After their release from prison, offenders are faced with many hardships that hinder their reintegration efforts. Often, offenders are stereotyped and face community exclusion due to their criminal record. Much of the literature on reintegration has focused on the way in which society stereotypes offenders, but not how offenders interpret and internalize these stereotypes. This study examines the way offenders internalize the stereotypes associated with having a criminal record, and how this affects their reintegration. Data was gathered by conducting 18 in-depth interviews with offenders at the John Howard Society in Toronto. The interviews showed that all participants felt that they had been negatively labeled by others based on the fact that they have a criminal record and/or spent time in prison. Additionally, five participants indicated experiencing stereotype threat, and believed this phenomenon to have had a negative impact on their ability to reintegrate back into society. / UOIT

The purpose of this descriptive study is to examine how two Western women‟s NGOs represent women in the “Third World”. The examined cases are the progressive NGOs Kvinna till Kvinna (Sweden) and the American counterpart Women for Women International (US).Qualitative research methodology has been utilized throughout this study. This thesis is also based on the social theory of constructivism and its ontological assumptions. Since both Sweden and USA are said to be strong promoters of gender equality- a comparative study design, examining two progressive NGOs is one suitable way to analyze the specified research questions. The analysis is based upon the article “Under Western Eyes” (1986) in which Chandra Mohanty discusses Western feminists‟ representation of “Third World women”, summarized in six main stereotypes. Mohanty‟s six claims regarding Western representation of “Third World women” designed the framework that has been used to analyze the collected data, which consists of the two organization‟s own material that is available on their individual websites. The formulated research questions asks whether Kvinna till Kvinna and Women for Women International represent “Third World women” as a homogeneous group sharing a similar experience of oppression in the ways described by Mohanty and if there are any differences in the ways of representation when comparing Kvinna till Kvinna and Women for Women International.

The present research examined how interactions with sexist men can trigger stereotype threat among women, undermining their engineering and mathematical performance. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the literatures on sexism and on stereotype threat. Chapter 2 validates a subtle sentence completion measure of sexism. In Chapter 3, male engineering students who scored highly on this sexism measure behaved in a dominant and sexually interested way towards an ostensible female classmate. In Chapter 4, female engineering students who interacted with such sexist men, or with confederates trained to behave in the same way, performed worse on an engineering test than women who interacted with nonsexist men. Chapter 5 conceptually replicated this finding and showed that women’s underperformance did not extend to an English test, an area in which women are not negatively stereotyped. Furthermore, interacting with sexist men lead women to suppress concerns about gender stereotypes, an established mechanism of stereotype threat. Chapter 6 discusses the implications for stereotype threat and for addressing barriers to women’s performance at school and in the workplace.

Individuals tend to underestimate situational causes and overly rely on trait causes in explaining negative behaviors of outgroup members, a tendency named the ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979). This attributional pattern is directly related to stereotyping, because attributing negative behaviors to internal, stable causes tends to perpetuate negative stereotypes of outgroup members. Recent research on implicit bias reduction revealed that circumventing individuals’ tendency to engage in the ultimate attribution error led to reduced stereotyping. More specifically, training White participants to consider situational factors in determining Blacks’ negative stereotypic behaviors led to decreased automatic stereotype activation. This technique was named Situational Attribution Training (Stewart, Latu, Kawakami, & Myers, 2010). In the current studies, I investigated the mechanisms and moderators of Situational Attribution Training. In Study 1, I investigated the effect of training on spontaneous situational inferences. Findings revealed that training did not increase spontaneous situational inferences: both training and control participants showed evidence of spontaneous situational inferences. In Study 2, I investigated whether correcting trait inferences by taking into account situational factors has become automatic after training. In addition, explicit prejudice, motivations to control prejudice, and cognitive complexity variables (need for cognition, personal need for structure) were investigated as moderators of training success. These findings revealed that Situational Attribution Training works best for individuals high in need for cognition, under conditions of no cognitive load, but not high cognitive load. Training increased implicit bias for individuals high in modern racism, regardless of their cognitive load. Possible explanations of these findings were discussed, including methodological limitations and theoretical implications.

The present research examined how interactions with sexist men can trigger stereotype threat among women, undermining their engineering and mathematical performance. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the literatures on sexism and on stereotype threat. Chapter 2 validates a subtle sentence completion measure of sexism. In Chapter 3, male engineering students who scored highly on this sexism measure behaved in a dominant and sexually interested way towards an ostensible female classmate. In Chapter 4, female engineering students who interacted with such sexist men, or with confederates trained to behave in the same way, performed worse on an engineering test than women who interacted with nonsexist men. Chapter 5 conceptually replicated this finding and showed that women’s underperformance did not extend to an English test, an area in which women are not negatively stereotyped. Furthermore, interacting with sexist men lead women to suppress concerns about gender stereotypes, an established mechanism of stereotype threat. Chapter 6 discusses the implications for stereotype threat and for addressing barriers to women’s performance at school and in the workplace.

The aim of this thesis is to describe Western images of China by focusing on media representations of Chinese attempts to invest in Saab. Theories of media representation, orientalism, racialization and stereotype are applied and used in the qualitative discourse analysis in order to find out if there are orientalist and racialized stereotypes in the material. The findings show that there are orientalist stereotypes and racialized stereotypes presented in the material. The analysis also sums up that China is a country whose people are represented to be adaptable and to have amazing productivity, since China has cheap labor power and lax labor law. Furthermore, China is represented as a country whose financial power is strong and solid, Western media characterizes China as a threat. Moreover, Chinese negotiators who went to Sweden to negotiate not only are represented as full of ambitions, but also they are seen as the saviors for Western companies which are on the verge of bankrupt. This thesis contributes to the literature by filling the gap about the Chinese attempts to invest in Saab, which is characterized by Western media.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a series of the ¡§Gender Stereotype Threat Inventory¡¨(GSTI) of junior high school students in science classroom. The GSTI was included three scales: domain indentification, gender stereotype and learning environment. The GSTI was conducted to a total of 640 8th graders in Kaohsiung city. Results of the study were employed for internal consistency analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, Rasch modeling analysis, as well as the multiple invariance approach to test its reliability and validity. The result manifested that each scale had reasonable coefficient Cronbach alpha ranging from .73 to .85 and the overall model fit indices indicated that model fitted the oberserved data and had cross-validation. Finally, the results of gender stereotype threat in science classroom and implications for using the GSTI inventory in future research are presented.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-87). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 43 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-43).

Thesis (PhD(Education))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.