The concept of an 'ideal' femininity in Western cultures is subject to redefinition and change throughout historical periods. These fluctuating definitions of ideal femininity are produced and reproduced by media organizations, such as advertising, television, magazines, etc. This thesis will examine women's fashion and beauty magazines as a discursive site for the construction of a disciplining ideal of femininity. It is often the case that feminist research focuses its examination on larger social structures of power. I intend to examine the smaller structures or "micro practices" that women engage in to create a feminine, disciplined body. The articles and advertisements found in these magazines epitomize the micro practices of a constructed femininity. Finally, Foucauldian analyses and feminist debates will be employed to situate my thesis within a larger body of research: poststructuralist feminist work.
Three camera-arrangements, differing in number and location of video cameras, were compared in a prototype video-mail system using a between-subjects design. Subjects viewed and created video-mail messages containing shots of faces, objects and computers. Subjects rated their satisfaction with their camera arrangement, the convenience and importance of different types of shots in video-mail, and described their ideal video-mail system. Subjects found object shots to be more important than face shots, although face shots were easier to obtain than object shots in the two arrangements that had front-located cameras. Face shots were frequently included by subjects in all conditions. Satisfaction with the camera arrangements was not rated highly in any of the conditions. Improvements include better support for object and computer shots and the inclusion of face shots at the user's discretion.
This Independent Inquiry Project is a qualitative study examining the experiences, needs and recommendations for services of South Asian women in Ottawa and Kingston who have been abused. Five women who had been abused by their partners and/or their in-laws and three women involved with South Asian communities were interviewed for this study.
This case study examines implications of a completed evaluation at an experimental adult basic education project. While the literature of evaluation usage shows a high proportion of reports moving from evaluator to shelf having had little effect, there were, in this case, many changes congruent with recommendations in the report. This study examines change in one element - a shift from one-on-one delivery to group delivery of instruction - and isolates factors which made this change possible. It finds that the evaluation was intimately involved in the change, and that there were essential conditions beyond evaluation quality which were essential to bringing the change about - including compatibility of educational philosophy between evaluators and users of the evaluation and the existence of a corporate 'learning culture'. It finds that different users legitimately require different types and presentations of information, and recommends targeting reports to meet those requirements.
Through personal project analysis (Little, 1983), gender differences in the nature of ruminative and distractive coping responses were examined in the context of individuals' daily goals and concerns in order to assess their function and effectiveness in coping with depressive affect. A sample of 71 university students, composed of 35 males and 36 females between the ages of 18 to 29, participated in a one-on-one interview requiring both verbal and written responses. Respondents filled in the Personal Projects Analysis package, the Centre for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977) and the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (Endler & Parker, 1990). Results indicated no significant gender differences in the adoption of ruminative or distractive coping responses. In addition, contrary to NolenHoeksema's theory of coping, ruminative responses were associated with greater meaning, manageability, support, competency and less stress in relation to depressive goals. In contrast, distractive coping responses were significantly related to poor manageability, less meaning, support, competency and greater stress among individuals' most depressive goals. Furthermore, an analysis of the content categories that projects were categorized into, revealed that ruminative and distractive coping styles were consistently associated with particular types of projects. Broken down by gender, women were equally likely to adopt either a distractive or a ruminative coping response in the context of similar goals or concerns, though rumination was exclusively associated with academic/occupational projects and distraction with health 'body appearance projects. In contrast, for men, neither coping style was consistently associated with any particular content category. Furthermore, rumination and distraction were significantly related to the depressive and non-depressive projects within particular content categories. The results of this study confirm that ruminative responses to depressive affect can be associated with beneficial effects and that distractive responses may be associated with negative project appraisals. The findings also provide evidence for the utility of examining the nature of coping responses to depressive affect within a real-life context. These findings are discussed in relation to the differential effectiveness of rumination and distraction as coping responses and in relation Nolen-Hoeksema's theory of coping. The implications of adopting each of these coping responses for men and women are also discussed.
