ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
This qualitative study examined how culture and community are created in the popular sports video game, NBA 2K. Sports video games are some of the most popular video games, but there has been lack of critical scholarship into these games. By engaging two popular cultural theories, the circuit of culture and the fields of cultural production, this study critically examined how culture shapes online communities in sports video games.By employing a variety of ethnographic methods including thick descriptions of cultural artifacts, an intake questionnaire, interviews with 17 NBA 2K players, and in-game participant observation, this study established cultural patterns, insider language, and other elements of culture within the NBA 2K community. The researcher learned to play NBA 2K, critically examined both physical and virtual cultural artifacts, conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with game players, and participated in NBA 2K with study participants to contextualize their experiences.
This study established NBA 2K as having some of the most advanced functions of any sports video games, including sophisticated multi-user domains (MUDs) and complex avatar (MyPLAYER) creation. NBA 2K offers a unique opportunity to create diverse MyPLAYER representations, setting the bar for sports video games to include people from varied physical identities. Though the game has made strides to include WNBA athletes, the lack of gendered options for the MyPLAYER feature reinforces misogynistic and hegemonic power structures that
are common in both sports culture and gaming culture.
ContributorsForbes, Allison (Author) / Gilpin, Dawn (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Kishonna (Committee member) / Reed, Sada (Committee member) / Silcock, Burton (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Slavery is a significant factor to consider when studying Mexica society and its economy, including societal roles and gendered labor. Many scholars who explore slavery within this culture and state look at the topic from specific angles and focus on the post-conquest and colonial periods. Pre-Columbian slavery is mentioned only briefly in the histories of the Mexica despite it being a key facet of their way of life. Questions of gender and class in relation to slavery are often missing from examinations of the topic. This project will, therefore, examine the process of enslavement, slave status and labor, and the written and visual evidence of enslaved individuals within Mexica society during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. By specifically examining slavery within the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and the Mexica region, this thesis will argue that enslaved women played a much more significant role than enslaved men, and that slaves constituted a social class in pre-Columbian Mexica society.
ContributorsRodriguez, Jennifer N. (Author) / Baker, Hannah (Thesis advisor) / Smith, Michael E. (Committee member) / Avina, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This study investigated the relationship between social emotional competency (SEC) and academic placement in gifted students. Data were collected on children between the ages of 5 and 12 years old (n=206) in three academic placement types - self-contained, cluster and content replacement. Social emotional skills were assessed by teacher report using the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment. Regardless of placements, the gifted students in this study were rated as having higher social emotional competencies than the standardization group of the DESSA. Gifted students in the cluster and self-contained settings demonstrated significantly higher scores in the area of Self-Awareness, which measures students' capacity to understand their personal strengths and weaknesses. When analyzed by gender, no significant differences were discovered between males; however, girls demonstrated significantly higher scores in the areas of Optimism and Self-Awareness in the self-contained and cluster settings. The results of the study have import for the development of gifted programs, especially for gifted girls.
ContributorsBacal, Emily (Author) / Caterino, Linda (Thesis advisor) / Brulles, Dina (Committee member) / DiGangi, Samuel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
This dissertation explores the relationship between motherhood and power in seventeenth-century England. While historians have traditionally researched the role of mothers within the family unit, this study explores the more public and discursive roles of motherhood. It argues that the various threads of discourse surrounding maternity betray a common desire to circumscribe and condemn maternal authority, as this authority was threatening to masculinity and patriarchal rule. It finds that maternity was frequently cited as harmful and dangerous; household conduct books condemned the passionate and irrational nature of maternal love and its deleterious effects upon both mother and child. Furthermore, various images of ‘unnatural motherhood’ reveal larger concerns over social disorder. Sensationalistic infanticide and monstrous birth stories in cheap print display contemporary fears of lascivious, scolding, and unregulated women who were subversive to patriarchal authority and thus threatened the social status quo. The female reproductive body similarly threatened masculinity; an analysis of midwifery manuals show that contemporary authors had to reconcile women’s reproductive power with what they believed to be an inferior corporeal body. This study ends with a discussion of the representation of mothers in published funeral sermons as these mothers were textually crafted to serve as examples of ‘good mothering,’ offering a striking comparison to the ‘unnatural mothers’ presented in other sources. Motherhood in seventeenth-century England, then, involved a great deal more than the relationship between mother and child. It was a cultural site in which power was contested, and a site in which authors expressed anxiety over the irrational female mind and the unregulated, sexual female body.
ContributorsWiedenbeck, Ashley Erin (Author) / Warnicke, Retha M. (Thesis advisor) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Wright, Johnson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Research in intercollegiate athletics has provided a relatively large body of findings about the kinds of stressors found in high profile intercollegiate athletic environments and their effects on student-athletes. Research is less robust regarding stress and its effects on head coaches in high profile collegiate athletics. This study focuses on the types, frequencies, and intensities of stress experienced by NCAA, Division I head coaches. The purpose of the study is to identify the types, frequency, and intensity of stress common to 20 head basketball coaches participating in the study, as well as differences in their experiences based on gender, race and the intersectionality of race and gender. The participants in the study are 20 head coaches (five Black females, five Black males, five White females, and White males). The conceptual framework guiding the study is a definition of stress as an interaction between a person and her or his environment in which the person perceives the resources available to manage the situation to be inadequate (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). The study’s design is an adaptation of prior research conducted by Frey, M., 2007 and Olusoga, P., Butt, J., Hays, K., & Maynard, I., 2009, and Olusoga, P., Butt, J., Maynard, I., & Hays, K., 2011. This study used qualitative and quantitative methods that triangulated results scores on Maslach’s Burn-out Inventory and the Perceived Stress Scale with the thick data collected from semi-structured interviews with the 20 head coaches from each of the three data sources to enhance the validity and reliability of the findings. The researcher analyzed the data collected by placing it in one of two categories, one representing attributes of the participants including race and gender; the second category was comprised of attributes of the Division I environment.
ContributorsRousseau, Julie B (Author) / Gray, Rob (Thesis advisor) / Vega, Sujey (Committee member) / Wilson, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Prosocial behavior refers to voluntary acts done to benefit another. To date, there is little work examining children’s prosocial behavior toward outgroup members. Across several multi-method multi-informant data sets, I used various statistical methods (e.g., latent change score analysis, mediation and moderation analyses) to examine the predictors, correlates, and development of children’s prosocial behavior toward various outgroup members (e.g., gender, race). In Study 1, I examined the relation between preschoolers’ other-gender friendships and their prosocial behavior toward other-gender peers. Findings showed support for the hypothesis that cross-gender friendships are positively associated with children’s prosocial behavior toward other-gender peers over time. Further, children’s prosocial behavior toward other-gender peers positively predicted children’s later gender attitudes suggesting that fostering intergroup prosocial behavior could be a potentially effective solution to reduce intergroup prejudice. To capture the multifaceted nature of social identities, in Study 2, I examined children’s prosocial behavior toward various ingroup and outgroup members with the intention of exploring the degree of ingroup-ness and testing the transfer effect of intergroup contact. Findings showed that cross-gender friendships were positively predictive of school-age children’s prosocial behavior toward diverse others. Further, cross-race friendships are related to children’s diverse prosocial behavior indirectly through children’s race-based sympathy. Study 3 extended the previous two studies by testing both Intergroup Contact Theory and Social Identity Theory and taking into consideration the social identity of oneself (versus the targets of prosocial behavior). Specifically, I examined the central component of gender identity: children’s perceived same-gender similarity and other-gender similarity, as well as children’s same- and other-gender friendships. Results showed that only intergroup friendships, but not children’s gender identity, were related to children’s prosocial behavior toward same- and other-gender peers. In sum, this basic research has potential to shed light on ways to promote equity and inclusion across various social groups early in development.
ContributorsXIAO, XINYUE (Author) / Spinrad, Tracy L (Thesis advisor) / Martin, Carol Lynn (Thesis advisor) / Eisenberg, Nancy (Committee member) / DeLay, Dawn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Teachers represent important agents of gender socialization in schools and play a critical role in the lived experiences of transgender students. What remains less clear, however, is whether the gender of the teacher impacts their response to transgender bullying and specifically how threats to gender identity might influence men who teach to respond negatively. The current study used a 2 (gender) x 3 (gender identity threat, no gender identity threat, and control) experimental design to assess whether the masculine overcompensation theory helps explain how men who teach respond to transgender victimization experiences. It was hypothesized that men in the gender identity threat condition would endorse more anti-trans attitudes (e.g., higher transphobic attitudes, lower allophilia [feelings of liking] toward transgender individuals, more traditional gender roles, less supportive responses to a vignette about transgender bullying, less support for school practices that support transgender students, and less likelihood of signing a petition supporting transgender youth rights) compared to the other conditions. It was also expected that they would endorse more negative affect but higher feelings of self-assurance. Women in the study served as a comparison group as no overcompensation effect is expected for them. Participants (N = 301) were nationally recruited through word of mouth, social media, and personal networks. Results from the current study did not support the theory of masculine overcompensation as there was no effect of threatening feedback. There were a number of significant gender differences. Men reported lower transgender allophilia, higher transphobia, more traditional gender role beliefs, less likelihood of signing the petition supporting transgender youth rights, and more self-assurance than women. No gender effect was found for negative affect or support for school practices supporting transgender students. There were also no observable differences in participant responses to the vignette by gender or condition. The implications and limitations of the current study were discussed.
ContributorsMintert, Jeffrey (Author) / Tran, Alisia (Thesis advisor) / Bernstein, Bianca (Committee member) / Carlson, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This dissertation delivers a timely scholarly conversation on differently imagined grassroots feminist politics in a non-Western neoliberal authoritarian context. The project pivots on a central inquiry: how do Chinese rural migrant women, whose lifetimes are cast under the shadows of “Made in China” global production and punctuated by multiple concurrent neoliberal crises, collectively give birth to community power for radical livability? Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldnotes, six oral history interviews, and archival studies, the dissertation employs community-based participatory action research to document and advance community organizing efforts by Green Rose (hence GR), a migrant women-led grassroots collective in Shenzhen. Set against the historical backdrop of China’s post-socialist reform when South China emerged as the world’s factory for manufacturing globalization, my study traces the trajectories in which a group of migrant women, upon gaining exposure to transnational labor NGO activism in the early 2000s, asserted collective power at the frontline for intersectional gender and class struggles. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, when economic downturns and welfare austerity measures entangled with the resurgence of state authoritarianism targeting civic actions, GR women temporarily transitioned to guerrilla activism to bring emancipatory cultural organizing and mutual aid into the social arena of a precarious migrant neighborhood. To survive welfare segregation and economic-political contingencies, GR women tactically established a social work service NGO to translate their depoliticized service labor into radical actions. They animate a sisterhood kinship system to liberate individual care capacity from the privatized household; they reorganize people, spaces, and resources to build a care safety net for all. By foregrounding migrant women as political protagonists in China’s precarious and fragmented civic landscape, my study problematizes both male-dominant labor politics embraced by orthodox Marxist scholars and the mainstream feminist movement sponsored by urban middle-class feminists, all the while exposing the state censorship that attempts and yet fails to erase the history of the marginalized gendered collective.
ContributorsDong, Anzi (Author) / Quan, H. L. T (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Linton, Mellissa (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024