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A descriptive study was conducted to determine the level of self-esteem in elderly women in two different settings, the community and the nursing home, and if there was a difference in the level of self-esteem between the groups. The relationship between self-esteem and the intervening variables of loss, health, role fulfillment, social support, and control was examined. Thirty subjects, aged 69 to 92 years, participated in the study, 15 from the community and 15 from a nursing home. The questionnaire focused on demographic data, intervening variables scales, and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale to determine the level of self-esteem. The data revealed no significant difference of self-esteem between the two groups (p = 0.46). Community subjects showed a significant relationship between self-esteem and financial status (p = 0.001). Nursing home subjects showed significant relationships between self-esteem and age (p = 0.05), self-health (p = 0.004), compared health (p = 0.04), and control (p = 0.001).

This thesis has explored the relationship between authoritarian personality traits and women who are members of politically active community groups. This study includes a pilot study of attitudes of Ball State University students. The thesis surveyed attitudes of a random sample of Muncie, Indiana residents as well as members of the League of Women Voters of Muncie-Delaware County and women who attended a conference on International Women’s Year.The study,, utilizing a self-administered questionnaire, found the members of the women's groups to be far less authoritarian than the random sample of Muncie residents. The study found, through factor analysis, some indications that the F-Scale was not entirely accurate. A strong "obedience-t" factor of authoritarianism was found which included both F-Scale items and the author’s own items. Further research in this area was urged.Samples of the questionnaire and cover letters were included in the appendices.

Dominant discourses of womanhood and femininity equate woman and mother synonymously, implying that motherhood is a woman's destiny. Childfree women need to create identities divergent of these dominant discourses. Traditional and some feminist psychological theories of women's identity development are based on women's biology and their capacity to reproduce, either implicitly or explicitly. Women who choose to be childfree fall outside of these theoretical models and illuminate the necessity to revise or expand our theoretical understanding of women's identity development. In this qualitative inquiry, six voluntary childfree women were interviewed about their experience of being and becoming women. They shared their experiences of self discovery, living authentically, creating identities, and how being childflee impacts their sense of belonging to the womanhood.

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This thesis describes women's conceptions of power in the context of an all-woman work group. Research on the psychology of power, which began in the 1950's, has been dominated by particular focii, perspectives and techniques which may have resulted in somewhat narrow definitions of power which tap only factors traditionally seen as "masculine." In reframing these focii, perspectives and techniques, this research focuses on women's understandings; was conducted from a naturalistic perspective, using qualitative techniques; and approached the investigation of power from a position of "not knowing" rather than relying on a priori theory. The naturalistic perspective used in this study is phenomenography, a relatively new research approach developed in Sweden by a group of educational researchers at the University of Goteborg. Phenomenography describes individuals' conceptions in the form of categories of description which represent people's ways of understanding or conceptualizing phenomena—in this case, power. The findings of this study—the conceptions of power— came out of in-depth open-ended interviews with eight women who comprised the membership of the 1988-89 "gender-fair" counsellors' training team at UBC. These interviews were conducted in the hermeneutic tradition of mutually-constructed meaning, audio taped, transcribed, and analyzed to yield six qualitatively different conceptions of power which appear consistent with feminist theory on women's developmental perspectives and views of power. The conceptions, in the form of categories of meaning, are organized into an outcome space in which understandings of power move from: (a) an inner focus on self to an outer focus on the other; (b) a view of the process as "being", to acting, to interacting; and (c) a private context to a public context. The six conceptions of power are: 1. personal integrity 1a. entitlement 2. expressing personal integrity/congruence 3. self-determination 4. agency/competence 5. respected standing 6. influence The implications of these findings for counselling and suggestions for further research are discussed. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

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Horner has hypothesized that females who exhibit fear of success imagery on a projective test, tend to perform more poorly in competitive than in noncompetitive situations. In the present study, Horner's technique of identifying females who exhibit fear of success was employed. Groups of females exhibiting fear of success and females not exhibiting fear of success were placed in different competitive situations involving a matching task in which they were paired with a male partner, female partner or were alone. Halfway through the task, all subjects were told they were successful. The last half of the task was a measure of success avoidance. It was found that females exhibiting fear of success increased performance on the second half of the task less than those females who did not exhibit fear of success in accordance with Horner's hypothesis. However, the existence of a partner did not affect performance significantly.

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