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Burgoon's expectancy violation model posits that nonverbal rule violations will be evaluated according to the perceptions toward the violator and the behavior itself. However, the violator may have perceptions regarding the appropriateness of the rule. This study measured the perceptions of high school students regarding the rules for classroom interaction. It is believed that the rules for classroom interaction are rules which have been learned through the process of socialization and enculturation into the classroom setting throughout students' careers. These rules should be well known...

This thesis provides a detailed analysis of UK Aid policy over the period 1974-90. Its focus is primarily upon the extent to which official aid was concerned with poverty alleviation. This theme permitted a comparison to be made between the records of the Labour administration of 1974-79 and the Conservative administration of 1979-90. A quantitative comparison is made of the two aid programmes. The philosophical, moral and ideological aspects of the British aid programme are explored. Two themes in particular are studied in depth: aid and gender and aid and the environment. The influence o...

Karl Mannheim, and Karl Marx suggested that there is a relationship between economic and political institutions and that behaviors and attitudes are influenced by this. Viewing this postulate as a conception which posits the economic mode of production as the locus of causality for culture, this examination of capitalism as culture, investigates how education and its pedagogical techniques, as a means of "enculturation," reflects the capitalist economic mode of production. Building on the theoretical notions in the Sociology of knowledge and Structuralism, this hermeneutical analysis discus...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of clarifying students' misperceptions regarding their peers' consumption of alcohol and feelings of comfort in drinking situations. Quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to determine if providing students with information would impact on their perceptions. A posttest-only control-group experimental design was employed to investigate the efficacy of clarifying students' misperceptions. The experimental group was provided with information gleaned from the literature regarding students' misperceptions. Participants were administe...

This study analyses the legal condition of women in Catalonia, Spain, in the early modern ages, particularly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by way of the study of primary legal sources. The legal discourse was conceived as being different for men and women: women were treated as a specific social category, were judicially discriminated against and were given inferior legal personality. Following the moral discourse of the time, jurists classified women as honest and dishonest, and tried to establish a physical and legal barrier to divide the good from the bad. As a result, wo...

AIDS has become a ubiquitous disease of catastrophic proportions. In this 'sex study' included as part of the Advocate magazine in 1994, attitudes and sexual activities of 13,000 gay men nationwide were surveyed. A set of research hypotheses were made, these were: that there would be a relationship between various sociodemographic, intepersonal and relational, substance use, sexual, experiential, and health care variables and high-risk sexual behavior. Some of these hypotheses were confirmed, while others were not. The particular value of this study is that it was nationwide, contained large ...

This thesis proposes a reconceptualization of the "attitude" as a multidimensional latent process, which may be unstable across situations, individuals, and time. A review of the literature in light of this reconceptualization reveals aspects of the survey situation that may systematically influence measures of attitudes, behaviors, and social norms. This suggests that contradictory findings regarding attitude-behavior consistency may be partly due to specific inadequacies of conventional measures. A reflexive research strategy is proposed, which supplements survey methods with both quantitat...

The electrostatic interaction between two charged spheres in the presence of a screening electrolyte is calculated at the level of the linearized Debye-Hückel theory. The calculation is performed analytically as a multipole expansion by applying two-center spherical harmonic expansions and symbolic manipulation methods. I focus on charge-charge and charge-induced dipole interactions, calculated for two spheres of possibly unequal size. The former interaction is given to good approximation by the familiar Debye-Hückel form ~ q1q2exp[-k(R-2a)]/[(epsilon*r(1+ka)^2]. The new results are ...

In this dissertation I investigate how community context affects Spanish language use and English proficiency among Latina and Latino children in the United States, focusing on the children of immigrants. I view children's language attributes through a sociological perspective that recognizes that children learn and use languages within specific social and cultural contexts, and that these contexts have an important effect on language acquisition and use. This theoretical perspective leads to the hypothesis that children's language skills and language use will be affected by the communities t...

Has 20th century literary technique been influenced by the cinema? The obvious answer is yes. But with that answer few specific examples are ever provided, frustrating the reader and filmgoer alike. This study does give specifics drawn from the novels, short stories and screenplays of Argentine writer Beatriz Guido (1925-1988), wife of noted film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Cinematic narrative techniques and literary narrative techniques share features in common, a mutual influence, but also important differences. Here these are examined in detail. Students and fans of film and Latin Amer...