Browsing by Subject "Sociology"
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Item Open Access A New Take on Gamification: Playing the Culture Shock Experience in a Digital Card Game(2020) Yan, AnniIn 2018-2019, over 1 million international students from all over the world come to the United States to seek higher education. Along with their hope for quality education, they bring their own cultures. The clash of the United States (US) culture and the foreign culture produces “culture shock”, the progress of learning and adjusting to new environments. This process of working through culture shock, which can take from days to months, exposes the foreign students to loneliness, depression, and lack of belonging. International students also face challenges from language barriers, identity crises, and mental distress. To cope with the stress, they might choose to remain in their comfort zone and isolate themselves from other cultures, but this prevents them from taking full advantage of their new environment and communities. Many institutions offer programs to help students from different backgrounds to embrace diversity by hosting student groups, culture fest, and seminars. They have tried to solve this problem, but for many individuals, it is still difficult to encounter culture shock.This thesis analyzes the effects of culture shocks, the usage of games in empathy building, and aid in the understanding of cultural barriers. It first explores the challenges international students face and their coping strategies. It then surveys research into existing empathy-building games that have shown a positive impact on the targeted audience. Finally, the thesis introduces a digital card game, Cultivated, which was developed to act upon these research findings and to create an experience that helps to address the issue of cultural shock. The game is designed for domestic students to discover cultural differences. The players are asked to develop a new culture of communication together, to experience “culture shock”, and most importantly learn about each other’s culture in real life by exploring the following five aspects of the phenomenon: language, value, symbol, norm, and ritual. The paper argues that a gamified approach to the problem, a digital card game thematized around addressing culture shock, can help tell the story of international students to others and themselves and that playing the game can help break down cultural barriers.
Item Open Access A Structural Event Approach to the Analysis of Group Composition(Social Networks, 2002) Ruef, MSince Simmel's early work on forms of association, the processes guiding group composition have commanded considerable attention in structural sociology, but have not led to a general methodology for examining compositional properties. By introducing a structural event approach, this study offers a new technique that is not restricted to analysis of dyads or triads nor post hoc analysis of those structural arrangements that are observed in a given sample. The approach is illustrated using data on 745 organizational founding teams. Structural event analysis separates choice behavior guiding team composition (with respect to ascribed and achieved characteristics of members) from structurally-induced behavior based on contact opportunities. Results suggest that the strong impact of ascriptive homophily may be tempered when functional considerations of group composition are addressed. However, many of the other arrangements that ostensibly pass as 'functional' are in fact induced by opportunity structures. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.Item Open Access Adolescent Friendship Stability(2023) Tucker, LiannAdolescence is a key point in the life course, and friendships during this time are strong predictors of health and behavioral outcomes. This dissertation seeks to understand the causes and consequences of friendship stability, answering the question: Friendships during adolescence are important, but does it matter how long they last? Chapter Two introduces a new measure of friendship stability and tests possible pathways by which it affects extreme outcomes, threatening oneself or others. The findings indicate that some of these mechanisms partially explain this relationship, but low network instability remains strongly associated with the outcomes.Chapter Three examines the possible causes of friendship dissolution, as adolescents are more likely to dissolve the more unstable their networks. This chapter simultaneously tests individual, dyadic, and structural predictors of dissolution. The findings suggest that ego’s perception of intimacy, as well as the structural and dyadic features of the relationship, are the most prominent predictors of dissolution. Additionally, the results suggest differing relationships between several structural and dyadic features when considering whether friendship is reciprocated. Chapter four examines the relationship between racial peer mixing and mental health. I tested the effect of having cross-race ties on mental health, conditional on individuals being a racial minority in their school population. I also test whether two contextual factors of egos friendships, intimacy, and stability–mediate this relationship. I found that when adolescents are minorities in their schools, cross-race friendships somewhat protect them from emotional distress, and that this relationship is minimally mediated by friendship intimacy.
Item Open Access Agents with Principles: The Control of Labor in the Dutch East India Company, 1700-1796(American Sociological Review, 2017) Wezel, F; Ruef, MPrincipal-agent problems plagued early modern corporations. The existing literature emphasizes the potential benefits provided by private trade in aligning the interests of company agents to those of their principals. We contribute to this line of work by analyzing the organizational and social mechanisms that may help address principal-agent problems in the presence of private trading opportunities. Drawing on personnel records of more than half a million seafarers employed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) over nearly a century, we show that monitoring was effective in reducing desertion when private trade was conceived as a market activity subordinated to hierarchy. Social bonds were more effective in preventing desertion when the company elevated private trade above hierarchy. Our analysis clarifies how early corporations could maintain control over a geographically dispersed and diverse labor force in the absence of modern tools of organizational governance.Item Open Access Anatomies of Kinship: Diversity in the Formal Structures of American Families(2014) Gauthier, Gertrude RobinAmerican family relations are formally defined through marriage and descent but these formal distinctions are inadequate to capture the diversity of contemporary family life. Recent demographic trends have led to a diversification of family structures. Alternative, and less institutionalized ties like co-residence and informal partnerships bind an increasing number of families. Clearly defined cultural models do not yet exist for these new relationships. During these demographic changes the cultural dominance of the single breadwinner model has been challenged by women's mass entry into the labor market. New models of fatherhood have begun to emerge and conventional parenting roles may be carried out in diverse ways. A new method is needed to capture the relational processes of new family forms and the heterogeneity of conventional ones.
I argue families' formal structures can be classified by the things their members do, and the time they share with each other. Network methods sort family structures into discrete types that capture differences in lived experiences. The distinctions differentiating family structures from each another reveal meaningful information about how families are organized in the contemporary context. The four substantive papers in this dissertation each contribute a different demonstration of this fundamental argument.
First, the method is developed in a familiar context, using conventional distinctions embedded in kinship terms to move one step beyond traditional analyses of the family. Traditional categorical approaches enumerate traditionally defined relationships. We ask instead how patterns of consanguinity and marriage actually combine in American households, making no assumptions about the importance of any particular relation or individual attribute.
The three papers that follow are further from the traditional categorical approach. I don't assume that descent and marriage are necessary elements of family relationships. Instead, relationship types are defined by patterns of activities that children do with their potential kin. I apply the method to three waves of time use diaries from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Children's relationships with both traditional and new kin types are heterogeneous, yet structured. Next I develop and test a predictive model of parent-child relationships. The results show that allowing salient relationship features to emerge from time use data is fundamental to understanding how parent-child relationships differ by parents' attributes and household characteristics.
Finally, I examine how relationship types cohere into families. Children have the same type of family when their families are composed of a similar set of relationship types. The relations within most family types are qualitatively similar to each other - if one relationship is broad (or perfunctory) the others are likely to be as well.
Item Open Access Animating Globalization and Development: The South Korean Animation Industry in Historical-Comparative Perspective(2011) Lee, JoonkooOver the last decades, the global flow of cultural goods and services has significantly grown as a result of liberalized international trade and investment and technological advance. Global cultural production is now flexibly organized and decentralized as more tasks are outsourced into different parts of the world. Yet, the question of how globalization has affected the structure of global cultural industries and upgrading dynamics has not been taken seriously.
This study takes up this question by examining the animation industry in South Korea ("Korea" hereafter) and its changing relationship with global animation production from an historical-comparative perspective from the mid-1960s to the late 2000s. This study attempts to answer several main questions: 1) How did two waves of globalization differently reshape the structure the global animation industry? 2) What are the major characteristics of the Korean animation industry at different stages? 3) How did the differences between U.S. and Japanese outsourcing chains and international coproduction chains affect the upgrading outcomes of Korean suppliers? and 4) Has the Korean state's developmental role been declined, preserved, or reconfigured over time?
Based upon secondary literature and the author's field interviews in Korea, India and Japan in 2008 and 2009, this study finds that the animation industry has been globalized over the last four decades with two distinctive waves of globalization. The first wave until the 1980s involved the rise of offshore outsourcing networks linking the U.S. market to East Asian suppliers. The second wave beginning in the 1990s has restructured the industry through the consolidation and global expansion of media conglomerates, the relocation of offshore outsourcing, and the growth of animation production and consumption in emerging economies.
Throughout the period, the Korean animation industry has undergone three distinctive phases in terms of its development patterns. The development path has been constructed by the interaction of global linkages and local dynamics. The first phase leading up to the mid-1980s is characterized by a gradual integration to global production networks through small-scale processing. The ensuring large-scale, outsourcing-based export growth defines the second phase up until the end of the 1990s. The latest phase is the outcome of a new path in the late 1990s toward upgrading based on local production and international coproduction.
The disaggregation of global forces at the global value chain (GVC) level shows marked differences between U.S. and Japanese outsourcing chains in terms of chain structure, division of labor, firm characteristics, and chain governance. These differences generated distinctive upgrading patterns among two segmented local supplier groups. A quick build-up of large-scale production by consolidated suppliers in the U.S. chains (yet their equally quick decline later) contrasts to a slower pace of upgrading by a large group of fragmented suppliers in Japanese chains. While the structure of emerging international coproduction chains varies by project, power relations between the partner firms are critical to determine the gains captured.
Finally, as for the role of the state, the finding of this study supports the reconfiguration argument that the developmental state, at least in Korea, is not in eclipse but bolstered with a new mode of state intervention and developmental alliance. In the face of growing competitiveness pressure on Korean firms at home and abroad, state-led, export-oriented development strategies have been rather strengthened and extended. Sector-specific industrial policy has increased, not decreased, particularly after the economic crisis of the late 1990s. Industrial policy has been narrowed onto the sector level and strategically engaged in specific chain nodes within the sector. Organizationally, this policy reform was supported by a newly-minted developmental alliance based on original animation exports and the re-embedding of the state onto specialized supportive agencies and new policy constituencies.
These findings are compared and contrasted to the experience of the Indian animation industry to draw implications for upgrading in the global cultural economy, which include: a) globalization as a differentiating and restructuring process; b) the interaction between global integration and local production; c) linkages between local, regional and global markets; and d) value chain-based state intervention.
Item Embargo Applications of Latent Class Analysis to Discrimination and Health Studies(2024) Smith, Imari ZThis dissertation builds on over 40 years of research demonstrating the negative effects of discrimination on health. Though there is a copious amount of studies on discrimination frequency, this rich literature largely neglects discrimination attribution processes (i.e., perceptions of which factors motivated the discriminatory treatment). This dissertation is comprised of three studies that employ latent class analysis to illuminate how attributions cluster, and regression to examine the implications of those clusters for health outcomes and individuals’ responses to discrimination in healthcare settings. Study 1 examines the extent to which attribution processes vary by race, gender, and race-gender groups among a Black and White young adult sample drawn from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics Transitioning to Adulthood Supplement. Results reveal that race-gender subgroups experience distinct clusters of attributions for discriminatory experiences—patterns that are obscured when estimating latent classes of attributions in the full sample. Study 2 estimates the extent to which emergent latent attribution classes from Study 1 predict health outcomes among Black and White young adults, disentangling the effects of two dimensions of interpersonal discrimination: attributions and frequency. Findings demonstrate that membership in any latent attribution class is not always associated with worse health outcomes and significant associations between health and dimensions of discrimination (i.e., frequency and attributions) vary across race-gender groups and health outcomes. Study 3 employs nationally representative data from the Health Reform Monitoring Survey to investigate how patients interpret and respond to provider mistreatment, and examine associations between the two. Resulting emergent attribution classes vary across racial groups, with race being more salient among Black patients relative to White and Latino patients. In contrast, emergent latent reaction classes are similar across groups wherein patients either disengage from healthcare (e.g., delaying or avoiding care) or do not modify their care plans after mistreatment. Furthermore, patients who attribute discrimination to many concurrent items have higher odds of disengagement relative to those who select fewer attribution items. These studies underscore the importance of social group specificity in understanding the implications of attributions for health, and they demonstrate how provider mistreatment may further exacerbate patient health inequities.
Item Open Access Betting on Black and White: Race and the Making of Problem Gambling(2015) Buckelew, RoseProblem gambling, a fairly recent addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is estimated to affect between two and five percent of the US adult population (Volberg 2001). While present in all racial groups, this disorder is not evenly distributed, as Blacks are more likely than any other group to become problem gamblers (Welte et al. 2006). And while this pattern is consistent with those found with other disorders (Black 1984; Ford and Widiger 1989; Strakowski et al. 1993), it is important to note that thirty years ago, when the first study of problem gambling prevalence was conducted and the disease had only recently been institutionalized, there was no difference in rate of illness by race (Kallick et al. 1979). This dissertation aims to explore this phenomenon: the role of race in the making of problem of gambling.
Through a multi-site and multi-method approach, this study examines the assumed race neutrality of gambling addiction. By tracing the history of gambling policy and North Carolina's adoption of a lottery program, this study explores how the state further defined problem gambling as a mental illness. Following this, participant observation of state-sponsored problem gambling counselor training workshops provides insight into the ways racialized understandings of behavior are constructed and maintained through counselor education. To gain a sense of how gambling is lived, this study involves participant observation of lottery gambling in convenience stores to interrogate racialized conceptions of behavior and reveal how financial gain motivates gambling across groups.
Item Open Access Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600-1757(Contemporary Sociology, 2015) Ruef, MItem Open Access Binding the Strong Man and the Outpost of Grace: A theological investigation of fear in young adults(2021) Davis, Preston AndrewsThis work unfolds in three moves to explore the rise in fear and anxiety in young adults and to provide a theological response from a chapel office on a college campus. The first move involves an exegetical reading of the Markan parable (adapted in Matthew) of “Binding the Strong Man”. This parable serves as an overarching metaphor for the nature of both the fearful realities many young adults find themselves in and the nature of the God who seeks to break into that reality and remind us of our innate value and worth in God. The parable asks us to think about whom we follow and call our leader, for whom we follow will form us at the deepest levels individually and collectively.
The second move of this thesis examines frameworks for understanding the anxious lives of young adults today: neurological, psychological, philosophical, and finally theological through an Augustinian lens. Through these frameworks we learn we need a renewed appreciation for the emotional life as the primary place of meaning making. Emotions are intelligent, that is, they have something to tell us about our deepest loves and desires. In particular, it investigates Augustine’s exploration of sophistry and philosophy as guides for constraining fear. Ironically, the deeper he found himself in those fields and frameworks the more disordered his inner life became. His personal experience and the values of ancient Rome serve as a warning for what happens when fear is allowed to run the lives of the ambitious individually and collectively.
The final move of the thesis is to take us into the outpost of grace, a location and people retraining their desires in the direction of Christ. This section highlights one prescriptive piece–that of retraining in belonging—to address the rise of loneliness and its interrelationship with anxiety. The outpost of grace provides new liturgies and habits to replace the cultural norms that disorder our inner lives.
Item Open Access Binding the Strong Man and the Outpost of Grace: A theological investigation of fear in young adults(2021) Davis, Preston AndrewsThis work unfolds in three moves to explore the rise in fear and anxiety in young adults and to provide a theological response from a chapel office on a college campus. The first move involves an exegetical reading of the Markan parable (adapted in Matthew) of “Binding the Strong Man”. This parable serves as an overarching metaphor for the nature of both the fearful realities many young adults find themselves in and the nature of the God who seeks to break into that reality and remind us of our innate value and worth in God. The parable asks us to think about whom we follow and call our leader, for whom we follow will form us at the deepest levels individually and collectively.
The second move of this thesis examines frameworks for understanding the anxious lives of young adults today: neurological, psychological, philosophical, and finally theological through an Augustinian lens. Through these frameworks we learn we need a renewed appreciation for the emotional life as the primary place of meaning making. Emotions are intelligent, that is, they have something to tell us about our deepest loves and desires. In particular, it investigates Augustine’s exploration of sophistry and philosophy as guides for constraining fear. Ironically, the deeper he found himself in those fields and frameworks the more disordered his inner life became. His personal experience and the values of ancient Rome serve as a warning for what happens when fear is allowed to run the lives of the ambitious individually and collectively.
The final move of the thesis is to take us into the outpost of grace, a location and people retraining their desires in the direction of Christ. This section highlights one prescriptive piece–that of retraining in belonging—to address the rise of loneliness and its interrelationship with anxiety. The outpost of grace provides new liturgies and habits to replace the cultural norms that disorder our inner lives.
Item Embargo Black, but “Not Black”: Dominican Racial Contestations and the Pursuit of Authentic Blackness(2024) Zabala Ortiz, PamelaBecause identity is a continuously evolving process, it is important to question whether and how immigrant groups contend with U.S.-based ideas about race. This is especially the case for Afro-Latinxs, who sit at the intersection of two identities, Blackness and Latinidad, that are constructed as mutually exclusive. This dissertation uses Dominicans in the U.S. as an empirical case for understanding how Afro-Latinx groups think about their racial identity and create racial meaning around labels like “Latinx” and “Black.” I also theorize the concept of ethnoracial authenticity and explore how this group navigates normative constructions of Blackness and Latinidad that situate them outside of these identities. Finally, I discuss how Dominicans engage with transnational racial justice movements that create space for Dominicans both in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora to challenge Dominican xenophobia and anti-Blackness. This work contributes to a broader conversation about the future of Black and Latinx politics and intergroup coalition building and offers insight into how Black Latinxs perceive the benefits of social and political alignment with these larger groups. Understanding the intersections of ethnicity and racial identity and the ways in which these groups overlap is ultimately important for considering what Black, Latinx, and Black Latinx coalition-building will look like in the future and could help us better understand and appreciate the role that these communities could play in global efforts for racial justice.
Item Open Access Branded: How Mental Disorder Labels Alter Task Performance in Perception and Reality(2013) Foy, Steven LarrimoreExtensive evidence demonstrates how mental illness symptomatology can inhibit perceptions of and actual performance on important tasks. However, receiving treatment from the medical establishment for such symptomatology requires diagnosis, whereby the patient becomes labeled and subject to the stereotypes connected to that label. Mental illness labeling is associated with a variety of negative outcomes including inhibited access to unemployment, housing, health insurance, and marriage and parenthood opportunities and can disrupt interpersonal relationships. However, the repercussions of mental illness labeling for one area of life have remained largely overlooked; that area is task performance. Adults spend a substantial portion of their lives at work engaged in group-based or individual level tasks. This dissertation explores external perceptions of mental illness in task groups and the role of self-internalization of stereotypes about mental illness in individual task performance through two experimental studies.
Previous research has revealed that, on average, task partners with a mental illness are stigmatized and subject to diminished status when they are identified to participants as having been hospitalized for general psychological problems for an extended period of time. Study 1 of this dissertation explores the stigma- and status-based attributions triggered by engaging with a partner in a mutual task who is identified as having a specific mental illness label: none, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or schizophrenia.
Additionally, research has revealed that members of a group about which negative stereotypes exist may face a situational threat in a domain relevant task--stereotype threat. Race, gender, social class, age, and a variety of other sociodemographic attributes can trigger stereotype threat. However, little research has considered the potential for stereotype threat to emerge on the basis of mental illness labeling. Study 2 of this dissertation focusing on individual-level performance, exploring the potential for ADHD to trigger stereotype threat in test-taking situations.
Results from Study 1 suggest that the specific mental illness labels studied, presented devoid of symptomatology severity, do not trigger stigmatized attributions but may trigger some negative status attributions in the case of a task relevant diagnosis. (ADHD). Study 2 suggests that a task relevant diagnosis may also trigger stereotype threat in a test-taking situation, negatively impacting performance. Taken together, the results indicate that task relevance of one's mental illness label may be a driving factor in negative external and internal perceptions of mental illness.
Item Open Access Bridging and Bonding: How Diverse Networks Influence Organizational Outcomes(2015) Fulton, Brad RobertAlthough many organizations aspire to be diverse, both in their internal composition and external collaborations, diversity's consequences for organizational outcomes remain unclear. This project uses three separate studies to examine how diversity within and across organizations influences organizational outcomes. The first study uses original data from a national study of organizations to analyze how an organization's internal social composition is associated with its performance. It advances diversity-performance research by demonstrating how the mechanisms of social bridging and social bonding can work together within a diverse organization to improve its performance. The findings suggests that an organization can improve its performance by having socially diverse members who interact often and in ways that engage their social differences. The second study integrates social capital theory and network analysis to explore the relationship between interorganizational networks and organizational action. It uses cross-sectional and panel data from a national study of congregations to analyze the collaborative partnerships congregations form to provide social services. This study demonstrates that a congregation's network ties, net of the effects of its internal characteristics, are significantly associated with the number and types of social service programs it offers. The third study illustrates how an organization's external ties can shape its action by examining black churches and their responses to people living with HIV/AIDS. It uses data from a nationally representative sample of black congregations and draws on institutional theory to analyze congregations as open systems that can be influenced by their surrounding environment. This study indicates that black churches that are engaging their external environment are significantly more likely to have an HIV/AIDS program. Overall, by analyzing how individuals interact within organizations and how organizations interact with one another, these three studies demonstrate how diverse networks influence organizational outcomes.
Item Open Access Brown Sugar and Spice: Exploring Black Girlhood at Elite, White Schools(2019) Young, Bethany JBlack girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.
Item Open Access Capitalizing on Cities: The Diffusion of Neoliberal Urban Policies in China(2012) Zhang, YanlongThe global diffusion of neoliberal economic policies is one of the most significant events in modern history. This research applies current knowledge on policy diffusion to the analysis of the diffusion of two major neoliberal urban policies among Chinese cities, namely land banking and privatization of urban infrastructures. Both policies are believed to have contributed greatly to the rapid growth of China's urban economy, and reflect the idea of capitalizing a city's tangible assets and utilizing market institutions to manage them so as to achieve economic gains.
Borrowing insights from existing diffusion theories developed by scholars from different background, this research explores the determinants of the policy innovation decisions by utilizing three theoretical models: (1) The internal determinants model, which presumes that the factors causing a local state to adopt a new policy are political, economic, and social characteristics of the local state. (2) The regional diffusion model, which posits that the geographical proximity affects diffusion by encouraging emulation and competition among neighboring states. (3) Institutional diffusion model, which proposes that a new policy may be adopted to prove the legitimacy of the organization, to cope with environment uncertainties by modeling others, to conform to the will of other organizations on which the adopters depend.
This study emphasizes the role of the Chinese states, both at the central and local levels, in building neoliberal market institutions. It pays particular attention to the effects of provincial governments' pressure, and shows that local states' dependency on higher level authorities has limited the effectiveness of such interventions. Moreover, I highlight the influence of horizontal intergovernmental relations, such as competition and emulation, on the diffusion processes, and argue that it is an important factor that has promoted the national-wide expansion of neoliberal policies. The results of this study enrich our understanding on how local policy makings are influenced by complex intergovernmental relations, and how do local states balance between local economic interests and political loyalty to higher levels when they formulate local development agenda.
Item Open Access Career Dynamics in the U.S. Civil Service(2019) Bruce, Joshua R.This dissertation examines how knowledge is developed and deployed among employees inside one of the largest internal labor markets in the United States: the federal civil service. Each chapter lays out the theoretical background behind career- and capabilities-based processes, discusses the application to the federal employment context, and tests hypotheses derived from theoretical review, extension, and development. This dissertation uses data from two similar but distinct datasets, which come from the US Office of Personnel Management’s administrative records database. These datasets cover different periods of time (either 1974-2014 or 1989-2011), but both contain core information on civil servants and their employment.
The dissertation begins with a short introduction to organizational theory and sociological research on bureaucracies. The first chapter shows, contrary to standard economic and sociological theory, generalists in the federal civil service experience higher downstream pay than specialists. Several competing mechanisms are discussed, laying the groundwork for the next chapter. The second chapter explores the mechanism of coordinative capability as a key component of civil servants’ career success, finding that integration with the skillsets of co-workers positively predicts later salaries and levels of authority. This effect is most pronounced in larger divisions of the government, where the need to coordinate among employees with diverse capabilities is greatest. Thethird chapter moves from individual processes to organizational aggregates, demonstrating the influence of public-sector personnel capabilities on private-sector research and development (R&D). This final chapter evaluates the impact of the government’s geographically-bounded scientific capabilities on private R&D funding mechanisms and the downstream likelihood of patenting by federally-funded firms.
As a whole, this dissertation traces the historical dynamics of career progression for hundreds of thousands of individuals over multiple decades, elucidating both the career dynamics experienced by civil servants as well as the external influence of those collective dynamics as allocative processes that influence non-governmental outcomes.
Item Open Access Childhood Adversities and Adult Mental Health: Conceptualizing and Measuring Heterogeneity in Adversity Experience(2022) Kamis, ChristinaThe life course perspective has long theorized that childhood is a sensitive period for mental, physical, and emotional development, meaning that negative experiences during childhood can have long-lasting impacts on health and wellbeing. Thus, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as parental alcoholism, sexual abuse, and physical neglect, during this sensitive period of the life course may elicit poor mental health both in childhood and as children age into adulthood. Although research on the long term impact of childhood adversity is growing, this research has been somewhat limited in the measurement of childhood adversity, focusing on dichotomous measures (occurred/ did not occur) or the summation of such dichotomous measures. In doing so, this research fails to capture heterogeneity in adversity experience, such as the severity, duration, and context of childhood adversities as well as how specific types of adversities may co-occur, consequently underestimating the impact of negative experiences for those at greatest risk of poor mental health. In this dissertation, I explore how these sources of distinction pattern mental health trajectories, with consequences for mental health disparities across the life course. In broadening the definition of childhood adversity beyond the simple occurrence of negative events, this dissertation provides an analytic blueprint for future research assessing childhood adversity, contributing to stress, life course, and mental health studies. In Chapter 2, I focus on a single adverse experience, parental mental health problems in childhood, to showcase how differences in severity, duration, and context of an adversity correspond to different mental health patterns across adulthood. Using six waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID; 2007-2017) and applying growth curve methods I find that more severe and longer exposures to parental mental health problems in childhood correspond to even greater distress in adulthood. The gender of the parent afflicted does not predict differences in adult mental health, but those individuals exposed to both maternal and paternal poor mental health in childhood have the greatest distress in adulthood. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two other sources of heterogeneity in childhood adversity experience: the number and type of childhood adverse events. These chapters employ latent class analysis (LCA) to capture latent subtypes who are similar in their responses to a set of indicators, essentially estimating adversity classes that capture both the number and type of adversities that co-occur. These classes are then used to predict mental health trajectories across the life course. Before assessing latent classes of childhood adversity, Chapter 3 sets the groundwork for the analytic strategy of predicting outcome trajectories by latent classes. To date, there are several methods for including a distal outcome in latent class models, with no clear analytic strategy for when the outcome of interest is a growth model. Therefore, in Chapter 3, I employ a simulation study assessing the performance of five different methods under 27 different data conditions. Results from this study suggest that a maximum-likelihood (ML) approach best captures the true parameter estimates while maintaining substantive clarity. Chapter 4 uses the identified method in Chapter 3 (ML approach) to assess how latent classes of childhood adversity relate to trajectories of mental health using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health, Wave I-IV). Findings suggest that in addition to a class represented by low adversity experience, there are two classes with greater experiences of adversity. One adversity class, characterized by household dysfunction, has greater depressive symptoms than the low adversity class in early life, and this gap is maintained into mid-adulthood. The other adversity class, characterized by maltreatment, has both greater depressive symptoms than the low adversity class in early life and becomes increasingly more depressed than this group across the life course. Overall, this dissertation contributes both methodologically and substantively to the study of childhood adversity and life course mental health. Childhood adversity has the ability to shape one’s mental health outcomes for many years after childhood, but this relationship is conditional on the lived experiences of adversity. These findings underscore the importance of severity, duration, context, type, and number of adverse events for patterning which children are at greatest risk for mental health problems in adulthood. Future work should consider these elements in favor over an over-simplified measure that may obscure the life course impact of these negative experiences.
Item Open Access Chinese Cloud Players: How Proxy Play Develops From the Game Live Streaming(2022) Gu, YueThe term “Cloud Player” (云玩家) has been widely used as a put-down of the alleged pseudo-players who actively engage in online game discussion but seldomly play games themselves, and game live streaming is considered as the major channel for those to indirectly experience games. This paper enquires into the identification and population of the so-called cloud players in China by investigating Chinese players’ habits, consumption, and preferences in game and game live streaming through survey and interviews. The study showed that cloud players are an endogenic subgroup of the Chinese game community that has been marginalized and stigmatized. Cloud player as an identity is not a static but fluid and composite status an individual can opt for in experiencing one game at a time. To analyze the complex play mechanism of cloud players, a particular play conduct named proxy play by which gamers actively take on avatars of avatars and tune their levels of agency to varying play scenarios, is proposed and elucidated based on the established research on individuals’ motivations for and engagement in game live streaming as well as reflective discussion of prominent theoretical frameworks in game studies such as the magic circle and the frame theory.
Item Open Access Cohort Succession, Intergenerational Transmission, and the Decline of Religion in the United States(2019) Brauer, Simon GeorgeScholars over the past several decades have noted the resilience of religion in the United States (Chaves 2011; Gorski and Altınordu 2008; Hadden 1987:601–2; Presser and Chaves 2007), but many recognize that the youngest US cohorts are significantly lower on several religious characteristics than older cohorts (Hout and Fischer 2014; Putnam and Campbell 2012; Voas and Chaves 2016). Scholars have proposed several explanations for this trend, disagreeing about whether it is the result of a particular cultural moment or an ongoing process leading to even greater religious decline. Replicating Voas’ (2009) model of slow, predictable decline across cohorts, I find that, surprisingly, the US closely fits the same trajectory of religious decline as European countries, suggesting a shared demographic process as opposed to idiosyncratic change. Family dynamics are an important part of this story. Family characteristics are some of the most significant predictors of religious outcomes (Hoge, Petrillo, and Smith 1982; Smith and Denton 2005; Uecker and Ellison 2012), but only a few studies have examined how aggregate religious decline is shaped by family processes (Chaves 1991; Crockett and Voas 2006; Kelley and De Graaf 1997). Even fewer have done so using self-reported data from members of several generations of the same families (Bengtson et al. 2018; Bengtson, Putney, and Harris 2013; Smith and Denton 2005). I advance this line of research by decomposing within-family, inter-generational religious decline into components that can be attributed to factors within the family and those that cannot. Whereas the combination of individual and family characteristics explains the decline in religious service attendance within families, it does not explain much of the decline in self-rated religiosity, suggesting that the intergenerational transmission of religious behavior operates differently than the intergenerational transmission of internal sense of religiosity. I consider these findings in light of theory and research by developmental psychologists and sociologists of the family on what leads children to adopt (or not) their parents’ values, attitudes, and practices.