Although there is an increasing amount of research concerning body satisfaction among heterosexual White men, few of these studies have adequately represented heterosexual Black men. This was a quantitative survey study aimed to illuminate gaps in the literature regarding Black men's body satisfaction experiences. The study used surveys and tested research questions to determine whether college-aged heterosexual Black (n = 220, 55%) and White (n = 180, 45%) men differed in their body satisfaction experiences and whether race significantly moderated the relation between sociocultural influences and body satisfaction in the two groups. This study was based on the social comparison theory, and examined sociocultural influences (i.e., media images, parents, peers, internalization of cultural appearance standards, and drives for muscularity) known to be associated with body satisfaction. Results from t test analyses indicated that Black men were significantly more satisfied with their appearance and weight, were significantly more confident that other people liked their appearance, and reported less social pressures to have an attractive body in comparison to their White peers. A series of moderated regression analyses failed to indicate that race moderated the relation between the sociocultural influences and body satisfaction. Seventy-five percent of both groups were dissatisfied with their bodies and desired to be more muscular. Social change implications include alerting clinicians that Black men, like White men, should be screened for problems with body satisfaction: Results may stimulate research to determine why Black men have greater overall body satisfaction than White men, and lead to culturally-specific guidelines for identifying and treating body dissatisfaction.

In recent years, family support partners (FSPs) have been hired to work in the behavioral health care system for the state in which this study was conducted. FSPs are legacy caregivers, meaning they have raised a child with a mental health illness. At the time of this study, there was not a set criterion in the state to measure the effectiveness or benefits of FSPs working with families. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to determine whether a caregiver's level of empowerment, as measured by the Family Empowerment Scale (FES), was increased through working with an FSP. Social learning theory provided the framework for the study. Survey data were collected from 93 caregivers using the FES. Simultaneous multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the predictive relationship between the caregiver's gender, age, ethnicity, length of time as a caregiver of a child or youth with a mental health illness, and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP, and the level of caregiver empowerment on the family, service system, and community/political levels. On the family level, caregiver age and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP were statistically significant predictors. On the service system level, length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP was a statistically significant predictor. On the community/political level, caregiver age, ethnicity, and length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP were statistically significant predictors. Length of time the caregiver worked with an FSP was the only variable shown to be statistically significant on all 3 levels. Findings may be used to support peer specialists in the state this study was conducted and other states, not only in the mental health field, but in additional fields as well.

Limited literature exists on Ghana's child domestic servants, and researchers have found it difficult to locate and study these children. The research for this dissertation used qualitative research methodologies and non-probabilistic sampling techniques to make it possible to interview child domestic servants, their parents, employers and recruiters in Ghana. The findings from the qualitative analyses informed the second part of this study, which was quantitative and tested hypotheses using crosstabulations and logistic regression analyses that were based on survey data from the Ghana Statistical Service. Explanatory variables in the quantitative analyses included lineage, level of education and relationships to the household head. This study located findings about the processes of children's recruitment into domestic servitude, their working conditions and methods of remuneration in theories of slavery to answer the question of whether or not child domestic servants are slaves. According to the findings, elite households in Ghana exploit children from rural regions because they have taken advantage of a historical practice that allowed children to live with older members of their extended families to provide domestic services and in return, be given the chance to receive formal education or to learn a trade. The participants in the qualitative part of this research described the treatments that they receive from their employers as slavery. Nevertheless, the processes of their recruitment and the age at which most of them accepted such job offers made it difficult to categorize a majority of them as contemporary slaves.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation research brings together disparate bodies of literature on environmental inequality, sociology of space, and feminist theories of intersectionality to bear on the location and distribution of environmental hazards in the form of landfills. Landfills pose a threat to both ecological sustainability as well as present risks to human health through contamination and pollution. While environmental inequality literatures have executed exceptional work into the dynamics of race and class with respect to the distribution of hazardous waste facilities, the literature is noticeably lacking with respect to identifying relationships between gender and environmental inequalities. Furthermore, many quantitative studies have exclusively focused on hazardous waste facilities as a singular measure of environmental inequality. This study advances the field in three major ways. First, through the inclusion of theorizations based on feminist intersectionality theories, this research empirically analyzes hypotheses derived from intersectionality theories to understand dynamics of gender-environment interactions. Second, this study extends analysis to all forms of waste containment—municipal, industrial, construction and demolition, and hazardous—to identify trends across the social fabric of the contiguous United States at the county level of analysis with respect to multiple forms of environmental hazards. Third, utilizing innovative analytic techniques, this research provides three unique and related strategies, geographic information systems, logistic binary regression, and structural equation modeling, to examine socio-environmental disparities. Findings from each analytic strategy inform the subsequent strategy. Findings suggest the importance of including gender indicators to account for the unique effect of gender and environmental inequality. Furthermore, results indicate the importance in applying intersectionality theories to environmental outcomes as well as empirically testing hypotheses derived from the largely theoretical and qualitatively backed field. Future research should focus on specific regional dynamics of identified socio-environmental interactions by including historical and qualitative data to triangulate quantitative findings. / 1 / Clare Cannon

Dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are highly debilitating conditions that afflict millions of elderly persons. In recent decades, biological evidence has implicated chronic stress in the etiology of these conditions. As a result, the relationship between widowhood, one of the most stressful life events, and dementia and AD has also received attention. However, studies are mixed regarding this association, and few have investigated whether this relationship is moderated by the context surrounding widowhood. This study extends this literature by investigating whether widowhood increases risk for dementia and AD and whether this risk is moderated by contextual factors including age at widowhood, remarriage after widowhood, manner of death, number of dependent and adult children at the time of widowhood, gender, presence of epsilon 4 allele of apolipoprotein E (APOE), and history of depression and antidepressant use. To do this, this investigation utilized data from the Cache County Memory Study (CCMS), a large population-based epidemiological study of dementia and AD, and the Utah Population Database (UPDB), one of the world's foremost linked genealogical databases. In Cox regression analyses that modeled time to onset of dementia and AD, gender was found to moderate the relationship between incident widowhood and dementia (HR = 1.74, 95% CI: 0.97-3.10), in that widowhood trended towards decreased risk among men (HR =0.72, CI: 0.45-1.16) but increased risk among women (HR = 1.21, CI: 0.83-1.75) in stratified models. In addition, history of depression and antidepressant use moderated the association between incident widowhood and dementia (HR = 2.63, 95% CI: 1.26-5.50) and AD (HR = 1.68, 95% CI: 1.11-2.53), in that widowhood was associated with decreased risk for dementia and AD among the never depressed (HR = 0.66, CI: 0.42-1.02 and HR = 0.54, CI: 0.31-0.92, respectively), a trend towards increased risk for AD among those with a history of antidepressant use but no depression (HR = 1.80, CI: 0.86-3.75), and with increased risk for dementia and AD among those with a history of both (HR = 1.93, CI: 0.98-3.81 and HR = 1.89, CI: 0.80-4.43). These findings advance clinical and scientific knowledge concerning the effects of widowhood on risk for dementia and AD, and underscore the importance of context in understanding this relationship.

Ce projet de recherche s’intéresse aux émojis. De nos jours, les téléphones intelligents ont changé notre façon de communiquer en utilisant tantôt la communication orale, tantôt les messages écrits ou les images, i.e. les émojis. Par le biais d’une méthodologie quantitative, en l’occurrence un sondage électronique suivi des quelques questions ouvertes, la présente thèse de maîtrise se penche sur le rôle et l’impact des émojis dans la réception de messages texte. Afin de procurer un nouveau regard sur l’influence des émojis dans la communication iconique, nous avons mesuré le confort des participants vis-à-vis six mises en situation provenant de contextes amoureux, amical et professionnel. Nos résultats indiquent que les émojis peuvent influencer la perception des messages texte et que le contexte de la communication joue un rôle important dans l’acceptabilité de ces images numériques.

No description available.

Depuis 1997, la modélisation du comportement microbien est au coeur de mes travaux de recherches. Ainsi, mon stage de dernière année à l'INA PG m'avait conduite à modéliser des cultures à haute densité cellulaire d'Escherichia coli en utilisant des réseaux de neurones. Mon stage de DEA et ma thèse m'ont ensuite permis d'approfondir la modélisation des dynamiques bactériennes, en me consacrant particulièrement au cas des cultures mixtes (mélange de deux populations bactériennes). Depuis 2000, date de ma soutenance de thèse et de mon intégration à l'Afssa (Agence française de sécurité sanitaire des aliments), j'ai poursuivi ces travaux en les appliquant aux missions de l'agence de recherche, expertise et appui scientifique et technique, dans le domaine de l'évaluation des risques microbiens alimentaires. Les cinq premières parties de ce document sont consacrées à un mémoire intitulé "modélisation d'incertitudes et de variabilités en microbiologie quantitative alimentaire", qui présente mes activités de recherche au cours de ces six dernières années au travers de ces deux concepts d'incertitude et de variabilité. La bibliographie, en sixième partie, est constituée d'une liste de mes travaux (numérotés de 1 à 74, et référencés par leur numéro dans le mémoire), puis d'une liste de références bibliographiques autres (citées dans le mémoire comme (auteur, année)). Le bilan ainsi établi est complété par une présentation de l'ensemble de mes activités sous la forme d'un curriculum détaillé dans la septième partie. Enfin, la huitième partie rassemble une sélection de 12 publications se rapportant à mes activités de recherche.

Characterization of the determinants of economically important phenotypes showing complex inheritance should lead to more effective use of genetic resources. This study was conducted to determine the number, genome location and effects of QTLs determining malting quality and agronomic traits in the two North American barley quality standards. Using a doubled haploid population of 140 lines from the cross of Harrington x Morex, agronomic phenotype and malting quality data sets from nine and eight environments, respectively, and a 107-marker linkage map, QTL analyses were performed using simple interval mapping and simplified composite interval mapping procedures. Thirty five QTLs were associated either across environments or in individual environments, with five grain and agronomic traits (yield, kernel plumpness, test weight, heading date and plant height). Thirteen QTLs were associated with five malting quality traits (grain protein percentage, soluble/total protein ratio, ��-amylase activity, diastatic power and malt extract percentage). QTLs for multiple traits were coincident. The loci controlling inflorescence type [vrsl on chromosome 2 (2H) and int-c on chromosome 4 (4H)] were coincident with QTLs affecting all traits except heading date and malt extract percentage. The largest effect QTLs -for yield, kernel plumpness test weight, plant height grain protein percentage, S/T ratio, and diastatic power- were coincident with the vrsl locus. QTL analyses were conducted separately for each sub-population (six-rowed and two-rowed). Ten new QTLs were detected in the sub-populations. There were significant interactions between the vrsl and int-c loci for plant height, grain protein percentage, and SIT protein ratio. Positive transgressive segregants were found for all agronomic traits. They were more prevalent in the six-rowed sub-population, indicating that more favorable alleles were fixed in the two-rowed parent. Results suggest that this mating of two parents representing different germplasm groups caused a disruption in the balance of traits involved in malting quality, which resulted in no progeny carrying all favorable alleles and therefore surpassing the quality of either parent. This study describes some of the genetic determinants of agronomic and malting quality traits in a two-rowed x six-rowed cross and it is a first step toward the further characterization and manipulation of these determinants. / Graduation date: 2001

Neurturin (NTN) belongs to the glial cell-line derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) family of growth factors. Both NTN and GDNF have been shown to potently prevent the degeneration of dopaminergic neuron in vitro and in vivo. The GDNF family receptor alpha 2 (GFRα-2) is the preferred receptor for NTN. In addition to the known full-length isoform (GFRα-2a), we have previously reported the isolation of two novel alternatively spliced isoforms (GFRα-2b and GFRα-2c). The expression levels of these isoforms have yet to be quantified and the functional properties determined. In this report, we have developed a real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using SYBR Green I to detect the expression levels of the three splice variants (GFRα-2a, GFRα-2b and GFRα-2c) in murine tissues. Both GFRα-2a and GFRα-2c were expressed at similar levels in all tissues examined. GFRα-2b was found to be 10 fold lower in expression. All three isoforms activated MAPK (ERK1/2) and Akt. Transcriptional profiling with DNA microarrays demonstrated that the spliced isoforms do not share similar profiles. In conclusion, we have now shown the expression levels of the spliced variants. All three isoforms are functional. However, each isoform appeared to have unique transcriptional profiles when activated. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)