This thesis focuses on Kaiapoi, a small town in North Canterbury, and studies the ways young people are discursively constructed by adults and each other, and also the different ways young people experience and use the town's environment. Drawing on key informant interviews, media analysis, a youth survey and a photography activity (photovoice); the research developed a rich understanding of the different ways young people are constructed in Kaiapoi and the places young people enjoy and do not enjoy going to in the town and why.

Utilizing subcultural identity, scripting, and reference group theories, this study analyzes 21 young adult, evangelical Christian women’s attitudes toward sexuality, and how they utilize messages regarding sexuality from their pastors and parents. Although the women in this study perceive that messages from their pastors and parents regarding sex are unclear and at times inconsistent, their attitudes still particularly fit into the well-known strict sexual “norms” for evangelical Christians. However, the women’s understanding of sexuality did not always include messages from a pastor or parent. Though messages from the participants’ pastors and parents are not irrelevant to the women in this study, the ambiguous nature of their messages offers the participants a unique opportunity to construct their own definitions of sex. Most participants consider procreation to be an important purpose of sex, but they also believe enjoyment and intimacy are important purposes. Additionally, while most of the women in this study consider oral sex and anal sex to count as a loss of virginity, participants also noted many gray areas when considering virginity loss and sexual purity. / Department of Sociology

186 Ghanaian and 199 Liberian young adult students living in Ghana completed surveys regarding their sexual risk taking behaviors, as well as their knowledge about HIV, their current level of hopelessness, and their subjective quality of life. Results indicated that although knowledge levels were adequate, there was no connection between knowledge about HIV and past risk taking behaviors, including multiple sexual partners, and lack of safe sex practices. Results did indicate a connection between quality of life and the number of sexual partners, and a connection between hopelessness and lack of safe sex behaviors. The author concluded that HIV/STD prevention campaigns located in Ghana should include behavioral skills training in current preventative campaigns. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (MPsy(Clinical))--University of South Australia, 2001.

Master of Philosophy / The purpose of this study was to examine the adolescent novels that were awarded in Greece from 1985 till 2005 by four major organizations. The primary focus was to outline the main characteristics of the awarded adolescent novel that developed during the last 20 years in Greece and secondly, to examine the main characteristics of those awarded novels so as to understand the importance of this newly formed genre and the important role it can play in the development of the adolescent. In the first part of the study we outlined the development and the main characteristics of the adolescent novel while we focused on the different criteria that are used by the four major organizations that award and promote this literary genre in Greece. The second part of the study analyzes the various stages of the buildingsroman as it’s seen through the themes of the novels, while a major component of it deals with the way the Greek identity is portrayed and promoted as well as the model of the adolescent hero. The study suggested that adolescence is the period between childhood and adulthood, during which the adolescent changes both biologically and psychologically and those changes are directly related to his/her future personality. The study also indicates that the adolescent novel describes that period that coincides with the final stages of the maturation of the teenager. Therefore, the adolescent readers identify themselves with the heroes, their emotions, and the various problems with references to the surrounding environment and the every day life. It was also suggested that the adolescent reader can discover a role model in the novel’s heroes and heroines which could lead to a self evaluation and an evaluation of the others around him, while at the same time he/she can enjoy the entertainment and aesthetic values of the novel.

This thesis investigates the representation, positioning, and valuing of young people and youth-specific performance in the field of cultural production in Australia in the 1990s. Using specific case-studies, this thesis argues that young people and youth-specific performance are being represented, positioned, and valued in a variety of contradictory ways as a result of a number of significant contemporary factors: namely, a prevalence of 'new generation' discourse and an attendant generationalism, a growing critical recognition of young people's 'grounded aesthetics', and existing anxieties surrounding the economic future of Australia's arts industry. This is an unstable situation for youth-specific performance, contrasting from earlier periods in Australia's theatre history when young people were positioned principally in terms of their need for 'development' (education and training) or their potential contribution to ongoing 'progression'. This thesis considers this contemporary situation in relation to issues of access and power for young people in the changed social and cultural conditions of the 1990s. The introductory chapter provides a critical background to the main issues presented in the thesis: the concepts of 'youth' and 'culture', the social and cultural characteristics of young people's lives in the 1990s, the rise of generationalist discourse, and the anxious state of the Australian arts industry. The 'institutional' site of state theatre is then taken as a beginning case study to examine the positioning of young people and youth-specific programs in 'official' cultural environments. It argues that anxious plans for the future survival of state 'flagship' companies are positioning young people and youth-specific programs in predominantly generationalist ways, using 'new generation' discourse to mask often conservative approaches. Chapter One begins with a history of Magpie Theatre (a former youth-specific company attached to the State Theatre Company of South Australia) which reflects some of the major priorities of youth-specific theatre of the last twenty years. By way of contrast, the Sydney Theatre Company's recent attempts to reposition young people and youth-specific work in the 1990s are discussed in Chapter Two. This chapter shows how the company's developmental aims and processing of new work are achieved in 'new generation' programs that strictly control young people's contribution to the company's future. Both chapters help to demonstrate the main conceptual shift in youth-specific theatre in the 1990s from 'developmentalism' to 'difference' (with reference to the concomitant growth of drama-in-education in schools), while at the same time alluding to its varying effect. Chapter Three argues that festivals, as volatile sites of cultural production, magnify the wider cultural field's 'stake of struggles': particularly, the struggles to equitably value young people's diverse contributions to developments in the cultural field, both as cultural 'innovators' and cultural 'preservers'. Centred on an interrelated critique of access, this chapter discusses the various motives and priorities of three recent youth-specific arts festivals in terms of their representation and valuing of young people and their work: the Take Over 97 National Festival for Young People, the Stage X Event, and the Loud National Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts. Chapter Four considers a site primarily and explicitly concerned with issues of access, representation, and value. This chapter examines in detail the 'self-narratives' of two youth-specific community-based performances, whereby young people's access to 'grounded' modes of cultural expression resulted in innovative cultural performance and signalled a regenerated social politics of community theatre. The chapter examines how Skate Girl Space by the Hereford Sisters and Zen Che by the Ningi Connection utilised young people's 'grounded aesthetics' of video performance to address young people's necessary negotiation with risk and individualisation in the late 1990s. Both projects counteracted public generationalist discourses, and challenged and reinscribed the conventions of gender performance and 'youth'. The final chapter considers the positioning of young people and youth-specific arts in Australian cultural policy, arguing that youth-specific cultural production rarely fits into the characteristic modes of arts production valorised by statistical frameworks for arts industry evaluation. The chapter calls for more open approaches whereby practice might inform policy which recognises the interconnected social, cultural and economic regimes of value that youth-specific work engages in. This thesis draws from theatre and performance studies, sociology, youth studies, cultural studies, and cultural policy studies.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 2001. / "A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the School of Teaching and Educational Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean." "January 2001" Bibliography: leaves 252 - 262.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-228).

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 44-50).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.