways through which dimensions of appraisal and attributes of the stressor in combination influence distress.

This study provides a better understanding of both adolescent Web-use and the factors that influence teen Web-consumption. To this end, a hierarchical, cognitive-behavioral decision-making model of personal values → innovativeness → Web-consumption was proposed and tested. More specifically, Web-consumption behavior was thought to dichotomize into hedonic and utilitarian domains. Two hundred high school students from a Southwestern state, representing various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, anonymously completed surveys. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses identified three latent factors of personal values (personal-self, ambition, power); four factors of innovativeness (vicarious-pensive, vicarious-future, adoptive, use); and two factors of global Web-consumption (hedonic, utilitarian). The global Web-consumption scales were cross-validated against specific Web-consumption behaviors. Global utilitarian behaviors were practical and obligatory, while global hedonic behaviors were experiential and discretionary. Specific hedonic Web-consumption included escape from reality, use with friends, and music activities, while specific utilitarian Web-activities included use for future planning, doing homework, and, coaching parental Web-searches. The two-stage structural equation model analysis with nested comparisons confirmed the hierarchical flow of the relationships. Results indicated that innovativeness served as a middle-level variable, and mediated between the Web-consumption behaviors of teens and their personal values. Each personal value factor displayed unique predictive power on unique factors of innovativeness, which, in turn, displayed unique paths to each Web-consumption factor. For instance, the "ambition" value predicted "vicarious-future" innovativeness which, in turn, predicted both "utilitarian" and "hedonic" Web-consumption. Also, the "personal self" value linked to "vicarious-pensive" innovativeness, which, in turn, predicted "hedonic" Web-consumption. The findings suggest that teens are intrinsically motivated to use the Web and benefit from computer use, even if the use is hedonic in nature. However, parents and educators may choose to monitor adolescent Web-consumption more closely. The paradox of technology can create cognitive dissonance, and teens report regular visits to sites that their parents would not approve of. The study has theoretical and practical import. New measures, and a confirmed a priori hierarchical structure, will be useful tools to researchers of consumer behavior. Professionals are advised to consider applications that would benefit adolescents, including structured after-school activities and curriculum that further integrates the Web and the classroom.