Mountain Scholar :: Browsing by Author "Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member"

Browsing by Author "Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8

Open Access
Culture wars? Applying categorical variation measures to the study of sociocultural and political polarization
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Willis, Jamie L., author; Lacy, Michael G., advisor; Hempel, Lynn M., committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
Over the last 20 years, an extensive literature has examined the "culture wars," or increasing socio-cultural and political polarization within the United States. A major focus of the debate has been whether attitude polarization within the public has increased over that time. While the diversity of perspective and methods within this literature makes understanding their conflict difficult, in general, this debate has centered around differences in the definition and measurement of polarization, consensus, and dissensus. Several researchers have attempted to clarify the divide within the literature, but with insufficient attention to the role of methodological differences. Therefore, the first contribution of this paper is to analyze this literature so as to clearly separate out the distinct and interesting aspects of mass polarization. Beyond that conceptual contribution, the empirical focus of the current work is to illustrate the use of three statistical measures designed specifically to study attitude variation or polarization, which have not previously been used within this literature. These measures, the Index of Qualitative Variation, the RQ Index, and the Index of Ordinal Variation, each offer a unique approach to the measurement of dispersion or polarization in a categorical variable, and thus offer new ways to examine whether the United States has experienced increasing socio-cultural and political polarization within the public. Each of these measures are designed to examine variation in categorical data, which has not been treated as such in the literature. Within this paper, these measures are applied to 120 variables drawn from the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey over the last 40 to 50 years to examine changes in dispersion or polarization over time. These findings are used to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of these measures for capturing increasing social and cultural fragmentation within the public, and to compare the findings of these measures to those of the interval level measures used within this literature.
Open Access
Forgetting the self: nondual awareness as a key component of self-transcendent experiences
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Canning, Brian A., author; Steger, Michael F., advisor; Dik, Bryan J., committee member; Davalos, Deana B., committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
Self-transcendence (ST) and self-transcendent experiences (STEs) have been described as a positive component of human experience and as predictors of wellbeing across a diverse and multidisciplinary literature. As a trait, self-transcendence (ST) has been conceptualized as a developmental process (Levenson et al., 2005; Tornstam, 1996), a coping mechanism (Reed, 2014), an aspect of personality (Cloninger, 1987), and as a value (Kasser, 2019). STEs have been described as a type of experience marked by a reduced sense of self and greater feelings of connectedness, as seen in awe, flow and mystical experiences. Recent scholarship has suggested that these diverse approaches have hampered the development of ST theory (Yaden et al., 2017), and identified a need to conceptually link these independently studied domains. There is need for a subject-agnostic measure of STE—an instrument that can measure STE irrespective of the type of experience. Nondual awareness (NDA)—a blurring of the distinction of self and other—is proposed as the construct best suited to these ends. Two studies were designed to improve our understanding of this construct and how it relates to STEs and ST. Study 1 was a correlational study to expand the nomological net of a new measure of NDA (the NADA-T) and examine connections to other ST/STE constructs and wellbeing variables. Study 2 utilized a sample of experienced meditators, with measurements before and after an intensive meditation retreat to track co-occurrence of awe and flow states, and connect them to increases in NDA. These studies found evidence of a strong connection between awe and NDA, and a weaker connection with flow. Some initial but limited support was found for the notion that NDA may lead to development of trait ST. The implication of these findings and limitation of these studies is explored, as well as suggestions for future research.
Open Access
Hip Hop family in the underground: the words and actions of the True School community in Atlanta, Georgia
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Kumar, Andrew Anil, author; Browne, Katherine E., 1953-, advisor; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member; Breaux, Richard M., committee member
Hip Hop Culture is the fastest growing culture on earth. Around the world, people of multiple ethnicities, religions, economic backgrounds, and political affiliations consume and produce Hip Hop music and culture for a range of reasons. The music and art surrounding the culture has been intimately tied to the entertainment industry, and Hip Hop's national and international dissemination speaks volumes about the processes and outcomes of globalization. It is for this reason that the vehicle of Hip Hop is a useful tool to analyze a wide range of topics like gender, class, ethnicity, business, and performance to name a few. In my thesis I explore underground Hip Hop culture in Atlanta Georgia. My analysis draws on fieldwork I conducted from 2008 to 2009 and includes data from participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a survey. In Atlanta Georgia, a group of underground Hip Hop practitioners and consumers who are affiliated with a socially conscious movement within the culture known as "True School," form a tight network. This network is rooted in deep local connections to one another reinforced by multiple exchanges of resources and information as well as commitment to a community ethos that is tied to the True School Movement.
Open Access
Making my image
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Tompkins, Farrell Elisabeth, author; Dormer, James T., advisor; Simons, Stephen R., advisor; Ryan, Ajean Lee, committee member; Lehene, Marius, committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
The impulse to craft my own likeness is an intuitive choice driven by questions about my identity as a woman and an artist. I define these themes as passive and active, and explore them visually through the medium of reductive woodcut printmaking. Using the genre of self-portraiture, I force the viewer into the same space I occupied as I observed myself in the mirror. Original drawings are analyzed as a series of shapes and broken down into layers of value. The resulting prints express my suspicion that the viewer can never fully understand my point of view.
Embargo
Polysubstance use protective strategies for concert and festival contexts: inventory development and characterization of personal drug checking practices
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Piercey, Cianna J., author; Karoly, Hollis C., advisor; Conner, Bradley T., committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member; Tompkins, Sara A., committee member
Polysubstance use is prevalent at electronic dance music (EDM) events and attendees are at elevated risk of experiencing adverse substance-related outcomes. Protective behavioral strategies (PBS) implemented at the individual level (e.g., test drugs for presence of fentanyl) may help to mitigate substance-related consequences such as accidental overdose. While there is considerable evidence demonstrating the efficacy of PBS for alcohol and cannabis use, little research has examined PBS for other substances and there are currently no validated measures of polysubstance use PBS. Participants (aged 18-65) were two community samples of EDM event attendees in Colorado. Both studies used field methods to survey event attendees on their substance use and PBS use patterns. Study 1 (N=450) was conducted in two phases with the goal of developing and establishing initial content and criterion validity for an inventory of polysubstance use PBS. Study 2 (N=227) involved a deeper exploration of drug checking PBS (i.e., use of reagent test kits and fentanyl test strips) and polysubstance use patterns among attendees of a 4-day music festival. Study 1 results indicate that EDM event attendees employ a variety of PBS to protect themselves while engaging in polysubstance use at concerts and festivals. Polysubstance use PBS include strategies related to collective community welfare (e.g., "When attending an event with friends, I make sure to let others in the group know what drugs I am taking"), dosing practices (e.g., "If I am mixing drugs, the quantity I take of each drug is lower than if I take them separately"), mindfulness and body awareness (e.g., "I check in with myself while using drugs to see how I am feeling"), environmental safety (e.g., "Before using drugs at an event, I familiarize myself with the location of medical stations and/or harm reduction services"), and minimizing risks associated with an unregulated illicit drug supply (e.g., "I analyze my drugs with fentanyl test strips when applicable"). Polysubstance use PBS (i.e., mean frequency of use and mean perceived effectiveness) were negatively associated with past-year consequences (i.e., mean frequency and total number of consequences). Study 2 results indicate that participants engaged in differential patterns of polysubstance use that varied significantly by festival event day, with participants using a greater mean number of substances on days 2 and 3 of the festival. The percentage of participants having ever used reagent test kits and FTS was 75.3% and 66.5% respectively. When asked how often participants ensure their drugs are tested prior to consumption, participants responding "always" or "most of the time" was 54.4% for use of reagent test kits and 59.4% for use of FTS. 60.8% of participants reported that they had never consumed a drug that reagent tested differently than expected and 87.9% of participants reported that they had never consumed a drug that tested positive for fentanyl. Engagement with polysubstance use PBS appears to help individuals attending EDM events to reduce substance-related harms. Given that perceived effectiveness of PBS was also linked to reduced harm, interventions aimed at increasing beliefs related to PBS efficacy may be useful. Reagent test kits and fentanyl test strips seem to empower festival attendees to make informed decisions related to their substance use and health. Thus, there is a critical need to continue expanding access to drug checking tools, training, and services for this at-risk population.
Open Access
Prestige: concept, measurement, and the transmission of culture
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Berl, Richard E. W., III, author; Gavin, Michael C., advisor; Jordan, Fiona M., committee member; Vaske, Jerry J., committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
Cultural transmission influences how we learn, what we learn, and from whom we learn. Factors such as prestige can influence this process, leading to broader evolutionary dynamics that shape cultural diversity. In this dissertation, I describe three studies designed to elucidate the role that prestige and other transmission biases play in determining the course of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. In the first study, we conduct a systematic review of the academic literature on prestige to determine how the concept of prestige has been defined within different academic traditions, and what potential determinants and consequences of prestige have been proposed. We find that the academic literature on prestige is highly fragmented and inconsistent, and we integrate the diversity of prestige concepts from the literature into a unified framework that represents prestige as an outcome of contributions from all levels of social structure and from individual performance in a social role. We then systematically sample and code the ethnographic literature using the unified framework to determine the variability of prestige concepts across non-Western cultures, and find that different societies show significant differences in how prestige is perceived and operationalized. Using the results of both reviews, we offer an integrative definition of prestige and comment on the utility and implications of the unified prestige framework and definition across disciplines. In the second study, we develop and validate a common scale to measure individual prestige in Western societies. Drawing from participants in the United States and United Kingdom, we elicit terms related to prestige and evaluate additional terms from the literature. We pare down this pool of terms using attitudinal ratings of speech from a separate group of participants to find which are most closely related to a generalized Western prestige concept and to determine their structure with an exploratory factor analysis framework. Using confirmatory factor analysis and cluster analyses, we obtain a 7-item scale with 3 factors contributing to prestige that we term position, reputation, and information (or "PRI"). Finally, we perform checks to ensure that the scale exhibits good fit, scale validity, and scale reliability. We provide guidance for using the scale and for extending it to other cultural contexts. In the third study, we conduct a transmission experiment to compare the effects of prestige bias (a model-based context bias in cultural transmission) against the effects of different content biases represented in a narrative. We use locally calibrated regional accents of English as proxies for prestige, their relative levels of prestige having been established using the PRI scale of individual prestige and an application of the scale to a variety of accents in the United States and United Kingdom. For the content of the narratives, we craft artificial creation stories to resemble real creation stories in their form and in the proportions of each content type suggested in the literature to influence transmission, which were social, survival, emotional, moral, rational, and counterintuitive information. We asked participants to listen to the stories read by a high- or low-prestige speaker, complete a visual memory-based distraction task, and recall the stories to us. Following coding and analysis of the data, we find that prestige does have a significant effect on participants' recall. However, the effect of prestige is small compared to those of social, survival, negative emotional, and biological counterintuitive information. Our results suggest that content biases may play a much more important role in cultural transmission than previously thought, and that the effects of prestige bias are largely limited to information that is free of content biases. As this study is the first to test all of these biases simultaneously, we discuss its implications for our understanding of the complexity of cultural transmission and cultural evolution. In these three studies, I provide a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of prestige in which we explore and integrate its diversity of concepts, develop a scale by which prestige can be reliably measured, and report the results of an experimental test of the effects of prestige on cultural transmission relative to content biases. As a whole, this research constitutes a substantial contribution to our collective knowledge of the nature and function of prestige and its variability. This improved understanding of prestige, and in particular the effects of prestige on the process of cultural transmission, has implications for cultural evolution, human dimensions and conservation social science research, and other disciplines across the social sciences.
Open Access
Put your best face forward: adolescent use of Facebook and the establishment of a hypermeality
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2010) Taddonio, Elizabeth A., author; Diffrient, David Scott, 1972-, advisor; Lupo, Jonathan, committee member; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member
This thesis seeks to understand how adolescents, aged 13-15, use the online social network (OSN) of Facebook to perform identity. Over the course of three chapters, the researcher uses the frameworks of social semiotics, narrative studies, and performance studies to analyze the site's design, features, and users, respectively. This analysis is meant to clarify whether Facebook as a medium rearranges and changes the activities of a generalized adolescent population in U.S. America, or if the medium simply reinforces pre-existing social practices. To answer this question, the study focuses heavily on the use of a new term, "hypermeality," in order to explain the communal narrativization of the social self online. The study concludes by stating that Facebook creates a hyperreal environment for both negative and positive outcomes of networking. These negatives include cyberbullying, self-centrism and problematic Internet use, while the positives include online community building and cosmopolitanism that might extend to offline behaviors and awareness. It is the goal of this thesis to add to the conversation on new media technologies, contributing to a better understanding of how the previously mentioned theoretical frameworks can be applied to the study of OSNs—their role and function in the lives of adolescent computer users. This knowledge should foster the development of safe OSNs, intergenerational computer-mediated communication, and the de-stigmatization of new media cultures.
Open Access
Stalled labor: homebirth parents, gender, and ritual in the US
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Biasiolli, April, author; Kwiatkowski, Lynn M., advisor; Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member; Canetto, Silvia Sara, committee member
Pregnancy and birth are not purely biological, but fraught in every human culture with a great deal of meaning. Home birth, though unusual in the US, offers an opportunity to examine the cultural beliefs of those that choose it. Through a series of semi-structured ethnographic interviews with homebirth mothers, partners, and midwives, I find that these parents hope to transform the culture of birth to empower women, include men more fully, and give babies a gentler welcome into the world. This thesis draws on feminist and symbolic anthropological theories to examine midwife-attended pregnancy and birth at home as a rite of passage in which the parents both enact and are socialized into their new roles as parents. The mothers learn that a healthy birth is a commodity to be earned or purchased, that society has few obligations to the individual, and that the body gives birth. Fathers receive the related, though not identical, messages that the family is (or should be) self-sufficient, that they are responsible, and that birth care is a business. Both mothers and fathers move in and out of conventionally-gendered activities and roles as they negotiate pregnancy and birth. In the context of ritual, this has the possibility of subverting or reinforcing gender norms. The parents must grapple with this as they raise their new children, and find themselves torn between the desire to foster individuality and coping with the consequences of their children's non-conformity. They resolve this through denying their own role in socialization and attributing their children's gendered activities to individual choice. Though they challenge many ideas about gender as they attempt to change the culture of birth, I find that this labor is stalled: much work remains to be done to empower women and make men more central in birth.

Browsing by Author "Snodgrass, Jeffrey G., committee member"

Results Per Page

Sort Options