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- All Subjects: childhood
- Creators: Charron-Chenier, Raphael
Description
This dissertation examines the role of adverse community environments in explaining individual-level adverse outcomes and social inequality. Specifically, it examines “How do adverse community environments contribute to the incidence of childhood adversity?” Through three related studies, this work contributes empirical evidence that can assist policymakers in designing more effective interventions to mitigate childhood adversity. Research, policy, and practice have emphasized changing parental behavior to minimize the effects of childhood adversity. However, critics of this parent behavior-focused approach claim these efforts contribute to a public narrative that centers family deficiencies as responsible for childhood adversity. This narrative oversimplifies toxic stress processes while obscuring broader social inequities that combine to overload families. This is especially important when understanding racial and economic disparities in rates of childhood adversity because poor, Black, Indigenous and Hispanic/Latino families are more likely to live in distressed communities. An alternative narrative is established through introducing the Community Adversity Index. This tool defines and quantifies community-level adversity and is used to demonstrate that community adversity is a strong predictor of family separation via foster care placement. Chapter 1 describes the three studies and concluding policy implications that form this dissertation. Chapter 2 establishes the theoretical support for a composite measure of community-level adversity and proposes data sources and indicators to calculate the index. The resulting single metric is then used to rank communities and describe how adversity is geographically distributed. Subindices are also used to determine how adversity is bundled or typically grouped in urban communities. Chapter 3 uses five criteria featuring statistical, validity, and sensitivity tests to establish the reliability of the index as a tool for directing policy efforts. Chapter 4 uses regression analysis to establish that measures of community adversity predict family separations. Findings suggest that reducing community-level adversity could reduce family separations in general, as well as for White, Black, and Hispanic/Latino populations specifically. The dissertation concludes with a final chapter summarizing how the index can be useful for influencing policy.
ContributorsWhite-Wolfe, Holly J. (Author) / Charron-Chenier, Raphael (Thesis advisor) / Denby-Brinson, Ramona (Committee member) / Jurik, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation discusses children and childhood in Soviet Kazakhstan from 1928 to 1953. By exploring images of, and for, children, and by focusing on children’s fates during and after the famine of 1930-33, I argue that the regime’s success in making children socialist subjects and creating the new Soviet person was questionable throughout the 1930s. The reach of Soviet ideological and cultural policies was limited in a decade defined by all kinds of shortcomings in the periphery which was accompanied by massive violence and destruction. World War 2 mobilized Central Asians and integrated the masses into the Soviet social and political body. The war transformed state-society relations and the meaning of being Soviet fundamentally changed. In this way, larger segments of society embraced the framework for Soviet citizenship and Soviet patriotism largely thanks to the war experience. This approach invites us to reconsider the nature of Sovietization in Central Asia by questioning the central role of ideology and cultural revolution in the formation of Soviet identities. My dissertation brings together images of childhood, everyday experiences of children and memory of childhood. On the one hand, the focus on children provides me an opportunity to discuss Sovietization in Central Asia. On the other hand, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of Soviet childhood: it is the first comprehensive study of Soviet children in the periphery in English. It shows how images and discourses, which were produced in the Soviet center, were translated into the local context and emphasizes the multiplicity of children’s experiences across the Soviet Union. Local conditions defined the meaning of childhood in Kazakhstan as much as central visions. Studying children in a non-Russian republic allows me to discuss questions of ideology, cultural revolution and the nationalities question. A main goal of the dissertation is to shift the focus of Sovietization from the cultural and intellectual elite to ordinary people. Secondly, by studying the impact of the famine and the Great Patriotic War, I try to understand the dynamics of the Soviet regime and the changing conceptions of culture and identity in Soviet Kazakhstan.
ContributorsKasikci, Mehmet Volkan (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Kefeli, Agnes N (Committee member) / Edgar, Adrienne L (Committee member) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020