The purpose of this study is to assess whether or not enforcement of the Minors and Tobacco Laws in the form of a citation had an impact on the knowledge, attitudes, practices and policies of over-the-counter tobacco retailers in Oregon. Demographic factors, such as store type, store size, ownership type, and location of the store that may contribute to the retailers response to receiving a citation for selling tobacco to a minor, were examined. The study examines two randomly selected groups of over-the-counter tobacco retailers in Oregon. The treatment group received a citation selling tobacco products to a minor while the control did not. A mail survey was sent to retailers selected for the study. The survey instrument measured the characteristics in each group, representing knowledge, attitudes, practices, and policies relating to the Oregon Minors and Tobacco Laws. The unit of analysis was owners or managers of retail stores. Cross-tabulation and a chi-square test statistic was used to assess and determine if there was a significant association between selected variables. Multiple regression was employed to determine if there is a relationship between composite dependent variables representing retailers' attitudes and practices and several demographic variables. Stores that had received a citation were more vigilant in compliance practices and perceptions than stores that had not received a compliance check and citation. Retailers' believe that both negative and positive strategies are necessary to achieve retailer compliance, retailers need more educational materials for training employees, and that a training video and a device to help clerks calculate the age on a minors ID would be useful. Retailers in both groups opposed the licensing of retailers to sell tobacco. Owners and owner operated stores in country settings were found to be resistant to policies aimed at reducing minors' access to tobacco products. / Graduation date: 1997

We first prove a ``non-embeddable extensions' theorem for polyhedral graph embeddings. Let G be a ``weakly 4-connected' planar graph. We describe a set of constructions that produce a finite list of non-planar graphs, each having a minor isomorphic to G, such that every non-planar weakly 4-connected graph H that has a minor isomorphic to G has a minor isomorphic to one of the graphs in the list. The theorem is more general and applies in particular to polyhedral embeddings in any surface. We discuss an approach to proving Jorgensen's conjecture, which states that if G is a 6-connected graph with no K_6 minor, then it is apex, that is, it has a vertex v such that deleting v yields a planar graph. We relax the condition of 6-connectivity, and prove Jorgensen's conjecture for a certain sub-class of these graphs. We prove that every graph embedded in the Klein bottle with representativity at least 4 has a K_6 minor. Also, we prove that every ``locally 5-connected' triangulation of the torus, with one exception, has a K_6 minor. (Local 5-connectivity is a natural notion of local connectivity for a surface embedding.) The above theorem uses a locally 5-connected version of the well-known splitter theorem for triangulations of any surface. We conclude with a theoretically optimal algorithm for the following graph connectivity problem. A shredder in an undirected graph is a set of vertices whose removal results in at least three components. A 3-shredder is a shredder of size three. We present an algorithm that, given a 3-connected graph, finds its 3-shredders in time proportional to the number of vertices and edges, when implemented on a RAM (random access machine).

Youth influence in Örnsköldsvik municipality -A thematic analysis of young people's ability to gain more influence in Örnsköldsvik This study is based on three focus group interviews with minors living in Örnsköldsviks municipality. The aim is to investigate what minor individuals want to gain more influence in that concerns their citizenship rights. It also aims to investigate what obstacles there is in their surroundings that prevent them from influencing it. I have conducted semi-structured interviews with the focus groups. The theoretical framework consist of T.H Marshalls theories about citizenship, with the division of civil, political and social rights. Important theoretical conclusions from Tom Bottomore and Rut Lister theories about different group’s substantial opportunities to use their rights in their citizenship has also been used. The conclusion is that the minors living in Örnsköldsvik want to get more influence on their school, places to meet and the opportunity to create a culture place for them to practice music and other culture. The minors experience several obstacles to being able to gain real influence on their citizenship rights. Their young age was one explanation, but there are also laws and rules that prevent them from participating and gaining influenceof their rights in their citizenship

The study presented in this thesis focuses on unaccompanied female minors and their experiences as newly arrived migrants in Sweden. As a group, unaccompanied female minors have until recently been rather invisible in both academic research and media. However, according to previous research on migration and integration, they risk being constructed as ‘others’ both due to their status as unaccompanied minors, being female and in relation to general perceptions of what it means to be Swedish. This study is based on qualitative interviews with 11 girls, 13 to 18 years old, who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors in the period between 2014 and 2017. The interviews were conducted in two phases, with nine months to one year between the first and second phases. Whereas the focus in the first phase was on getting to know the participants, the second phase provided an opportunity to delve deeper into discussions on recurring themes from the first phase. The interviews were transcribed using a denaturalised approach and thematically analysed through an abductive process. The thesis explores the girls’ narratives of everyday experiences and interprets them through a theoretical framework of othering. Without losing sight of the social structures that situates the girls’ experiences, othering is approached as a reciprocal, three-dimensional relationship, focusing on knowledge, values and conduct towards the other. The findings indicate that the girls participating in this study were often seen through the normative perception of an already othered context, and as a consequence, their own voices and agency were disregarded. They were, metaphorically, put in places without speech. However, by engaging a critical perspective on their everyday interactions, the girls were also able to recognise and resist othering by keeping true to their own experiences. The thesis concludes that by exploring the margins between their comfort zones and new contexts the girls engage in an epistemic merging of different horizons, which can be understood as a slow but insistent process of moving out from the place without speech.

This thesis is a qualitative case study that explores the experiences of unaccompanied Afghan asylum seeking minors in Greece – a largely neglected area empirically, in migration-related social science research – despite the fact that migration has been an issue of mounting concern recently. The study sets out to bridge this gap hence, to provide insights of the paths of young people as individuals in their own right, and of the dynamics and processes of their forced migrations. The research contributes to contemporary debates about migration and childhood. The thesis takes a broader approach that highlights the connections across borders and covers the multiple facets of unaccompanied minors’ experiences and feelings; pre-exile, during journeys, and on arrival in Greece. The future plans and motivations of the young respondents are also discussed. Information in relation to young respondent’s experiences, emotions and thoughts was collected in a series of in-depth interviews, focus groups and participatory activities. Data was also gathered by professionals and public figures with the aim to identify how these young people are treated and perceived inside and outside of the reception centres in Greece. The data indicates that these young respondents are deeply and negatively affected by experiences of loss, separation, discrimination, abuse, and long-lasting hardships to be found throughout their histories of movement. Their accounts are renegotiated tales where notions of belonging and identity are shaped along the way, and the boundaries drawn around childhood and adulthood are often fragile and fluid. The events of young people’s movements are reported as having been poignant, rendering them in a continuous, transitional state of existence. This stage ‘in between’, it is argued to be intricately entangled with the prolonged political insecurity which in some instances, extents to the condition of statelessness. The analysis of young respondents’ experiences revealed an overt gap between entitlements which are theoretically attributed to unaccompanied minors, regarding their social, political and legal rights – irrespective of their legal status – and pragmatic barriers to be found on the ground; on the streets, at borders, in detention, in police stations, and in reception centres, these young people are imperilled to the process of dehumanization. This process is understood to be a product of social and political violence implicated in local and transnational contexts. A combination of structural factors and practices has been found to be compounded by inhuman actions such as; the commodification process, the classification process, poverty, stigmatization, institutional racism and the ambiguity of political status. The findings further indicated that young respondents had mixed and distinct feelings of their experiences and responded to the process of dehumanization in very different ways; some developed robust resilient mechanisms along the way and formed important social networks for their survival and others felt powerless, and incapable mentally to lead their lives. The data indicated that the type of care and support varied significantly among the reception centres. There was a spectrum of attitudes towards the presence of the young respondents, showing sympathy and welcoming responses but also prejudice, stereotypes and xenophobia. These appeared at professional, government and public levels. Implications are discussed in relation to the punitive policies and practices that demoralise the rights and needs of the young people, hence potential strategies are suggested for reforming aspects of the child welfare/asylum system. The thesis concludes that these young respondents have a uniquely strong claim to social and political rights that will give them back their lost ‘ordinariness’.

Extremal Functions for Graph Linkages and Rooted Minors Paul Wollan 137 pages Directed by: Robin Thomas A graph G is k-linked if for any 2k distinct vertices s_1,..., s_k,t_1,..., t_k there exist k vertex disjoint paths P_1,...,P_k such that the endpoints of P_i are s_i and t_i. Determining the existence of graph linkages is a classic problem in graph theory with numerous applications. In this thesis, we examine sufficient conditions that guarantee a graph to be k-linked and give the following theorems. (A) Every 2k-connected graph on n vertices with 5kn edges is k-linked. (B) Every 6-connected graph on n vertices with 5n-14 edges is 3-linked. The proof method for Theorem (A) can also be used to give an elementary proof of the weaker bound that 8kn edges suffice. Theorem (A) improves upon the previously best known bound due to Bollobas and Thomason stating that 11kn edges suffice. The edge bound in Theorem (B) is optimal in that there exist 6-connected graphs on n vertices with 5n-15 edges that are not 3-linked. The methods used prove Theorems (A) and (B) extend to a more general structure than graph linkages called rooted minors. We generalize the proof methods for Theorems (A) and (B) to find edge bounds for general rooted minors, as well as finding the optimal edge bound for a specific family of bipartite rooted minors. We conclude with two graph theoretical applications of graph linkages. The first is to the problem of determining when a small number of vertices can be used to cover all the odd cycles in a graph. The second is a simpler proof of a result of Boehme, Maharry and Mohar on complete minors in huge graphs of bounded tree-width.

Thesis (doctoral)--Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [407]-421) and index.

7049 unaccompanied children seeked asylum in Sweden during 2014 and 15% of them were girls. The aim of the study was to highlight unaccompanied girls arriving in Sweden and examine their views on integration and belonging. Interviews were undertaken with five former unaccompanied girls in the age of 18-24 through a qualitative approach. The result was analyzed abductively through Rainer Bauböcks’ (1996) Model of Civil Society, David Morgans’ (2011) concept of Family Practices and through Steven Vertovecs’ (2001) concept of Transnational Social Room. Four out of five respondents described that they felt included in the Swedish society. However, according to Bauböcks’ model, the respondents were rather in the process of becoming integrated, since they did not yet fulfill all criteria for integration. Furthermore, the respondents expressed that education was of high value in order to get a job, get integrated and to become independent. Relationships with significant people was also a strong contributing factor to their sense of belonging. The position in transnational social rooms varied among the respondents.

The language used in newspaper articles affects the way readers internalize issues presented; thus, when negative language is used, readers' perceptions of issues may be influenced negatively. One issue for which language and word choice are particularly important is immigration, and historically, reporters have employed a variety of metaphors while writing about immigration in the United States. During the summer of 2014, there was a noticeable outpouring of newspaper coverage relating to thousands of unaccompanied Central American minors crossing undocumented to the United States. Although undocumented migration from Central American has been a common occurrence for decades, the number of children crossing during this time period was unusual. Through the conceptual frameworks of "othering" and moral geographies, this study uses content analysis to identify terminology and metaphors used in local newspapers close to the U.S.-Mexico border, state-wide coverage along the U.S.-Mexico border, and two national newspapers. Water-related metaphors were the most frequently used type of metaphor. There was no correlation between the perspective of the article toward the migrants and the use of metaphors. Thus, newspaper articles present metaphors as neutral terms, although the connotation of these metaphors may be very negative, implying danger or harm. This demonstrates an underlying contradiction between neutral newspaper coverage of an issue, such as immigration, and charged language, which can lead readers to visualize immigrants as dangers to communities and lifestyles, perpetuating the idea of immigrants as "others" who threaten societal norms, even while reading an article that is not overtly negative.

The thesis explores on the negotiation of agency in experiences of age assessment of former unaccompanied refugee minors who seek asylum in Germany, as well as in their interaction with the situational context. As a combination of narrative and thematic analysis, the study is based on six online semi-structured interviews with young people and two with professionals working in Youth Welfare Offices. By employing the perspective of Emirbayer & Mische (1998), agency takes here the form of a temporal process. As a result of the juxtaposition between aspects embedded in the past: such as the fact of not having identity documents; their knowledge of age; images of childhood; experiences lived in the trajectory to Germany, and the interplay with the time, flexibility, and credibility in the practical implementation, the negotiation of agency at the time of the age assessment ranges between normalization and confusion. The findings contribute to the debate about age assessment in Germany unifying migration and childhood research. Furthermore, it advances with an empirical approach of agency in the sociology of youth.