Recent studies have shown that imagining contact with a member of a differing social group can reduce prejudice toward said group. This type of prejudice intervention, known as an imagined contact intervention, can be beneficial when direct contact with the outgroup is not feasible. This study adds to existing research on imagined contact interventions by replicating a simple version of the intervention by Husnu and Crisp (2010) and assessing attitudes toward an American Muslim out-group. This study extends the research of Husnu and Crisp (2010) by using American participants as opposed to British participants and also uses an online distribution for the intervention as opposed to a laboratory setting. The research question was: Will the imagined contact intervention significantly reduce prejudice toward the American Muslim out-group when compared to a control condition? Participants who reported socializing with the Muslim out-group less than three times in the past six months completed a form of the intervention online, responded to an out-group attitude index regarding the Muslim out-group, and completed demographics questions. In this study, there was no significant effect of the imagined contact intervention on out-group attitudes. Possible reasons for the intervention’s ineffectiveness, including the use of online distribution for the survey, are discussed along with directions for future research.

Drawing on intensive interviews with 61 Asian American undergraduates from diverse class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper investigates the relationship between class, family involvement, and student success. I assess three hypotheses derived from the literature. First, social reproduction theorists suggest that parents from advantaged class backgrounds provide more support—economic and cultural capital—to their children than parents from disadvantaged class backgrounds, which leads to greater success for these advantaged offspring. Second, some research challenges this view, arguing instead that class does not impact students’ receipt of support or their resulting success. Third, some now suggest that larger amounts of support may undermine success. Employing a trichotomous class design and model of family that includes parents and non-parents, analysis of the interviews reveal that students from advantaged class backgrounds do receive far more economic as well as cultural capital than students from disadvantaged class backgrounds. Yet, how the receipt of that capital impacts student success yields mixed results. Quantitative analysis reveals that the receipt of large amounts of various forms of capital had little or no impact or a slightly negative impact on students’ GPAs. Analysis of the intensive interviews, however, suggests the provision of capital created substantially less stress and struggle for students as they navigated the college environment. These findings challenge popular stereotypes concerning Asian Americans, highlight the complexity of class, and call for broader definitions of family and a reconceptualization of “success”.

Welfare state scholars have amassed competing theoretical explanations for the development of welfare policies. When considering the U.S. case, a discussion of federalism is central to these theoretical examinations. How power in policymaking is distributed amongst the varying levels of government is influential in the construction of the U.S. welfare state. Standard quantitative approaches to U.S. welfare research have offered a limited analysis of how theoretical explanations change after historical moments of welfare reform. In this study, I examine the institutional changes introduced to U.S. welfare in 1996 by way of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This study examines the changes in welfare maximum benefit levels for a 3-person family from 1987-2015. However, I apply an alternative quantitative approach to studying the effects PRWORA has had on benefit maximums by splitting models into two separate time periods and running analyses separately: pre-PRWORA (1987-1996) and post-PRWORA (1997-2015). By applying this methodological approach, I demonstrate how the influence of different sets of theories change after institutional reforms, such as PRWORA. The results offer new insights to the temporal applicability of different theoretical explanations and the construction of social citizenship.

The present phenomenological study explores the experiences of ethnic minority students at John Brown University. The study includes 25 interviews with undergraduate ethnic minority students. The findings from this study show minority students have an overall positive response to their experience at a private, Christian institution. Additionally, participants experienced a variety of challenges which included feeling less than, lacking connection, and feeling isolated. Lastly, the researchers noted what was necessary for minority students to succeed at this university, which included support from faculty, staff, and organizations. The most important finding from the study was that minority students need a sense of belonging to succeed at John Brown University.

Under the recent shadow of the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction, popular writers mocked the national naiveté that led to major distortions in the American cultural self-image. In this dissertation, I study the socially and politically motivated satire of the era between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. For too long, scholarship in this area has focused almost exclusively on three major satirists and social critics from the Gilded Age: Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain. Though I do include some of Mark Twain’s lesser-known later writing as a lens through which to re-examine what is arguably the greatest work of American satire, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the main objective here is to interrogate lesser-known works by other authors of the period, famous as well as relatively unknown. My dissertation aims to uncover neglected works by more famous authors like William Dean Howells and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; to refresh our thinking about writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, and Edward Bellamy; and to reveal the satirical depths of overlooked figures like Marietta Holley and Mary E. Bradley Lane. Given the parallels between the Confident Years and the United States in the early twenty-first century, in-depth review of the satire of the earlier period seems not only timely but vital. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

Academic achievement disparities exist across race and ethnic groups. Parents may be a good resource to their children for their educational success. Parental academic involvement is associated with student academic achievement across race and ethnicity. This study explored the relationship between race and ethnicity and parent time-use on children's education. In addition to studying parental academic involvement across race and ethnic groups, the Latino American ethnic group was examined. Heterogeneity exists within race and ethnic groups. Understanding differences in parental academic involvement within the Latino American ethnic group is a step toward addressing education disparities across race and ethnic groups. The last aim of the study was to see if structural differences within families were associated with group differences. The sample was obtained from the 2010 American Time Use Survey and included parents with household children younger than 18 years. Logistic regression results indicated that race and ethnicity was associated with time spent on children's education. However, when the structural variables were accounted for, the race and ethnic differences became statistically nonsignificant. Many of the structural variables were associated with parent time spent on children's education. Parent demographics and other structural variables may make it more or less likely that parents spend time on their children's education. Study findings also showed that for the Latino American subgroup, one group, Central/South Americans, look more likely to spend time on children's education. Puerto Rican parents were statistically significantly more likely to spend time on their children's education for one model tested, but not the other. Controlling for structural variables did not remove the association in the Central/South American group. The results for the Latino American ethnic group analyses differed slightly from the race and ethnic group analyses. The results suggest that there are differences across groups regardless of parent demographics and family structure. The findings also suggest that teachers and school administrators may improve parental academic involvement by targeting programs to fathers and full-time employed Latino American families.

On June 11, 2009 the World Health Organization announced that a novel strain of H1N1 influenza was being classified a Phase 6 pandemic, the highest level of alarm indicating that the disease was present worldwide and its spread was inevitable. While seasonal influenza epidemics occur annually, the 2009 H1N1 strain was the first novel pandemic influenza since the 1968 Hong Kong flu. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic provides a case study of how the U.S. population responded to an emergent and potentially lethal infectious disease. The richness and variety of public health data presents an opportunity to examine predictors of vaccination among men and women from different racial/ethnic groups. Because vaccination is often the most effective way to prevent influenza, it is important to understand the predictors of low vaccination uptake during the H1N1 pandemic to better prepare for future novel outbreaks of influenza. Through a series of three research papers, my dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of the ways that race, ethnicity and gender affected H1N1 vaccination behavior. Paper 1 explores the diversity of the U.S. Hispanic population by estimating H1N1 vaccination uptake among U.S-born and foreign-born Hispanics. In Paper 2, I shift my focus to H1N1 vaccination disparities between non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks in the U.S. This paper further explores racial disparities in vaccination by examining intersections with gender and analyzing the influence of attitudes and beliefs about the H1N1 vaccine. In Paper 3, I provide a more detailed account of the socioeconomic and attitudinal mechanisms through which race, ethnicity and gender influence H1N1 vaccination. My research confirms large racial/ethnic disparities in H1N1 vaccination and identifies mechanisms amenable to policy change that could reduce the disease burden of a future influenza pandemic.

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, many American cities experienced the process of gentrification, and there are many studies based on data from this time period. A first purpose of this study was to follow up on the development of gentrification in the 1980s. Northwest Portland, Oregon, is culturally clearly defined as a gentrifying neighborhood and was, therefore, chosen as to empirically assess this process by comparing the 1980 with the 1990 census data. There is some theoretical confusion about the concept of gentrification. There is, however, general consensus on two aspects. The first is a physical renovation of old and run-down inner-city neighborhoods, and the second is a change in the demographic composition of the revitalizing neighborhood from low and middle to upper-middle and high status residents. One aspect of gentrification is largely ignored by empirical studies, but often assumed to flow from physical renovation and compositional change, i.e, an alteration in the fabric of social life in the gentrified area, in patterns of interaction and symbolic attachment. It was a second purpose of this study to explore this issue on the basis of longitudinal survey data collected in the Northwest neighborhood in 1978 and 1993. The census analysis showed that the demographic change in Northwest Portland was surprisingly consistent with Gale's original stage model of gentrification from 1980, but not with predictions for more recent times. The analysis of the survey data showed a lack of overall change in the interactional and symbolic fabric of community life. T-tests for distinct life-cycle stages and socioeconomic status showed a perception of the Northwest neighborhood as a nicer and safer place for all groups. The young were found to form a community consistent with the model of a "community of limited liability." Specifically for older and high income residents it is proposed that the demographic change, which made the neighborhood more status homogeneous, had an important socially integrating impact, consistent with Claude Fischer's notion of "critical mass" creating viable subcultures, since they were found, in opposition to common expectations, to have increased attachment and social contacts in the neighborhood.

This study, was conducted with four Indian groups: three of Portland and one in Whiteriver, Arizona. The purpose of the study was to identify attitudes about Indian identity and education through the use of a questionnaire on Indian stereotypes. Each group was unique in it’s response. Members of each group all had a different frame of reference for “who an Indian is.” Therefore, a conclusion could not be drawn because of the differences in attitudes between all four Indian groups.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the way in which religious beliefs and practices are instrumentalized by a Muslim community in order to strengthen Afro-Colombian ethnic identity, in an urban context of social exclusion. The study aims to examine the relationship between ethnicity and religion, and the role they play in the process of identity construction, particularly the way in which religious concepts and behaviors can be used to fortify ethnic identity. Another aim of this research is to describe and understand the processes of social change in an ethnic-religious minority and, as a final goal, to analyze the history of the Afro-Colombian Muslim community of Buenaventura. The thesis is based on fieldwork, which includes observation activities and interviews with members of the Muslim community in Buenaventura. A total of 21 participants between the ages of 18 and 72 are included in this study, all of them of Afro-Colombian origin. It is clear that the religious conversion of Afro-Colombians to Islam took place within the complex socio-political context of the Colombian conflict. To be sure, the adoption of this new religious perspective did not evolve in an isolated manner, rather, it transformed the identity of the community by strengthening the value of ethnic differences in a place of segregation. In this way, this thesis analyzes the role of religion as an important element in the construction of ethnic identity. Departing from this paradigm, we will look into some theological concepts, such as the Islamic jurisprudence and rituals, which have been reworked, in order to accommodate local aspirations for social mobility and ethnic differentiation. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this cultural negotiation happens at the margins of the dominant society, which negatively views Afro-Colombian minorities, or simply ignores them. Other findings include the identification of key moments of the historical development of the community; the analysis of the processes of conversion to Islam in this population; and the description of the organization, institutionalization, and hierarchy in the community in accordance with the changes from the Islamic perspective they have developed through its five-decade history.