M.A. (Psychology) / Research shows that infidelity has been and continues to be one of the major causes of divorce. Current literature on infidelity appears to focus on the effects infidelity has on one‟s health and has alluded to a woman‟s experience of her „self‟ as being intertwined in her relationship. The primary aim of the research was to explore the ideas, feelings, and attitudes a wife has about her identity, worth, capabilities, and limitations following her husband‟s sexual infidelity. A qualitative approach was adopted to explore the experience and the meanings which participants attribute to their circumstances. Participants were interviewed using a series of semi-structured questions and were afforded the opportunity to openly share their experience, thoughts, and feelings. Participant interviews were transcribed and analyzed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Despite both participants experiencing infidelity in their marriage and revealing accounts of the experience which proved to be quite different, the researcher identified three master themes across both participants‟ experiences. These themes are encapsulated as follows: (a) Laying of the self aside for the betterment of others; (b) Spirituality; and (c) Health. The researcher has highlighted overarching themes which concluded that the effect infidelity had on each participant‟s self appear to be comparable.

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No description available.

published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work

This study investigates the process of resilience from the perspective of military wives during deployment. The study had two main goals: 1) to further understand the deployment experience, as it is lived personally and within the family, and 2) to develop a theory-based resilience model, guided by family stress and resilience theory, highlighting the role of communication within the family resilience process. According to the FAAR Model (Patterson, 1988; 2002), resilience involves three components: meanings, demands, and capabilities. Based on the goals of the study and the three main components of resilience, five broad research questions guided the study: How do military spouses perceive, interpret, and make meaning of their experience with spousal deployment? How do spouses cope with the spousal deployment experience? How do spouses perceive the family deployment and coping experience? What supportive resources and responses are most helpful for military spouses during spousal deployment, and why? And what supportive resources and responses are most unhelpful for military spouses during spousal deployment, and why? The data are also viewed through a lens of ambiguous loss theory (Boss, 1999; 2004; 2006; 2007), as deployment is a stressful situation that incorporates uncertainty, loss, and a presence-absence paradox for spouses and families. To investigate these questions and develop these theories, in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 military wives who were currently experiencing deployment. The results illustrate various aspects of women’s perceptions of their deployment experiences, including how they make sense of these experiences. Women did not only discuss their own personal experiences; they also reported experiences at relational and family levels. Paralleling these tri-level perceptions of the experience, women’s approaches to coping also occurred at individual, relational, and family levels. Different coping strategies within each level are outlined and discussed. Finally, women’s perceptions and evaluations of the responses they receive from others, both supportive and unsupportive, are reported and discussed. Based on the results, a transactional model of family resilience, highlighting the central role of communication, is proposed. Implications for theory (e.g., stress and resilience theories, ambiguous loss theory) and practice are discussed. Future directions for research are explored. / text

In this study women's feelings of low self-esteem were related significantly to committed partnerships with occupationally successful men. Forty women aged 34 to 67 were administered a self-evaluation scale developed for the study, followed by personal interviews. Forty-five percent identified themselves as having lower self-esteem than desired during such relationships. They experienced lack of power in most of eight power areas investigated, while perceiving their partners as interpersonally powerful. Low self-esteem women tended to be extrinsically motivated and to feel psychologically battered by male partners. Identification of this population is recommended since their problems frequently are not being addressed by caregivers while the intimate relationships are intact. Women with low self-esteem apparently need to experience their own significant successes, particularly balancing of interpersonal power, and to refocus on intrinsic worth.

Mental health professionals have observed that children who witness interparental violence frequently display either an affrontive, demanding personality style, or a passive, compliant style. The prevalence of these personality types and their relation to identification, stress, and other variables was evaluated in a sample of 40 children (age range = 6 - 12 years old) who have witnessed parental spouse abuse. Children completed the Children's Personality Questionnaire and the Parental Identification Questionnaire. Mothers completed the Life Experiences Survey. Independent ratings of the children's personality were made. The results validated the existence of these two personality styles among both male and female witnesses, and supplied evidence for their relation to paternal identification, familial instability, and parental ineffectualness. The implications of these findings for assessment and intervention are discussed.

Abuse of women by male partners is a significant social problem in New Zealand. Ten participating women, whose experiences span more than fifty years, provided interviews focused on their recovery from partner abuse but including the broader context of their lives. Grounded Theory methodology with a feminist perspective was applied in conjunction with Grounded Theory methods. The study identifies GROWING THROUGH ADVERSITY as the basic psychosocial process of recovery from an abusive relationship. GROWING THROUGH ADVERSITY has three inter-related core categories: FINDING A PATH BEYOND ABUSE concerns experiencing abuse and finding safety; GETTING A LIFE is about interactions with the social world; and BECOMING MYSELF involves personal growth and development. In the first of five phases, FALLING FOR LOVE, women commit to the relationship with unexamined, traditional beliefs in gender ideals. When the partner becomes abusive stereotyped meanings of relationship require compliance as the price of 'love', or result in shame and self-blame. In phase two, TAKING CONTROL, coping strategies of resistance and compliance fail. Seeking help for themselves, or the relationship, results in finding other perspectives and new contexts of meaning, prompting participants to overcome personal, social, and safety constraints to separation. Phase three includes the distress and difficulty of SECURING A BASE. In the fourth phase, MAKING SENSE OF IT, participants seek both explanation and meaning for their experience. By the fifth phase, BEING MYSELF, participants have constructed new meaning systems and integrated into wider social contexts. They have become women who live by their own values, without partner abuse. Analysis of participants' experience highlights the changing purpose of help-seeking, The paradox of shame and self blame, and processes of meaning-making and coping are clarified. Victim-blaming is identified as a social sanction that supports abuse. Personal growth processes are conceptualised by integrating several developmental theorists.

PhD / This thesis explores the lives of key female members of the Bolshevik elite from the revolutionary movement’s beginnings to the time of Stalin’s death. Through analysing the attitudes and contributions of Bolshevik elite women – most particularly the wives of Lenin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Bukharin – it not only provides for a descriptive account of these individual lives, their changing attitudes and activities, but also a more broad-ranging, social handle on the evolution of elite society in the Soviet Union and the changing nature of the Bolshevik elite both physically and ideationally. Chapters one and two focus on the physical and ideological foundations of the Bolshevik marriage. Chapter one traces the ideological approach of the Bolsheviks towards marriage and the family, examining pre-revolutionary socialist positions in relation to women and the family and establishing a benchmark for how the Bolsheviks wished to approach the ‘woman question’. Chapter two examines the nature of the Bolshevik elite marriage from its inception to the coming of the revolution, dwelling particularly on the different pre-revolutionary experiences of Yekaterina Voroshilova and Nadezhda Krupskaya. Chapters three and four then analyse two key areas of wives’ everyday lives during the interwar years. Chapter three looks at the work that Bolshevik wives undertook and how the nature of their employment changed from the 1920s to the 1930s. Chapter four, through examining the writings of wives such as Voroshilova, Larina and Ordzhonikidze, focuses upon how wives viewed themselves, their responsibilities as members of the Bolshevik elite and the position of women in Soviet society. The final two chapters of this thesis explore the changing nature of elite society in this period and its relationship to Soviet society at large. Chapter five investigates the changing composition of the elite and the specific and general effects of the purges upon its nature. Directly, the chapter examines the lives of Zhemchuzhina, Larina and Pyatnitskaya as wives that were repressed during this period, while more broadly it considers the occupation of the House on the Embankment in the 1930s and the changing structure of Bolshevik elite society. Chapter six focuses on the evolution of Soviet society in the interwar period and how the experiences of Bolshevik elite wives differed from those of ‘mainstream’ Russian women. While previous studies of the Bolshevik elite have focussed upon men’s political lives and investigations of Soviet women’s policy and its shifts under Stalin have mainly concentrated upon describing changes in realist terms, this thesis demonstrates that not only is an evaluation of wives’ lives crucial to a fuller understanding of the Bolshevik elite, but that by comprehending the personal attitudes and values of members of the Bolshevik elite society, particularly with regards to women and the family, a more informed perspective on the reasons for changes in Soviet women’s policy during the interwar period may be arrived at.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 303-326). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.