Sociology

Latinos are the fastest growing ethnicity of farmers in Iowa and across the U.S., and 3.7 percent of Iowa's total population. This case study of four Mexican immigrant farmers explores why and how they farm in Iowa, and how agricultural institutions can support them. I conducted in-depth interviews and observation, using the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods framework in analysis. These farmers learned as children to tend livestock and butcher animals for home consumption. Each bought a small Iowa farmstead by assembling social, human and limited financial capital. They work off-farm fulltime, while on-farm producing meat, dairy, and/or vegetables for home consumption, and selling slaughter animals through networks of co-workers, friends and family. They are disconnected from farm agencies, and desire information in Spanish on regulations, production and marketing. This study suggests potential to develop institutional linkages that strengthen local food systems by building on Mexican immigrant farmer knowledge, practice and networks.

This report presents survey results from the 2014 Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll focused on farmer perspectives on the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy, a science and technology-based approach used to assess and reduce nutrients delivered to Iowa waterways, the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The intended purpose is to help stakeholders in the agricultural community and beyond understand where farmers stand on the nutrient reduction strategy to inform outreach actions.

The current study assessed improvement in healthy lifestyles of third-grade children from Iowa schools who participated in nutrition education lessons provided by the Iowa Department of Public Health’s Building and Strengthening Iowa Community Support for Nutrition and Physical Activity (BASICS) program in 2009. The program encourages children to eat more fruits and vegetables as snacks and to be active every day. Autoregressive models and logistic regression analysis results showed that the BASICS program improved awareness of the “Pick a better snack™ & Act” campaign among children and their parents. The program also led to children’s increased preferences toward fruits, vegetables, and low-fat milk products, and to parents’ increased willingness to offer healthy foods to their children. The program stimulated children’s desires to be physically active and parents’ attentiveness toward children’s physical activity. These results indicated that the children influenced their parents’ recognition of campaign materials and how often their parents provided them with fruits and vegetables. Increasing parent age negatively influenced the probability of children receiving free and reduced-price lunch, reflecting the better economic situation of families with older parents.

With a theoretical background of Gordon's assimilationist and Blau's social structural theories, this thesis quantitatively explores generational, gender, and group size effects on Latino intermarriages by using the Current Population Survey. Chapter one explains the bases of these two theories, along with a literature review of intermarriages. The second chapter gives a brief history of Latino immigration to the United States from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central/South American, and the Dominican Republic. The conceptualization of important terms along with the methodology of the study is presented in chapter three. Finally, the outcome of the cross tabulations and the logistic regressions are presented in chapter four, along with the analysis of these outcomes. All three factors (generation, gender, and group size) are found to have a significant impact on the likelihood of Latino intermarriages.

ABSTRACT

Relatively little research has examined what motivates people to make the choice to become involved with drugs, how drug involvement becomes a salient feature of those individuals' lives, the consequence for their identity, and how these vary by race/ethnicity, class, gender and residential location. Inspired by Bourdieu and emerging criminological research utilizing his framework, and in concert with insights from narrative criminology, I fill a gap in the literature I provide a nuanced examination of the intersecting influences of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and residential location on the development of a drug using or dealing identity. Sixty current or former users and dealers were interviewed across two research sites. Semi-structured life-history interviews were used to elicit narratives from participants.

I find participants pull from multiple subculturally available identities to construct their own personal narrative identities and that these identities vary by user, dealer, race/ethnicity, class, gender, and residential location. Drug users could call on a variety of identities and the most commonly presented ones among my sample included "party", "responsible drug user", "super mom", or "failing mom" identities. Those from Two Rivers more commonly constructed a party identity, while it was more common for those from Winterton City to construct one of the later identities. Dealers often called on one of three identities. Those from Two Rivers could be considered "good time dealers" while those from Winterton City were more apt to construct a "hustler" or "survivor" identity in relation to their dealing. I provide evidence that deviant identities are not situationally constructed and enacted. Instead, deviant behaviors are incorporated into an individual's pre-existing identity and are shaped by important markers of social identity. I suggest this identification with drug involvement becomes important for an individual's sense of identity with effects for deviant and no-deviant spheres of life.

Cover crops are known to promote many aspects of soil and water quality, yet estimates find that in 2012 only 2.3% of the total agricultural lands in the Midwestern USA were using cover crops. Focus groups were conducted across the Corn Belt state of Iowa to better understand how farmers confront barriers to cover crop adoption in highly intensive agricultural production systems. Although much prior research has focused on analyzing factors that help predict cover crop use on farms, there is limited research on how farmers navigate and overcome field-level (e.g. proper planting of a cover crop) and structural barriers (e.g. market forces) associated with the use of cover crops. The results from the analysis of these conversations suggest that there is a complex dialectical relationship between farmers' individual management decisions and the broader agricultural context in the region that constrains their decisions. Farmers in these focus groups shared how they navigate complex management decisions within a generally homogenized agricultural and economic landscape that makes cover crop integration challenging. Many who joined the focus groups have found ways to overcome barriers and successfully integrate cover crops into their cropping systems. This is illustrated through farmers' descriptions of their ‘whole system’ approach to cover crops management, where they described how they prioritize the success of their cover crops by focusing on multiple aspects of management, including changes they have made to nutrient application and modifications to equipment. These producers also engage with farmer networks to gain strategies for overcoming management challenges associated with cover crops. Although many participants had successfully planted cover crops, they tended to believe that greater economic incentives and/or more diverse crop and livestock markets would be needed to spur more widespread adoption of the practice. Our results further illustrate how structural and field-level barriers constrain individual actions, as it is not simply the basic agronomic considerations (such as seeding and terminating cover crops) that pose a challenge to their use, but also the broader economic and market drivers that exist in agriculturally intensive systems. Our study provides evidence that reducing structural barriers to adoption may be necessary to increase the use of this conservation practice to reduce environmental impacts associated with intensive agricultural production.

The present study examined, first, the associations between age, gender, psychosomatic and emotional symptoms in case of Taiwan to inspect whether theories which have developed based on the studies of American society can be generalized cross-culturally, while taking in to account the effects of marital status, SES (including education, self-rated class, and income), and religion. Second, the age and gender differences on the relationships between life strain (e.g., physical health problems) and life event and psychosomatic and emotional symptoms were also investigated. Third, this study tested the age and gender differences on the relationships between social support and social contact and the mental health symptoms just mentioned. Finally, the buffering (or moderator) effect of social support on the associations between life strain and life event and the psychological distresses (e.g., psychosomatic and emotional symptoms) was tested. The data was drawn from a nationwide household survey (n = 2,530) of adults age 18 to 64. Using Multiple Classification Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling (including model comparison procedures) with test for statistical significance, the findings revealed that elder people and women had greater sources of life strain and higher level of mental health symptoms. In other words, there existed significant age and gender differences among life strain, psychosomatic and emotional symptoms. However, no age or gender differences were found on social support or social contact. Social support had no buffering influence on the association between life strain (or life event) and the mental health symptoms either. In brief, some theories were supported by the findings of the present study but some other were contradicted. The findings were discussed in terms of their limitations and implications for further studies.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12616937