Browsing by Subject "Sociology"

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Advancing Pharmacy Practice Through Social Theory
(University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy, 2011) Rovers, John
Although there is a substantial role for social theory in explaining patients’ health behaviors, it does not appear that pharmacists commonly use such theories to provide patient care. This paper attempts to demonstrate an explicit link between social theory and pharmacy practice. The theory of structure and agency and the practice problem of poor medication adherence (MA) in patients with HIV/AIDS are used as exemplars to illustrate such a link. Factors influencing MA were identified from qualitative studies of adherence in patients with HIV/AIDS. All factors identified were stratified into one of four categories: agency related factors that facilitate MA; agency related factors that are barriers to MA; structural factors that facilitate MA; structural factors that are barriers to MA. Stratifying MA in this manner allows pharmacists to identify clinical interventions that are targeted towards the specific cause of MA problems.
All Care is Health Care: How Healthcare-Legal Partnerships Are Challenging the Biomedical Paradigm
(2018-05-05) Bhatnagar, Prashasti
This project comprehensively examines how healthcare-legal partnerships (HLPs) are challenging the biomedical paradigm. I explore this in clinics through rich semi-structured interviews with HLP advocates (social workers, healthcare administrators, nurses, lawyers, and physicians) and focus groups with patients. In this paper, I will highlight the ways in which on-site legal services in clinics help in breaking down barriers that limit access to care and thus reduce anxiety and stress in patients. I will also argue that while helpful, HLPs continue to operate under a neoliberal biomedical model-based health care system and hence, do not provide a comprehensive solution to the complex health needs of patients. Health issues are not just legal issues; they are social issues that need to be addressed using a structural care approach.
Assembling the Orthodox Soul: Practices of Religious Self-Formation among Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy
(2013-07) Winchester, Daniel Alan
This dissertation is the result of a multi-sited ethnographic study of contemporary conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region of Minnesota. Theoretically, this case study of Orthodox conversions is utilized as a way to better approach and account for the phenomenon of religious self-formation, here defined as the process by which social actors, with the aid and encouragement of others, incorporate aspects of a religious tradition into their own subjective experiences and self-interpretations. Through talking, interacting, and practicing with Orthodox Christian converts, this study provides answers to how individuals come to inhabit and experience a religious system as a personal reality, making a particular construal of the religious world a formative part of how they experience themselves as persons. While the empirical details are necessarily confined to the ethnographic case at hand, central to this dissertation is a wider claim that coming to grips with the question of how religious cultural systems enter into the lived experiences of individuals requires a better understanding of the constitutive effects of religious practices on those who perform them. Moreover, through detailed analyses of three significant religious practices and their phenomenological effects on the converts who participated in them, I demonstrate how these constitutive relationships between particular religious practices and subjectivities unfolded over time and in context, extending cross-disciplinary literatures on religious narrative, embodiment, and materiality.
Branding consent: the role of employer brand in retail labor process control.
(2011-01) Smith, Deborah A.
This study uses the case of retail work at a high-line branded home furnishings store to examine how employer brand operates in retail labor control. Specifically, the study examines how gender and class as meshed are exploited by the organization for control, and how worker consent to exploitation allows for positive self-feeling linked to positive class and gender identity. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that workers buy into the organization's gendered class directives demonstrated through the brand because it allows them to construct enhanced (gendered) class identities. Workers produce, consume, and realize symbolic status in their work, in turn feeling elevated in class, but this feeling is only sustained by continuing the work. I present this as a strong system of labor control, observing that status hits delivered by customers and managers are followed by worker efforts to reverse that damage. I also suggest the system is not seamless, showing how work contradictions are linked to worker resistance, and resistance is linked to workers' class and gender identifications. Introducing the concept of identity labor, I indicate a distinctive labor type associated with the branded labor process wherein enactment of employer brand meanings is part of work.
Child Out-of-Home Placement: Assessment Process as Contributing Factor to Racial Disparities
(2011-07-19) Rieland, Ashley
The social work system, like many other organizations is bombarded with laws, rules, and guidelines. Weber‟s theory of formal rationalization warns of a system in which human judgments are wiped away and replaced by non-human technologies that carry out processes designed to create a profit by the most cost effective means possible. Although the social work system is a state agency organized to offer services to families and individuals in need rather than to create a profit, elements of a formally rational system are apparent. Substantive rationality, or the use of values to make decisions, is decreased by the implementation of assessment tools designed to take the error out of the human decision making process. The assessment process used to determine whether a child should be placed in out-of-home care has created victims to the system, another element of a formally rational operation. According to data published by the Minnesota Department of Human Services (2010), there is a clear discrepancy between Native American, African American, and Caucasian American populations in regards to the rates of children that have been placed in out-of-home care. Through conducting my research I am attempting to explore certain factors that have led to these disparities in placement rates among different racial groups in Minnesota. The current research will focus on the social workers‟ assessment process and how their tools and discretion affect placement rates. I chose to focus on the assessment process rather than on the possible reasons for increased reporting and therefore placement of minority racial groups. With higher reporting of minority groups to Child Protection Services it is assumed that the placement rates will be higher as well; however it will be interesting to determine what, if any, factors are built into the assessment process that mitigate higher reporting rates. Reporting is based on the community, teachers, doctors and others in connection with children whom they may perceive to be in danger. The standards of what constitutes proper child treatment vary among different people, especially when it comes to different races and their differing practices (Brissett-Chapman 1997). I am interested in analyzing how the social work system helps, if at all, to alleviate the higher reporting of some races by taking into account differences in child treatment by different racial groups. Specifically, I address the following research questions: With stricter guidelines and the use of standardized assessment tools, is it possible to include substantive rationality or the use of values in the social work system? What facets of the assessment tools are specifically designed for racial sensitivity? To what extent are social workers able to use their own judgments to determine whether children need to be removed from their homes and how do they take differing racial norms into consideration?
Collective identity and African American views of Africa, African immigrants, and immigrant entitlements.
(2010-06) Pendaz, Sadie
In this dissertation, I examine how collective memory and collective identity impact African American interpretations of Africa, African immigrants and African immigrant participation in affirmative action programs. The setting of the research is the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota (the "Twin Cities"), which has a notable historical and contemporary African American population and the largest eastern African population of immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Sudan. I find that rather than expanding their definition of African American ethnic identity through their interactions with African immigrants, African Americans, relied on a bifurcated notion of the historical place of Africa as part of the two-ness of African American ethnic identity, and African immigrants as an on-the-ground reality. Methodologiclly, I use historical newspaper analysis and extensive in-depth interviews with African Americans and eastern Africans from the Twin Cities. Theoretically I analyze theories of collective memory, intergroup contact and challenge the notion that African American ethnic identity is equatable with black racial identity.
The contexts of parental job loss and children's educational attainment
(2014-12) Arbeit, Caren
Prior research on the effects of parental job loss on children has paid little attention to the life course and contextual features of parental job loss. In my dissertation, I examine three such contexts: timing of job loss in the child's life, family socioeconomic status, the number of parental job losses and the duration of parental unemployment spells. The dissertation contains three related papers; I focus on a cohort of children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, to examine the relationship between these contexts of parental job loss and educational attainment at age 25. In the first paper, I draw from interdisciplinary research on parental job loss, sibling differences and life course theories. I consider whether the timing of a parent's job loss moderates the impact of the event on children's educational attainment in adulthood. The results suggest that, contrary to theory, timing is not a significant moderator. In the second paper, I examine the educational attainment of children born into socioeconomically similar families, but whom have divergent experiences related to parental job loss. I find that family SES primarily moderates the probability of experiencing a parental job loss. Finally, I focus on the impact of the number of parental job losses, the duration of parental unemployment spells and the interaction between number of job losses and the length of unemployment spells. I find that any parental job loss harms educational attainment, with a non-linear relationship between exposure to parental job loss and educational attainment at age 15. This dissertation on the timing of parental job loss, family socioeconomic background and exposure to job loss/unemployment helps create a fuller picture of the potential consequences of parental job loss on children's educational attainment.
Engaging the dialectic: managerial resistance to change and innovation in corporate America.
(2012-07) Chermack, Kelly
This dissertation examines the implementation of FREE, an innovation-based, organization-wide workplace flexibility initiative. Through FREE, the company experienced a massive re-structuring to how, when, and where work was done. From its very inception in the company, the FREE concept critiqued and criticized current norms and assumptions about work in corporate America. During FREE training sessions, managers, in particular, began to oppose and resist the rollout. Evident from fieldwork and ethnographic observations of these training sessions, a dialectic model of change fostered a dialectic model of resistance. Resistance emerged at three levels of abstraction: macro, meso, and micro. Analyses indicate that through the operation of these dialectic processes, managers resisted the very idea of changing work on a grad scale, changes in actual work practices, and/or the change agents. In addition, this resistance prompted changes to the change implementation process and FREE, itself, began to change. This dissertation suggests that resistance to change is rooted in conceptualizations of identity and representations of the self in and out of the organization. This work also proposes that resistance to change bears a significant impact on the implementation of the change, so much so that the implementation adapted over time.
Envisioning adult lives: adolescent aspirations and expectations of work and family.
(2008-06) Copher, Ronda Marie
Adolescence provides a portal for understanding the life course, to examine how ideas for the future coalesce and potentially change during this time. The configurations of adolescent aspirations and expectations tell us how adolescents see adulthood, and to a lesser extent about the conceptualization of the roles they will later occupy. To further understand the process of life course formation, I examine the process of cognitive orientations toward work and family roles during adolescence. My dissertation addresses the larger question of life course formation, emphasizing the dynamic and multidimensionality of people's lives and the importance of the self in life course formation. With longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study, specifically survey data from 496 girls and 431 boys of the over 1000 adolescents survey annually since 1987, using latent class modeling, I investigate three issues: first, adolescent cognitive orientations, which are the configurations of adolescent aspirations and expectations during the adolescent period of the life course--specifically the first and last years of high school. Second, I assess the influence of precursors to and the outcomes at age 25 of the adolescent cognitive orientations. Third, I examine whether there are gender differences in the cognitive orientations of adolescent girls and boys, as well as differences in the effects of precursors and outcomes. Adolescent girls and boys exhibit both similarities and differences in their cognitive orientations. In 9 th grade, 5 different cognitive orientations characterized adolescent girls ( conventional, educationally uncertain, ambitious, occupationally ambitious, and uncertain ). In 12 th grade, adolescent girls revealed 5 cognitive orientations ( conventional, vocationally oriented, low aspirations, uncertain, and ambitious ). In contrast, 9 th grade boys had 4 cognitive orientations ( conventional, below average, uncertain, and occupationally ambitious ) and 12 th grade boys had 4 cognitive orientations ( ambitious, conventional, low aspirations, and uncertain ). Further, the effects of family, education and work experiences on the 12 th grade cognitive orientations are varied. Results additionally suggest a limited relationship of adolescent cognitive orientations to adult roles. From the empirical investigation of adolescent aspirations and expectations I derive four general conclusions which are discussed.
Forced migration processes and global refugees at the borders of Europe in Ukraine
(2014-08) Rechitsky, Raphi Konstantin
As of 2013, nearly half of the world's refugees stay in camps adjacent to countries of origin, largely in the Global South. Yet it is those people on the move able to seek asylum near Global North countries that have become objects of control and exclusion. This dissertation explores this asylum paradox with an extended case study of refugee migration to Ukraine, asking why do refugees stay or move again from this buffer country to the European Union (EU). It does so by exploring the impact of social network formation, household resources, and international refugee policy on the capacity, motivation, and execution of either onward mobility or settlement. Using interviews and observation in three Ukrainian cities with urban refugees from 25 countries, triangulated with legal aid case files, this project shows that questions of social action, such as why people move, are best answered by taking seriously first person narrative research methodologies. Specifically, findings demonstrate (1) the security of social networks drives capacity to move or stay; (2) access to different resources influences exit, voice, or adaptation; and (3) refugees seek to settle or move on regardless of EU-funded humanitarian policy for their local integration. This study challenges the transnational paradigm in migration studies, bridging literatures on how migration is sustained with political sociology and refugee studies. The contribution links micro and macro levels in the sociology of migration, building on recent studies of migration trust networks, Bourdieu's view on the transfer of capital in everyday life, and the role of international institutions in the extraterritorial "remote control" of asylum.
From tragedy to opportunity: long-term development in post-disaster intentional communities in Honduras.
(2012-06) Alaniz, Ryan Chelese
With 2010 witnessing the second highest number of global disasters in history, climate change has spurred interest concerning how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should respond with long-term development strategies in post-disaster communities, especially those in fragile states. This comparative case study examines how two intentional Honduran communities built for survivors (comprised of traumatized and displaced poor people) of Hurricane Mitch (1998), Divina Providencia and Ciudad España, developed since the disaster. Although initially similar based on demographics, the communities are dramatically different today in social health (defined as low crime, social capital, social cohesion, vision, sustainability, and community participation). My doctoral research combines household surveys (N=1,918), 74 interviews, nine months of ethnography, and archival research in an analysis of what mechanisms shaped the social health trajectory of each community. I found that both communities have had varying degrees of success and conflict due in large part to the Honduran context and decisions and practices implemented by sponsoring non-governmental organization including: time horizons/long-term commitment, organizational resources, spatial design, community size, and coercive mechanisms by the organizations. Although both communities faced similar constraints, such as trauma and broken social networks, Divina overcame many hurdles with the help of a strong NGO presence, organizational resources, a long-term commitment, and coercive means. It was able to foster cultural structures that created a healthier community than resident pre-Mitch neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa. Certain emergent norms of community life prevented the Divina community from falling back upon old structures and norms (which were inequitable and socially unhealthy). However, its top-down paternalist approach led to protests by community residents, the creation of dependency on the NGO, and issues of possible long-term sustainability without organizational support. While Ciudad España did have better social health than the former communities in Tegucigalpa, its partnership approach failed to establish emergent norms that would have promoted stronger social health indicators. There was less NGO influence, fewer organizational resources over time, shorter time commitment, and almost no coercive means. Although España has lower social health than Divina, the community has had less conflict and is more independent.
Gang task forces: formation, network structure, and effectiveness
(2010-12) Barrows, Julie S.
Gang task forces are multi-agency collaborations that seek to address and quell gang problems in the communities they serve. From a sociological perspective, gang task forces offer a rich topic ripe for study. Why do gang task forces form? Are certain demographic and political environments more conducive to gang task force implementation? Which agencies participate in gang task forces? What relationships exist between gang task force participants and non-participants? Are gang task forces effective in combating real or perceived gang problems? This study is the first attempt to answer these important questions by examining every gang task force in operation in the United States today. Using a mixed methods approach, this study compares original survey data collected from 197 of the 249 gang task forces in current operation to secondary data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA), and the FBI's Uniform Crime Report to examine whether certain metropolitan areas are more likely to implement a gang task force and whether gang task forces are successful in curbing youth violence. After describing survey responses about gang task force formation and presenting a life table of the survival and hazard rate of gang task formation, the results of the Cox regression analyses suggest that gang task forces are likely to form in politically liberal areas of relative affluence with high juvenile crime rates. Further, and again after describing survey responses about gang task force effectiveness, the results of the fixed effects models suggest that gang task forces may indeed lower official juvenile crime rates while controlling for geographic region, race, socio-economic status, and political affiliation. To complement the national study of gang task force formation, structure and effectiveness, a case study of one particular gang task force, the Metro Gang Strike Force in Minnesota (MGSF) is presented. After describing the organizational structure and network of relationships that exist in gang task forces according to national survey respondents, the case study provides a closer look into the structure of and relationships in the MGSF. A social network analysis examines the network positions of 27 of the 34 MGSF participants, and provides a visual depiction of their relationships. Overall, this national study of gang task forces and case study of the MGSF offers the first 1) attempt to explain why such multi-agency collaborations form, 2) glimpse inside the network of a gang task force, and 3) evaluation of the success of gang task forces. As the first study of its kind, results are preliminary and subject to the limitations of the available data and evaluation research. However, this comprehensive analysis can be extended to studies of other private and public sector initiatives, and paves the way for much needed future research on gang task forces specifically
Gendered careers in changing social and institutional contexts: criminology in the post-WWII era
(2009-03) Flood, Sarah M.
This dissertation is simultaneously a study in the sociology of science, especially criminology, the life course, and gender relations in academia. I examine careers of male and female criminologists spanning nearly six decades in the post-WWII United States from a life course perspective, focusing on both careers stages and career trajectories as well as investigating differences by cohort membership, gender, and graduate department affiliation. Survey and interview data along with detailed information about crime-related scholarship published in leading sociology and criminology journals illustrate the unfolding of careers over time and offer insights into how and why careers progressed as they did. Cohort membership helps us understand how large scale changes affected individual opportunities and experiences, though career mobility and trajectories were largely stable over time. While gender initially appeared to play a limited role in the careers of male and female scholars, explicit attention to work and family life in the analysis of career trajectories demonstrated how the lives of scholars are clearly gendered at their intersection. Graduate department differences reflected both the concentration of specialized training programs in non-Research 1 institutions and the career opportunities available. My work illustrates the strengths of the life course approach, considering specific historical, social, and institutional contexts, demonstrating the interlock of work and family life, and showing the importance of early career experiences for institutional mobility and career trajectories. At the same time, my findings also contribute to our knowledge about the history and sociology of criminology, the empirical examination of careers, and work in the stratification of science.
Imperial Medicine: An Ethnography of Immigrant Experiences after the Affordable Care Act
(2019-07) Jimenez, Anthony
My dissertation illustrates affinity between the US health care system and border control. I conducted 11 months of ethnography at Justicia y Paz (JyP), a volunteer-run NGO based in Houston, Texas that provides free food, clothing, basic medical services and temporary shelter to hundreds of undocumented immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia each year. I supplement this data with hundreds of informal interviews and 36 semi-structured in-depth interviews with migrants, volunteers, and city employees affiliated with Houston's medical district. I find that immigrant health care is premised less on legality (i.e., being documented) and more on legibility (i.e. being recognizable to health care practitioners in particular ways). Drawing on Harsha Walia's theory of border imperialism, which draws insights from critical race theory, Marxist analysis, feminist studies, and poststructuralism, I argue that illegality is not simply a determinant of but also determined by health disparities. Today's health care system operates like a border where the racialized terms of illegality are regulated, (re)produced and actively contested. My research illuminates these processes through examining how health care is understood, provided, and received at the medical district, NGO, and migrant levels. In doing so, I make several theoretical contributions to the areas of medical sociology and immigration and develop practical considerations for health practitioners and NGOs with health equity aims. On a theoretical level, I illustrate convergence between the welfare and carceral state, advance theoretical debates around medicalization, and add nation to analyzes between caregiving and masculinity. On a practical level, I implicate health practitioners and equity-oriented NGOs like JyP in different forms of migrant suffering and offer considerations for becoming social justice allies.
In the system for too long: former foster youth and the structural ambivalence towards mental health
(2014-08) Baiocchi, Arturo
A growing research literature documents that young people who "age out" of foster care (after turning 18 or in some states 21) frequently encounter challenging obstacles during their transition into adulthood, and in particular are susceptible to poor mental health and substance abuse problems throughout their early twenties. Drawing from an 8-month longitudinal study of 26 young people transitioning out of care, the dissertation reports on the conflicted relationship that some former foster youth have with service providers, mental health programs and ideas of seeking help more generally, during their transition out of care. The dissertation argues that many former foster youth endorse conventional health beliefs about the efficacy of mental health treatments, but are nonetheless ambivalent about re-integrating themselves with what they perceive as an inconsistent and untrustworthy system of social services and public supports. This sense of what I describe as "structural ambivalence " reflects the inconsistent and contradictory forms of support that many foster youth received while wards of the state, and underpins many of their decisions as young adults to avoid and resist prolonged engagement with social services. Structural ambivalence has implications for meso-level theories of health seeking behavior, and in particular recent frameworks that emphasize the role that social networks and culture play in shaping the dynamic engagement that young consumers have with mental health treatments. This conceptual framework also highlights the contradictory logics of welfare and public health institutions more broadly in the US, and the troubling situation that former foster youth find themselves in while navigating these public systems during their uncertain transition to adulthood.
Individual, family, and community factors that predict economic self-sufficiency: An analysis of Minnesotans who receive community action agency services.
(2011-09) MartinRogers, Nicole
The research question addressed by this dissertation is: What household (individual and family) characteristics and community-level factors contribute to continued material hardship and welfare dependence and inhibit economic self-sufficiency among low-income families? The individuals who participated in this study are clients of one of the 28 community action agencies in Minnesota. Community action agencies are nonprofit organizations that receive funding from the federal Community Services Block Grant to address poverty at the community level. Here the term economic self-sufficiency is used to define a state of being for individuals and families that meet two criteria. The first component is income source. To be self-sufficient, a household must be receiving more than half of their income from sources other than public assistance. The second component is income adequacy. To be economically self-sufficient a household also must not be experiencing material hardship, meaning that they are able to afford both food and housing expenses. To examine the relationship between economic self-sufficiency and various individual/family and county-level variables, multilevel regression modeling techniques were used. The key findings are that: demographic characteristics are generally related to self-sufficiency and the impact of these variables on self-sufficiency is reduced when cash and non-cash supports are controlled in the models; participants' access to and use of cash-and non-cash supports are strong predictors of self-sufficiency, even after controlling for the impact of county-level factors; and nonprofit density is the only county-level factor that is significantly related to individual participants' self-sufficiency, and the nature of this relationship is still unclear. The results of this dissertation suggest that public programs geared toward promoting self-sufficiency should focus on increasing access to non-cash resources and supports, especially in the areas of transportation and housing. Also, community action agencies should make it a goal to register their clients who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. These agencies should also address major barriers to self-sufficiency by assessing and responding to needs for transportation, housing, and child care. More research is needed on the cost effectiveness of various policy and program solutions to improve self-sufficiency.
It takes a village? neighborhoods and children's readiness for school
(2014-01) Wruck, Peter Jordan
From classical theorists like Durkheim, to the Chicago School's Park and Burgess (1916) and Shaw and McKay (1942), to today's work in criminology, sociologists have demonstrated clear relationships between residential context and a variety of outcomes. We also know that children vary in their school readiness. A variety of social forces push and pull on preschool age children and impact their overall school readiness, including family, health, institutions, and neighborhood. This research bridges the neighborhood and early education research literatures to answer three questions: first, is there an association between neighborhoods and school readiness in the United States? Second, which social disorganization-theory informed neighborhood characteristics are most salient in describing this observed association? Finally, do families act as a mediator of this relationship? Given the literature and theory, I hypothesized that these relationships would be substantial and endure across a variety of definitions of neighborhood and school readiness. My results, however, paint a different picture: while neighborhoods appear to be associated with school readiness, the importance of this association is perhaps best described as mild. This has important implications for neighborhood and social capital theories, as well as future research into neighborhood effects on individuals and families.
Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles
(University of California Press, 2021) Savelsberg, Joachim J.
How do victim and perpetrator peoples generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Joachim J. Savelsberg answers this question in the context of the Armenian genocide committed during the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, Savelsberg examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interactions, public rituals, law, and politics. He draws on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony to illuminate the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. Ultimately, this study reveals the counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, demonstrating the implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.
Legal context and youth drug use: a multilevel analysis of the European Union.
(2009-06) Vuolo, Michael Christopher
Though it has produced a high quality body of research, the study of substance use has remained highly individualized in its focus. This dissertation adds a sociological understanding to that research. A review of theories within sociology, particularly neoinstitutionalism, and within criminology, particularly social disorganization and strain theory, points to the conclusion that both national legal culture and local structural factors should not be overlooked in studies of substance use. This approach is particularly fruitful in law and criminal justice, where much differentiation exists among nations in the enforcement of laws. Using hierarchical models, the following explores individual level substance use and opinions about drug policy using variation at three levels, taking into account individual characteristics, local context, and national legal culture. Two main findings emerge from these models. First, national level legal context plays a role in understanding individual level probabilities of substance use and opinions on drug policy, even after controlling for individual and local characteristics. Second, the effects of the components of theories on the ecology of crime, namely social disorganization and strain theory, depend on the characteristics of the individuals that are experiencing them. Both levels of these contextual effects more firmly root the study of substance use, and crime more generally, in debates within sociology.
Mapping trends: patterns of employment trajectories in the United States, 1967-2005.
(2012-01) Huang, Reiping
This thesis systematically examines the overall patterns of employment histories in the United States based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1967- 2005). Over 15,000 individual employment trajectories, including those from previously under-studied social groups such as workers in the secondary labor market, blue-collar occupations, and those outside big firms, were compared by optimal matching analysis and cluster analysis. Accounting for gender, age period, and birth cohort, the distance of Americans’ career paths from the stable, full-time trajectories was found to be decreasing over time when careers were examined holistically; meanwhile, career paths have become more homogeneous to one another. Gender gap in employment trajectories has considerably declined. These trends have been driven primarily by women’s increasing engagement in full-time employment while men’s trajectories have changed only slightly. Three primary patterns of employment trajectories were found—an unstable, part-time pattern, a stable, inactive pattern, and a stable, full-time pattern that accounted for about three-quarter of the cases. Those in the stable, full-time pattern, particularly men, were highly likely to continue this type of employment trajectories into older ages. A modest occupation effect was found in which white-collar workers and those in occupations dominated by men, such as managers and administrators and machine operatives, were more positively associated with the stable, full-time pattern than those from other occupations, even after gender was taken into account. Overall, this study draws an optimistic picture of employment trajectories that contradicts current perceptions about the disappearance of long-term, full-time employment. Its conclusions, however, need to be interpreted with caution given a possible under-estimation of job changes, part-time work, and underemployment as well as an under-representation of women, economically less active people, and those in big family units due to data quality issues.

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