Papers
Rebel Without A Kid: Women Who Don't Want Kids and Efficacy Based Self-Esteem
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Social Science Association in the spring of 2008.
The traditional family structure of the nineteen fifties has faded. Today, there is a long list of possible family structures that are at least legally acceptable if not wholly socially accepted. Despite this change in American culture, traditional gender norms still linger in some situations. One notable case is when adult women voluntarily do not have children. Though American culture is outwardly accepting of this choice, there is strong social pressure on women to have children. Choosing not to have children has ramifications for women’s identities and for their day-to-day impression management. The purpose of this preliminary project is to explore the experiences of adult women who have chosen not to have children despite social pressure to do so. I will analyze data from in-depth interviews with four adult women from a symbolic interactionist perspective. My specific areas of interest are: how adult women cope with their stigmatized childless identities in their day-to-day lives, how their childlessness affects their identities, and how and why they maintain these identities despite the stigma.
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Community In The Blogosphere: The Social Construction of Textual Community
This is my thesis, which I successfully defended in the fall semester of 2008.
Some worry that people’s connection to each other is declining in contemporary society. I join the chorus of theorists who object to this notion and argue that people’s connections are changing instead of disappearing. In this thesis, I qualitatively investigate one new mode of human connection: blogging. Based on 34 online interviews, I describe the experience of blogging from the perspective of bloggers. I find that although the blogosphere may appear to be just another new type of broadcast medium through which people seek fleeting moments of micro-celebrity, blogs are interactive, and bloggers are community builders. Many are more focused on forming and maintaining rich online relationships than gaining fame. I show how bloggers experience many of the same things that people in offline communities experience. Then again, I also show that community in the blogosphere is deeply affected by the differences between face-to-face interaction and asynchronous, text-based Internet interactions.
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