Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989.

Thesis (M.S.)--Purdue University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-74).

M.A. (Sociology) / An increase in the number of people living alone has been observed in various modern industrialised societies, paricularly over the last four decades. Despite this, very little is known about living alone, since until now very little comprehensive research has been undertaken into the lifestyle of those living alone. There has rather been a tendency among social scientists particularly those working within the framework of social integration theory - to base their researches on the assumption that people living .alone necessarily expose themselves to social isolation, to their own detriment. Other researchers, however, stress the probability that those living alone compensate for their relative isolation by maintaining more contacts outside the household and are thus not necessarily exposed to social isolation. The aim of this study was to use qualitative research in an exploratory way to collect in-depth information on the nature of the social integration of women living alone and other related aspects of their lives. Although the findings are therefore limited by the type of research, a number of tendencies regarding the lifestyles and social integration of those living alone can be identified .. Probably one of the most significant conclusions is that, as far as their social integration is concerned, people living alone cannot be treated as a homogeneous category: when, for instance, the regularity and quality of respondents' contact with the central figures in their lives is examined, it appears that their integration into these centrality networks ranges from very high to very low...

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Ling, Qi. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

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Thesis advisor: Maia M. McAleavey / “Singular Plots” challenges the commonplace that the marriage plot defines the nineteenth-century British novel by uncovering the plot of vocational singleness. In this plot, a heroine renounces marriage and seeks another occupation – caring for parents or siblings; participating in philanthropy, business, or art. “Singular Plots” traces the history of representations of single women, arguing that unmarried women were often represented as plotless in the early century, while around mid-century the vocational plot coalesced in novels including Brontë’s Villette, Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, and Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain. In order to uncover vocational plots that exist alongside and against marriage plots, I advocate a method of reading called “analeptic reading” in which readers pivot from the final pages back to the more radical center and outward past the end – a process that expands our notion of which moments in a plot can be definitive. The project joins recent work by scholars including Sharon Marcus and Talia Schaffer to challenge and expand our understanding of the role of the marriage plot in nineteenth-century literature. “Singular Plots” uncovers single women as a group with uniquely and instructively particular relationships to gender, marriage, work, and the form of the novel itself. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The purpose of this study was to explore single women’s views towards the institution of marriage. This study utilized a qualitative design. In-depth face-to-face interviews with ten unmarried women living in San Bernardino County were conducted to collect the data. Participants were asked in a structured interview to provide their views towards premarital sex, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, divorce, and same sex marriage.This study found that women’s liberal and conservative views towards premarital sex, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, divorce, and same sex marriage did not affect a women’s desire to enter the institution of marriage. Furthermore, the study indicated that women exhibited both liberal and conservative views, regardless of religiosity. Last, this study found that women commonly exhibited the traditional view of marrying prior to starting a family, regardless of women accepting premarital sex and cohabitation. The findings of the study suggest that social workers need to have a better understanding of the diverse views and behaviors of unmarried women. The study also recommends that social workers need to increase their awareness of unmarried women’s preferred lifestyles and to diminish the stigma associated with unmarried women. Furthermore, social workers should enhance their knowledge of micro and macro services available to unmarried women including resources in family planning and women’s health.

This study of single women in the British Columbia context reveals the importance of marital status as a distinct category of analysis for women’s lives. Marital status fractures the gender of women into identities that are deeply structured by relations of power and privilege, creating some fundamental separations between the married woman and the never-married (‘ever-single’) woman. By taking marital status into account, we can learn more about the historical intersections between women, gender, and society. By setting the heterosexual dyad aside, we can delve more fully into the varied life-sustaining relationships that women forged, especially with other women. We can more thoroughly reconstruct the social contexts of feminist ideas, and the roots of a female citizenship based on a direct rather than deflected relationship to the nation. We can also trace the nascence of an ‘individual’ female subjectivity based in self-reverence rather than self-effacement. And we can decentre the conjugal family, especially the heterosexual dyad, as the essential unit of the Canadian past and the only legitimate site for women’s sexuality. The ‘borderlands’ of British Columbia before the Second World War are an excellent place to examine the lives and identities of ever-single women, given the astonishing number of (ever-)single women present in unique demographic and economic conditions that would seem to militate against singleness. This project looks at four themes: survival, status, relationships, and identity. Material conditions of income and household composition offer us some of the strategies of survival single women employed. Looking at the discursive boundaries of certain social groups emphasizes the centrality of single women to (all levels of) society and the leadership that single women bring to both crafting and policing the borders of status groups. The patterns of relationships that ever-single women built and their voices on being single offer important models for thinking through women’s affective lives that do not privilege the heterosexual dyad. And the emplacement of the ever-single woman as ‘outside heterosexuality’ suggests some ways though the bind of the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy in thinking about women’s lives and especially the hybrid nature of their autobiographical voices.

This study of single women in the British Columbia context reveals the importance of marital status as a distinct category of analysis for womens lives. Marital status fractures the gender of women into identities that are deeply structured by relations of power and privilege, creating some fundamental separations between the married woman and the never-married (ever-single) woman. By taking marital status into account, we can learn more about the historical intersections between women, gender, and society. By setting the heterosexual dyad aside, we can delve more fully into the varied life-sustaining relationships that women forged, especially with other women. We can more thoroughly reconstruct the social contexts of feminist ideas, and the roots of a female citizenship based on a direct rather than deflected relationship to the nation. We can also trace the nascence of an individual female subjectivity based in self-reverence rather than self-effacement. And we can decentre the conjugal family, especially the heterosexual dyad, as the essential unit of the Canadian past and the only legitimate site for womens sexuality. The borderlands of British Columbia before the Second World War are an excellent place to examine the lives and identities of ever-single women, given the astonishing number of (ever-)single women present in unique demographic and economic conditions that would seem to militate against singleness. This project looks at four themes: survival, status, relationships, and identity. Material conditions of income and household composition offer us some of the strategies of survival single women employed. Looking at the discursive boundaries of certain social groups emphasizes the centrality of single women to (all levels of) society and the leadership that single women bring to both crafting and policing the borders of status groups. The patterns of relationships that ever-single women built and their voices on being single offer important models for thinking through womens affective lives that do not privilege the heterosexual dyad. And the emplacement of the ever-single woman as outside heterosexuality suggests some ways though the bind of the heterosexual/homosexual dichotomy in thinking about womens lives and especially the hybrid nature of their autobiographical voices.