Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008. / Full text also available online. Scroll down for electronic link.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-250). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed March 2, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 2002. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-132).

This thesis investigates the functions and roles of victim support groups and their leaders in Northern Ireland. In doing so, this thesis employs social capital theory as a conceptual apparatus for understanding leadership roles and the functions of victim support groups. This thesis is the product of a qualitative case study of victim leaders in Northern Ireland. The data was collected through qualitative semi-structured interviews with victim support group leaders and policymakers. In the findings chapters of this thesis, a typology of leadership emerges from the data, revealing three distinct types of leaders – Shepherds, In Loco Parentis and Social Innovators – that help explain the roles of victim leaders and the reasons why they engage in certain types of group activities over others, specifically, activities which contribute to bonding, constriction or bridging social capital. The findings reveal that one of the main roles of victim leaders centers around the bonding and bridging of social capital in their groups. Consequently, around 80 percent of victim support groups were found to be bonding, whereas only 20 percent of groups were bridging. Moreover, around 20 percent of victim support groups were engaged in dysfunctional bonding, possibly leading to constriction. These findings have negative implications for the social inclusion of victims, as well as the social cohesion of wider society. This thesis argues that the reasons why victim groups bond, bridge or constrict is directly related to two factors: the type of leadership employed in each group and government policies and funding strategies that reinforce exclusivity and fail to encourage bridging. This thesis also makes significant contributions to the scholarly literature on Northern Ireland’s victims, government policy and social capital theory. The conclusion of this thesis argues that social capital theory and constrict theory both fail to fully explain the roles of victim groups and their leaders because the conceptualizations of these theories do not take into account the effects of leadership in groups and social trust that has been traumatized by protracted political violence. Thus, this thesis re-conceptualizes social capital theory and constrict theory by adding traumatized trust and leadership as important variables which help explain the roles of victim support groups and their leaders in divided and transitional settings. Finally, this thesis offers suggestions for policymakers and victim leaders on a social capital strategy that aims to increase positive forms of social capital and discourage constriction.

Graduate

This graduate report, more than a formal description of the artistic developments I have gradually acknowledged, is a personal and perhaps arbitrary recollection of ideas that might help the reader–and me–understand the nature of the gestures that have evidently influenced the work I have produced in the past two years. These words belong to an inevitable act of introspection that seeks to validate some of the questions that have directed my artistic investigation throughout this time. I believe my work derives from two different and yet relevant positions: on one hand, the need to find meaning out of brutal events that have indisputably marked the course of history, specially in Colombia–my home country–where victims appear to loose their voices in a context ruled by indifference and apathy; and, on the other, the desire to understand what controls the reception of violent imagery as we depend on how social location, collective identification and political affiliation dictate the way we perceive the world. Each project mentioned in this report is a result of studying obsessively the political kidnappings that have been taking place in Colombia in the past twenty years, as a response to an allegedly abuse of power induced by the government against Las FARC, one of the most powerful guerrilla groups in Latin America. However each one is far from being a true document of real events and on the contrary, each one emerges as a naïve interpretation, possibly an illustration, of an ambiguous conflict that has no reasonable explanation but being a natural product of a conservative warfare–which in fact is no less than a reading made by a distant and passive witness like myself. / text

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The purpose of this study was to examine control beliefs and their role in the different ways victims cope with burglary. Two studies were conducted. In the first study, participants were college students who had been burglarized within the previous year. The volunteers were men and women between the ages of 19 and 37 (N=61). The participants completed Levenson's (1981) locus of control scale. The following week, in order to assist recall, the participants viewed a 2-minute video that depicted a residential burglary in progress. Immediately following the video, they completed a coping measure, situational appraisals of control measure, and importance of outcome measure. The second study was a conceptual replication of the first study and therefore followed the same procedures. However, in order to assess locus of control prior to victimization, participants were male and female college students (N=102) who had never been burglarized (experimentally induced victims). Zero-order correlations, discriminant analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression were used to examine the main, mediating, and moderating effects of locus of control, importance of outcome, situational appraisals of control, and gender on coping functions. Because previous research has found gender differences in reaction to criminal victimization, i t was hypothesized that the influence that gender has on coping results from an individual's locus of control orientation. It was also expected that the direction or strength of the locus of control and coping relation would be influenced by an individual's gender and by how much importance he or she attached to the victimization experience. In both the victim group and experimentally induced victim group, emotion-focused coping was significantly predicted by gender, locus of control, importance of outcome, and situational appraisals of control. However, problem-focused coping was significantly predicted by gender, locus of control, importance of outcome, and situational appraisals of control for the victim group only. Locus of control did not influence the gender and coping relation. The results indicated that in both groups men who held strong powerful others locus of control beliefs used less emotion-focused coping. In contrast, in the burglary victim group, women who held strong powerful others locus of control beliefs used more emotion-focused coping. However, there was no relationship between powerful others locus of control beliefs and emotion-focused coping for women in the experimentally induced victim group. For experimentally induced victims, both men and women with high chance locus of control beliefs used more emotion-focused coping. In both groups, importance of outcome did not moderate the locus of control and coping relation. Implications of these results and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Although researchers and clinicians have been aware of male victims of childhood sexual abuse, the literature still lacks sufficient data on the long-term effects for adult males sexually abused during childhood. The current study examined the long-term psychological impacts of childhood sexual abuse for adult males. A standardized measurement, SCL-90-R, was used to assess current psychological functioning such as somatization, obsessivecompulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism. A questionnaire consisting of demographic data and childhood experiences was also administered to collect background information. Seventy-four undergraduate male students enrolled in counseling psychology courses were recruited. The abused group consisted of twelve subjects who reported histories of child sexual abuse. The rest of the sample (62) consisted of the nonabused group. Due to the small sample size, the results must be interpreted with extreme caution. Results of multiple t-tests suggested that there is no significant difference between the abused and nonabused group on subscales of the SCL-90-R. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services