View All Items

Title: "Going Greek": A social history of Jewish college fraternities in the United States, 1895-1945.
Creator: Sanua, Marianne R., Columbia University
Abstract/Description: Secret student societies have an extensive history reaching back to medieval Europe. In the U.S., the so-called "Greek System" began its ascent in influence at American colleges from the 1820s onward and in particular after the Civil War (the use of Greek letters was meant to recall the glories of the ancients and to stress the difference between the "Greeks" on the one hand, and the excluded "barbarians" on the other). Despite their objectionable aspects, college administrators saw...
Show moreSecret student societies have an extensive history reaching back to medieval Europe. In the U.S., the so-called "Greek System" began its ascent in influence at American colleges from the 1820s onward and in particular after the Civil War (the use of Greek letters was meant to recall the glories of the ancients and to stress the difference between the "Greeks" on the one hand, and the excluded "barbarians" on the other). Despite their objectionable aspects, college administrators saw fraternities as an advantageous and inexpensive way to feed, house, and control students, as well as to foster alumni loyalty. In addition, the social training and contacts students gained were considered an asset in the world of business and public life following graduation into an increasingly industrialized and capitalist working world. By 1900 the "Greek system" was an integral part of American higher education, completely dominating campus social life and student politics even when members did not make up the numerical majority., However, the system was effectively barred to Jews because of Christian symbolism inherent in fraternity rituals, the reluctance to share living quarters with them, and most often explicit racial and religious restrictive clauses in fraternity constitutions. Such exclusion was intolerable for an immigrant/ethnic group which sought higher education as a form of social and economic advancement and which attended college and professional school in hugely disproportionate numbers. American Jews with means to do so therefore both retaliated and sought comfort among their own by forming a complete parallel fraternity and sorority system which functioned separately from the Gentile groups into the 1950s and in some cases well into the 1960s, until a combination of anti-sectarianism, student indifference, and profound changes in post-World War II American society led to its decline., This work is an institutional biography and impressionistic narrative using surviving archives and periodicals of the historically Jewish fraternities concentrating on their heyday from 1920 to 1940 and focussing on the twin themes of external anti-Semitism and internal self-hatred. Other themes include: manifestations of the "Best Behavior" syndrome, whereby Jews sought safety by punctilious observance of Gentile modes of deportment; vocational fears of young Jews, especially during the Great Depression; the phenomenon of Jewish student migrancy; intergenerational relations between alumni and undergraduate members; and finally, the extensive social life and match-making role of the Jewish fraternity system.
Show less
Date Issued: 1994, 1994
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40781
Subject Headings: History, United States, Education, History of, Education, Higher
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "I don't see color - we're all just human beings": Phenomenology of students' online discourses on race, ethnicity and prejudice.
Creator: Kanata, Tamie., Arizona State University
Abstract/Description: This study provides a phenomenological inquiry of the way in which students of intercultural communication engage in online dialogues on issues related to race, ethnicity and prejudice. Particularly, it interrogates the structures of their preconsciousness (modalities) of their expressions on race, ethnicity and prejudice, as they are revealed through their lived experience in online dialogues. Students' specific manners of seeing (or not seeing) the meanings and significance of race and...
Show moreThis study provides a phenomenological inquiry of the way in which students of intercultural communication engage in online dialogues on issues related to race, ethnicity and prejudice. Particularly, it interrogates the structures of their preconsciousness (modalities) of their expressions on race, ethnicity and prejudice, as they are revealed through their lived experience in online dialogues. Students' specific manners of seeing (or not seeing) the meanings and significance of race and ethnicity are thus explicated., The study reveals the following four modalities of students' seeing of race, ethnicity and prejudice: (1) Primacy of the U.S. core values of freedom and individual choices structures students' ways of seeing and hearing racially/ethnically different others' experiences as real or not real; (2) Ahistoric and disembodied knowledge regarding self and others directs their understanding of race, ethnicity and others' experience of prejudice; (3) The U.S. assimilationist history creates an assumed absence of meaning on race and ethnicity; and (4) Experiencing others' different modalities of experiencing the world, through hearing others' lived experiences, facilitates one's reexamination of a taken-for-granted modality of existence. The implications of the study in the areas of whiteness studies and pedagogy are discussed, and directions for future research are also presented.
Show less
Date Issued: 2003, 2003
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40370
Subject Headings: Education, Bilingual and Multicultural, Speech Communication, Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "On the vanguard of civilization": Slavery, the police, and conflicts between public and private power in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, 1835-1888.
Creator: Brown, Alexandra Kelly., The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract/Description: Set in the context of an urban slave system in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia, this dissertation focuses on the police as an instrument of social control over the urban slave population and the ways in which slaves turned those same mechanisms of control to their own advantage. In the two decades following independence from Portugal in 1822, members of the planter class struggled to counter the ensuing social turmoil by establishing new structures by which to govern the...
Show moreSet in the context of an urban slave system in the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador da Bahia, this dissertation focuses on the police as an instrument of social control over the urban slave population and the ways in which slaves turned those same mechanisms of control to their own advantage. In the two decades following independence from Portugal in 1822, members of the planter class struggled to counter the ensuing social turmoil by establishing new structures by which to govern the population. A revolt of African slaves and freedmen (1835) in the city of Salvador had made Brazilian elites painfully aware of the danger the black population posed to the stability of the emerging state; fearful of another rebellion, lawmakers and prominent slaveholders ceded to Bahia's police forces the authority necessary to monitor the urban population of slaves and free people of color., Yet in the process masters sacrificed some of their own private power and came to resent police interference in their affairs. As agents of state authority, police interfered with the interests of individual owners when they arrested and beat slaves against their masters' wishes or investigated charges that slaveholders treated bondsmen with a degree of cruelty that violated the furthest accepted limits of castigation. Violence against slaves gradually emerged as a central point of contention among elites who, in the courts and legislatures, struggled to conciliate their demands for orderly slaves with newly adopted notions of humane justice appropriate to the kind of "civilized" society to which they imagined they belonged. And, by the 1870s, elites publicly voiced their condemnations of the "barbarism" and "immorality" of the men of color who made up Bahia's police forces., Such conflicts between masters and the police created a breach in the social order. Slaves used that division both when they appealed to their masters' social prestige to protect them in conflicts with police and when they relied on the police to launch legal challenges against their owners. Slaves thus turned to their own advantage an institution that had been designed to control them, until the final abolition of slavery in 1888.
Show less
Date Issued: 1998, 1998
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40886
Subject Headings: History, Black, History, Latin American, 0328, 0336
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "Subversive" southerners: Three uncommon lawyers and civil liberties in the South, 1945-1965.
Creator: Brown, Sarah Hart., Georgia State University
Abstract/Description: During the period of reaction after World War II American lawyers became leaders in the quest for conformity. The all white, elitist American Bar Association condemned attorneys whose clients employed the Fifth Amendment and censured liberal and leftist lawyers. Southern lawyers and judges who defied post-war efforts to reinvigorate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enjoyed the respect of their fellows, as did federal investigators who overlooked the First and Sixth Amendments while...
Show moreDuring the period of reaction after World War II American lawyers became leaders in the quest for conformity. The all white, elitist American Bar Association condemned attorneys whose clients employed the Fifth Amendment and censured liberal and leftist lawyers. Southern lawyers and judges who defied post-war efforts to reinvigorate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enjoyed the respect of their fellows, as did federal investigators who overlooked the First and Sixth Amendments while searching for subversives., This study examines the careers of three native white southerners who practiced civil liberties law in the south between 1945 and 1965: John Moreno Coe, of Pensacola, Florida, Clifford Judkins Durr of Montgomery, Alabama, and Benjamin Eugene Smith of New Orleans, Louisiana. Faithful New Deal Democrats before 1945, Coe and Smith campaigned for Henry Wallace in 1948, while Durr, a recently resigned member of the Federal Communications Commission, remained aloof from that campaign. All became officers of the National Lawyers Guild. Coe and Smith accepted board positions with the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and like Durr, maintained strong personal ties to leaders of this liberal organization and several others. They represented blacks in early anti-discrimination cases and white clients accused of being communists; by the late fifties their clients included "radical" civil rights workers., Though politically dissimilar, Coe, Durr, and Smith all remained committed civil libertarians in an era of repression. They represent a strain of American liberalism typified by the open "popular front" left of the 1930s. As a result, they faced professional scorn, personal ostracism, and official harassment. The dissertation focuses on the connection between anti-communism, civil liberties, and civil rights in the deep South during the post war years, highlighting Congressional and state legislative committees as well as groups which badgered non-conformists on the local level. Exceptional in the conservative southern bar, these three careers illuminate both diversity within the legal profession and the varieties of southern liberalism in the decades of change following World War II.
Show less
Date Issued: 1993, 1993
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40741
Subject Headings: Biography, American Studies, History, United States, Law
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "This is the real Bahamas": Solidarity and identity in Cat Island.
Creator: Brown, Susan Love, University of California, San Diego
Abstract/Description: This dissertation shows how the historical experience of people living in a Bahamian island led to the formation of a solidarity based on their Afro-Bahamian identity, and how this identity became the basis of political power and eventual independence from colonial rule in 1973. The roles of economic and social peripherality and isolation in the development of the society and the core values by which most Afro-Bahamians live are studied for the Bahamas as a whole and for Cat Island., This...
Show moreThis dissertation shows how the historical experience of people living in a Bahamian island led to the formation of a solidarity based on their Afro-Bahamian identity, and how this identity became the basis of political power and eventual independence from colonial rule in 1973. The roles of economic and social peripherality and isolation in the development of the society and the core values by which most Afro-Bahamians live are studied for the Bahamas as a whole and for Cat Island., This research emphasizes the importance of the core values of family and religion as the basis of Cat Island and Bahamian identity. Based on their interest in the family, Cat Islanders have developed a model of solidarity that recognizes the independence and equality of all members within the confines of specific duties and familial obligations, and this model prevails in the practice of religion as well. This dissertation analyzes family relationships in a Cat Island community, as well as the religious practices that have their basis in both African and Christian religion. The way in which the generations differ in the approach to these values is the basis of change., Both family and religion have become idioms through which the people of Cat Island and the Bahamas deal with one another. The dissertation analyzes how these idioms prevail in relationships that Cat Islanders have with one another, with the representatives of businesses and government agencies, and with national party politicians. It concludes that the model of solidarity employed by Cat Islanders makes them preadapted to conditions that arise as a consequence of development.
Show less
Date Issued: 1992, 1992
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40734
Subject Headings: Anthropology, Cultural, History, Black, Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "Waking dream": Hawthorne's hypnagogic image of the imagination.
Creator: Kurjiaka, Susan K. H., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract/Description: I investigate Hawthorne's use of hypnagogia, that "drowsy period between wakefulness and sleep, during which fantasies and hallucinations occur" (Random House Dictionary). Psychological research links this liminal state of consciousness to imagination, especially fantasy, daydreaming, and literary creation--areas that Hawthorne explored and emphasized, often ambiguously. His biography, notebooks, and prefaces reveal that his own creativity emerged in a half-dreaming state; furthermore, he...
Show moreI investigate Hawthorne's use of hypnagogia, that "drowsy period between wakefulness and sleep, during which fantasies and hallucinations occur" (Random House Dictionary). Psychological research links this liminal state of consciousness to imagination, especially fantasy, daydreaming, and literary creation--areas that Hawthorne explored and emphasized, often ambiguously. His biography, notebooks, and prefaces reveal that his own creativity emerged in a half-dreaming state; furthermore, he defines "romance" as a liminal, hypnagogic area halfway between fantasy and reality: "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact." Defining his own purpose as a writer, Hawthorne explains that he is "burrowing into the depths of our common natures for the purpose of psychological romance," thus linking the writer's imagination, the genre "romance," and psychology. These facets of Hawthorne's thought call for a metaliterary reading of his work, as all have layers and subliminal meanings. Furthermore, he usually indicates layering and ambiguity through hypnagogic imagery, making it of key importance to our understanding his fiction and his subject matter, the imagination., In Chapter I, I argue for a multifaceted psychological, historical, and metaliterary approach to hynagogia in Hawthorne's work. Then, in Chapters II and III, I define hypnagogia and its connections with 19th-century pseudoscience and modern psychological research. Next, I discuss Hawthorne's own hypnagogic experiences, his sketch "The Haunted Mind," and critical response. I argue in Chapter V that Hawthorne sees the imagination as a hypnagogic process, exemplified in "The Custom-House." Exploring ideas about hypnagogia, psychology, metaliterature, and the writer/reader relationship, I analyze in Chapter VI several prefaces and "Alice Doane's Appeal." In Chapter VII my close reading of The Blithedale Romance shows that hypnagogia dramatizes the failure of the imagination, including a powerful reversal of Hawthorne's usual hypnagogic imagery. In Chapter VIII I analyze several famous Hawthorne stories employing hypnagogia, ambiguity, metaliterature, and psychology of the imagination: "Young Goodman Brown," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "The Devil in Manuscript." I conclude that for Hawthorne, hypnagogia (itself a layered, ambiguous state) is a central and formative image of the imagination, necessitating psychological readings of his fiction and awareness of metaliterary and subliminal meanings.
Show less
Date Issued: 1992, 1992
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40718
Subject Headings: American Studies, Literature, American, Psychology, General
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: "With great liberty": Virginia's denominational character in the late eighteenth century.
Creator: Ingham, Cynthia Jo., University of Kansas
Abstract/Description: The phrase "with great liberty," used by evangelicals to describe effective preaching as well as the dynamic of voluntary conversion, captures the motif of Virginia's new pluralistic character in the formative period after the American Revolution. With great liberty Virginians considered and debated their religious beliefs during the late 1780s and early 1790s, and with liberty they allowed others the same privileges, because the circle was regarded as open--so open, in fact, that even slaves...
Show moreThe phrase "with great liberty," used by evangelicals to describe effective preaching as well as the dynamic of voluntary conversion, captures the motif of Virginia's new pluralistic character in the formative period after the American Revolution. With great liberty Virginians considered and debated their religious beliefs during the late 1780s and early 1790s, and with liberty they allowed others the same privileges, because the circle was regarded as open--so open, in fact, that even slaves and freedmen were allowed entry, if only briefly. The key religious groups in Virginia were the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, but the setting was further diversified by the presence of Lutherans, Quakers, Jews, and deists. The way that Virginians approached the problem of diversity--at once universal and unique to them--was materially influenced by the legislative struggle for religious freedom, which lasted nearly a decade. Popular and consociational, these debates offered Virginians the opportunity to mesh abstract theology with daily experience., The study begins by examining the doctrines of the four major religious societies, on the premise that the faithways of the past touch on theological understandings that cannot be reduced to socio-economic or other factors. At the heart of the research are the six chapters that take the reader on an itinerancy through the core regions of Virginia--Tidewater South, Tidewater, Northern Neck, Central Piedmont, Southside, and Valley of Virginia. These community narratives are pulled together from such extant records as diaries, minutes, and early denominational histories and are illuminated by certain key figures in the religious landscape, such as John Leland, Robert Carter, and James O'Kelly. Each of the regions reveals a distinctive religious personality in the early 1790s, as does each of the denominations. Despite contention and competition between and within the religious societies, the overall denominational pattern of Virginia in the early 1790s was voluntaryist, participatory, inclusive, and optimistic--clearly early not declensional. The resultant portrait reveals a moment in time and place when in an exploration of liberty, Virginians extended the hand of welcome to the religious Other. The mood would shift, the hand be withdrawn, but the moment expressed the best aspirations of the passionate celebration of liberty that underwrote the Revolution's meaning for many Virginians.
Show less
Date Issued: 1997, 1997
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40868
Subject Headings: Religion, History of, History, United States
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: 'NORMAL' MYSTICISM AND THE SOCIAL WORLD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF QUAKER AND HASIDIC COMMUNAL MYSTICISM.
Creator: Berger, Alan L., Syracuse University
Date Issued: 1976, 1976
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40516
Subject Headings: Religion, General
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: 'PIERS PLOWMAN' AND THE IMAGE OF GOD.
Creator: Murtaugh, Daniel M., Yale University
Date Issued: 1967, 1967
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40318
Subject Headings: Literature, General, 0401
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: THE 'TRUE PHILOSOPHY' IN HUME'S 'TREATISE.'.
Creator: EMBREE, LESTER EUGENE., New School for Social Research
Date Issued: 1972, 1972
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40459
Subject Headings: Philosophy
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: 'Ye bok as I herde say': Orality as a rhetoric in medieval and modern discursive contexts.
Creator: Sprenkle, Melissa C. Putnam., The University of Tennessee
Abstract/Description: Rather than viewing orality as a cognitive process or cultural context separate from literacy, this project argues that orality functions as a holistic rhetorical perspective and that there are three distinct orality rhetorics (epic, popular, and conversational) which use the notion of 'voice' to differently organize the relation between language, culture, and the world. To demonstrate the interpretative differences which result from the application of different orality rhetorics, this study...
Show moreRather than viewing orality as a cognitive process or cultural context separate from literacy, this project argues that orality functions as a holistic rhetorical perspective and that there are three distinct orality rhetorics (epic, popular, and conversational) which use the notion of 'voice' to differently organize the relation between language, culture, and the world. To demonstrate the interpretative differences which result from the application of different orality rhetorics, this study examines and compares oral approaches to textual problems in medieval vernacular narrative poetry (specifically in reference to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Nibelungenlied)., The first chapter traces epic, popular and conversational orality as they have functioned in interdisciplinary research on discourse over the past three decades and demonstrates how the voice theorized as 'primary' by each orality organizes different assumptions about epistemology, textuality, and subjectivity. The second chapter scrutinizes the epistemology undergirding epic orality and demonstrates how theorizing orality and literacy as distinct conceptual schemes leads to anachronistic interpretations of culture and literature (including, ironically, orally-derived epics such as Beowulf). The third chapter argues that because conversational orality theorizes the relations between subjects, texts, and contexts as heterogeneous yet coherent, it is more likely to exceed the confines of the hermeneutic circle and pull up new aspects of discursive and cultural phenomenon for conscious consideration. Interestingly, this notion of coherent heterogeneity gives a better account of how we can understand texts composed in the distant past (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) than accounts (such as those given by epic orality) which define our relationship to the past (and to all others) through difference and incommensurability. The final chapter contrasts the notions of personhood (subjectivity) underlying epic and conversational orality. In an analysis of representations of feminine voices in Germanic heroic epic and among critics of that genre, this chapter argues that the ethical project of epic orality is limited to the extent that it artificially enhances the voice of the masculine warrior hero posited by the epic.
Show less
Date Issued: 1997, 1997
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40884
Subject Headings: Literature, Medieval, Language, Rhetoric and Composition, 0297, 0681
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: The abject body: Toward an aesthetic of the repulsive.
Creator: Covino, Deborah A., University of Illinois at Chicago
Abstract/Description: This study in body criticism develops an aesthetic of the repulsive that fully admits the crude wasting body into critical practice. Chapter one introduces this aesthetic through a revisionist reading of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ in the Tomb, which depicts a rotting corpse, traumatized by crucifixion. Contending with critics who screen out the artwork's putrid contents by announcing the body's resurrection, I propose that the painting presents a repressed dimension of the Bible's grand...
Show moreThis study in body criticism develops an aesthetic of the repulsive that fully admits the crude wasting body into critical practice. Chapter one introduces this aesthetic through a revisionist reading of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ in the Tomb, which depicts a rotting corpse, traumatized by crucifixion. Contending with critics who screen out the artwork's putrid contents by announcing the body's resurrection, I propose that the painting presents a repressed dimension of the Bible's grand recuperation narrative, and urges us to confront our repulsion to the corpse., In chapter two, antipathy to the repulsive body finds expression in aversion, both a rhetorical device and a defense strategy. A look at current critical engagement with the literary imagination of the body--by Jonathan Culler, Elaine Scarry, and Susan Sontag--allows us to notice how the critic can replace repulsion with aversion, and leads me to consider the social taboos that obstruct a full view of pain, disease, and body waste., A critical ethics of the body urges that the ugly, rather than the beautiful, be the realm of art; thus, chapter three treats Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject, which names the unwanted other: in bodily terms, waste and fluids that suggest death, disorder, and the lack of clear boundaries, such as excrement and pus; in social terms, the racial other, the homosexual, the woman. Chapter three posits the reproductive woman, in particular, as a primary abject, stressed through a reading of Armenian-American Expressionist Arshile Gorky's art, which rebukes Freudian Oedipal constructions of the mother., Chapters four and five employ reading practices that foreground abject and repulsive bodies. Octavia Butler's contemporary science fiction maintains an eloquent tension between the extra-ordinary (virtual) body and ordinary flesh (tending toward infirmity, repulsive), and so compels a consideration of the repulsive body in light of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," a celebration of the promise of cybernetic technologies. Chapter five returns to the body of Christ. Through discussion of a recent debate between art scholars Caroline Walker Bynum and Leo Steinberg, I reprove critical territorializations of the body, and transfigure both the abject woman and the concept of salvation.
Show less
Date Issued: 1996, 1996
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40825
Subject Headings: Literature, Modern, Literature, American
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Access to quality child care for preschool children with disabilities: An examination of efforts by Illinois Head Start programs in the context of welfare reform.
Creator: Bhagwanji, Yashwant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract/Description: This study investigated the efforts of Head Start (HS) programs in improving access to quality and inclusive child care for preschool-aged children with disabilities and their families. Using survey questionnaires and telephone interviews, 81 Head Start Disability Service Coordinators (DSCs) from the state of Illinois responded to a series of questions pertaining to their experiences and expectations for the future. Challenges were identified at the (a) family level (e.g., high cost of child...
Show moreThis study investigated the efforts of Head Start (HS) programs in improving access to quality and inclusive child care for preschool-aged children with disabilities and their families. Using survey questionnaires and telephone interviews, 81 Head Start Disability Service Coordinators (DSCs) from the state of Illinois responded to a series of questions pertaining to their experiences and expectations for the future. Challenges were identified at the (a) family level (e.g., high cost of child care despite subsidies; transportation problems; needs in job training and good paying jobs); (b) HS program level (e.g., lack of training in working with children with disabilities and their families; limited collaborative opportunities with local child care providers; excessive caseload); and (c) community child care level (e.g., lack of quality; long waiting lists; subsidies not accepted). Absence of appropriate governmental policies and accompanying regulations to promote quality community child care services, especially through personnel and facility enhancement, were also concerns raised by the DSCs. Another issue, the 1996 welfare reform law, was identified as a factor in influencing parents' eligibility to family support programs and their capacities to access quality services for their children with disabilities. Despite these challenges, HS staff described a number of initiatives that had been taken to improve access to quality and inclusive child care services in the communities. Programmatic efforts included providing full day services and improving communication about child care needs with parents. Non-programmatic strategies included administrative initiatives to increase collaboration with job training agencies and employers, extending training to child care providers in the community, and applying for grants to offer needed child care services. A number of implications are drawn and discussed, as well as areas for future research.
Show less
Date Issued: 1999, 1999
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40911
Subject Headings: Education, Early Childhood, Education, Special, Sociology, Public and Social Welfare
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: ACCOUNTING AS A MATHEMATICAL MEASUREMENT THEORETIC DISCIPLINE.
Creator: ORBACH, KENNETH NED., Texas A&M University
Date Issued: 1978, 1978
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40528
Subject Headings: Business Administration, Accounting
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Accounting disclosures of derivative securities in the insurance industry.
Creator: Higgs, Julia, University of South Carolina
Abstract/Description: The Financial Accounting Standards Board recently issued three new statements (Nos. 105, 107, and 119) that revise the required reporting for derivative instruments. These disclosures provide users with information about off-balance sheet risk and obligations. This dissertation examines whether the disclosures are reflected in market risk measures or in equity value of insurance firms. In 1995, the FASB asked constituents to consider changes in disclosure requirements to eliminate or reduce...
Show moreThe Financial Accounting Standards Board recently issued three new statements (Nos. 105, 107, and 119) that revise the required reporting for derivative instruments. These disclosures provide users with information about off-balance sheet risk and obligations. This dissertation examines whether the disclosures are reflected in market risk measures or in equity value of insurance firms. In 1995, the FASB asked constituents to consider changes in disclosure requirements to eliminate or reduce the cost of disclosures while continuing to provide relevant information. By examining the market's use of required derivative disclosures in assessing equity risk and value, the usefulness of the new disclosures can be evaluated., First, a model is developed to determine if the disclosures are reflected in market measures of risk. Variables include items that capture the asset structure, level of debt, and characteristics of the types of insurance written. Separate regression models are developed for Property/Casualty firms and for Life/Health firms. The results do not indicate that measures of derivative use are associated with market measures of risk. Additionally, there is no evidence that derivatives used to hedge interest rate risk explain measures of interest rate sensitivity., A second test is conducted to determine if fair value disclosures are reflected in the value of equity. Using the accounting identity, market values of assets, liabilities, and off-balance sheet items are used to determine if these items are reflected in market equity values. A problem noted in prior tests of the identity is the potential for measurement error in determining fair values of balance sheet items. Using life/health insurance firms mitigates this problem because assets and liabilities of these firms are largely financial and measured at fair value. The results indicate a positive and insignificant relationship between the fair value of derivatives and firm value., Overall, there is no strong evidence that derivative disclosures are reflected in market measures of risk and equity value for insurance firms. Possible reasons include noisy disclosures, derivative activity that has offsetting economic effects, the absence of a market response to the information, or to the lack of statistical power in the tests.
Show less
Date Issued: 1998, 1998
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40871
Subject Headings: Business Administration, Accounting
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: THE ACTION OF SULFURIC ACID ON ISOCYANIC-ESTERS, ISOTHIOCYANIC-ESTERS, AND CARBAMIC-ESTERS.
Creator: Bieber, Theodore I., New York University
Date Issued: 1951, 1951
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40462
Subject Headings: Chemistry, General, 0485
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: ACTOR AND OBSERVER DIFFERENCES: SOURCES OF DIVERGENCE IN CAUSAL ATTRIBUTIONS ABOUT BEHAVIOR.
Creator: Monson, Thomas C., University of Minnesota
Date Issued: 1976, 1976
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40507
Subject Headings: Psychology, Social
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Actor-observer differences in the Big-Five personality factors: An information-processing explanation.
Creator: Janowsky, Alisha, Florida Atlantic University
Abstract/Description: A basic difference between the perspectives of actors and observers is the amount of information each has to make attributional inferences. Jones and Nisbett (1972) suggested these informational differences lead to an inverse relationship between trait and situational attributions, such that better-known others receive more situational attributions while lesser-known others receive more trait attributions. While this difference has traditionally been accounted for as a function of individuals...
Show moreA basic difference between the perspectives of actors and observers is the amount of information each has to make attributional inferences. Jones and Nisbett (1972) suggested these informational differences lead to an inverse relationship between trait and situational attributions, such that better-known others receive more situational attributions while lesser-known others receive more trait attributions. While this difference has traditionally been accounted for as a function of individuals' perceptions of cross-situational variability in the actor's behavior, recent research has suggested that this explanation is inaccurate. Unfortunately, alternative explanations for the self-other differences in attributional tendencies have yet to be offered. It was hypothesized here that these differences might be better explained as a function of the specific traits people attribute to themselves versus those that are attributed to others. To that end, the first study in this paper examined different attributions offered for oneself versus one's acquaintance as a function of the social desirability of the Big Five personality traits (i.e., Extraversion/Introversion, Agreeable/Disagreeable, Conscientious/Not Conscientious, Emotionally Stable/Neurotic, Intelligent/Unintelligent)., While it was expected that results would reflect self-enhancement tendencies on the subjects' part; i.e., subjects would make more positive trait attributions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Intelligence) to themselves than to their acquaintances and more negative trait attributions (Introversion, Disagreeableness, Not Conscientious, Neuroticism, Unintelligence) to their acquaintances than to themselves, findings suggested that whether subjects chose to self-enhance was based, at least in part, on the trait in question. The most counterintuitive of these findings being that subjects labeled themselves as being more Introverted than their acquaintances. While self-enhancement explanations are traditionally described as a function of a motivational drive to protect one's self-esteem, such reasoning could not be applied to findings reported in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 offered the alternative explanation that attributional differences on the part of oneself and one's observers are based on the amount of information available to themselves versus their outside observers.
Show less
Date Issued: 2004, 2004
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40396
Subject Headings: Psychology, Social
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Adlerian life styles and acculturation as predictors of the mental health in Hispanic adults.
Creator: Miranda, Alexis Omar., Georgia State University
Abstract/Description: Purpose. Two broad questions were addressed in this study: (a) Are there differences on personality variables, depression, and the social interest factor among Hispanics low, bi-cultural, or high in acculturation? (b) does acculturation and the Adlerian life style themes predict depression in Hispanic adults?, Procedures and methods of analysis. A random sample of 450 Hispanic adults, who were members of two social services agencies serving a southeastern metropolitan area, was the target of...
Show morePurpose. Two broad questions were addressed in this study: (a) Are there differences on personality variables, depression, and the social interest factor among Hispanics low, bi-cultural, or high in acculturation? (b) does acculturation and the Adlerian life style themes predict depression in Hispanic adults?, Procedures and methods of analysis. A random sample of 450 Hispanic adults, who were members of two social services agencies serving a southeastern metropolitan area, was the target of this investigation. A total of 313 completed questionnaires were received (70.22%). All subjects anonymously completed the Basic Adlerian Scales for Interpersonal Success (BASIS-A Inventory), the Beck Depression Inventory, The Hispanic Acculturation Scale, and a demographic questionnaire., Analysis and results. A multiple analysis of variance was calculated to assess differences on life style themes, depression, and the social interest factor based on the low, bi-cultural, and high levels of acculturation. The results indicated that depression, the social interest factor, and the life style themes Wanting Recognition, Being Cautious, and Taking Charge, significantly differed between Hispanics due to their level of acculturation (Pillais Criterion =.53, F = 16.11, p $<$.001). The Going Along life style theme did not differ between Hispanics (F = 1.97, p =.142). Bi-cultural Hispanics significantly differed from the low and high acculturation level Hispanics on depression (t = 14.73, p $<$.001) and social interest (t = 16.84, p $<$.001). The life style themes Being Cautious, Wanting Recognition, and the social interest factor significantly predicted depression in this population (F = 101.44, p $<$.001), accounting for approximately 52% of the variation., Conclusions. This study supports the literature that established that bi-cultural Hispanics seem to have better mental health when compared to those Hispanics who are low or high in acculturation. Also, the personality characteristics of Hispanics significantly differed in relation to the level of acculturation. Depression in this population was predicted from personality characteristics and the degree to which these individuals belonged and contributed towards others.
Show less
Date Issued: 1994, 1994
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40776
Subject Headings: Health Sciences, Mental Health, Education, Guidance and Counseling, Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: AN ADMINISTRATIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF ADOPTING COMMUNITY EDUCATION IN SELECTED PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS.
Creator: Decker, Larry E., Michigan State University
Date Issued: 1971, 1971
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fcla/dt/40451
Subject Headings: Education, Administration
Format: Document (PDF)

Business Administration, Management (33)	+ -
Mathematics (26)	+ -
Health Sciences, Nursing (24)	+ -
Political Science, General (23)	+ -
Education, Curriculum and Instruction (21)	+ -

Anthropology, Cultural (20)	+ -
Education, Higher (20)	+ -
Women's Studies (20)	+ -
Business Administration, General (19)	+ -
Engineering, Electronics and Electrical (19)	+ -
Economics, General (18)	+ -
Education, Special (17)	+ -
Biology, Neuroscience (15)	+ -
Business Administration, Accounting (15)	+ -
Economics, Finance (15)	+ -
Education, Administration (15)	+ -
Literature, English (15)	+ -
Psychology, Experimental (15)	+ -
Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies (15)	+ -
Literature, American (14)	+ -
Philosophy (14)	+ -
Psychology, Social (14)	+ -
Sociology, Social Structure and Development (14)	+ -
Computer Science (13)	+ -
Education, Educational Psychology (13)	+ -
History, United States (13)	+ -
Sociology, Individual and Family Studies (13)	+ -
American Studies (12)	+ -
Biology, Animal Physiology (12)	+ -
Biology, Zoology (12)	+ -

English (407)	+ -
French (1)	+ -
Spanish (1)	+ -
eng (1)	+ -

University of Florida (31)	+ -
University of Miami (28)	+ -
The Florida State University (27)	+ -
Florida Atlantic University (17)	+ -
Michigan State University (14)	+ -

Purdue University (14)	+ -
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (14)	+ -
Cornell University (13)	+ -
Georgia State University (13)	+ -
The Ohio State University (13)	+ -
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (13)	+ -
The University of Texas at Austin (12)	+ -
University of Georgia (12)	+ -
The Pennsylvania State University (11)	+ -
The University of Wisconsin - Madison (11)	+ -
University of California, Berkeley (11)	+ -
University of Maryland, College Park (11)	+ -
Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick (9)	+ -
Columbia University (8)	+ -
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (8)	+ -
Syracuse University (8)	+ -
University of California, Los Angeles (8)	+ -
University of Pennsylvania (8)	+ -
University of Virginia (8)	+ -
Texas A&M University (7)	+ -
University of Massachusetts Amherst (7)	+ -
University of Minnesota (7)	+ -
University of Pittsburgh (7)	+ -
Florida International University (6)	+ -
New York University (6)	+ -

Search In

Pages

Pages

Sort Results By:

Narrow results by:

Collection

Topical Subject

Genre

Type of Resource

Language

Creator

Format

Owner