Browsing by Subject "status"
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Item An Expectation States Approach to Examining Medical Team Information Exchange(2013-07-30) Manago, BiancaThis project is the first step in a long line of research that will examine the impact of status on information exchange in small groups of medical professionals. Specifically, we employ the expectation states theory and observable power and prestige methodology to develop a coding scheme and live coding methodology that is attuned to the unique status organizing process in interprofessional medical teams. This paper begins with an explanation of the shortcomings in current research that examines medical teams. We then discuss the conceptual development of the coding scheme and methodology. Next, we establish reliability between live coders and between the transcript coders. We conclude by employing our coding scheme to examine how occupational status (physician vs. nurse) operates in medical teams, and find that our scheme possesses both criterion and face validity. Future steps include increasing our sample size to have more statistical power in detecting status differences and dropping some items from the coding scheme to increase reliability.Item Commodifying Fido: pets as status symbols(2009-05-15) Plemons, AprilHow are pets being used as status symbols to display social position and wealth? This paper seeks to theoretically examine pet owners and their use of animals to convey a message of social status, position and wealth. This will be done through an application of theoretical constructs by Veblen, Marx, and Bourdieu and applications to concepts of consumerism, status, commodities and distinction. While the human-animal relationship has been investigated in terms of the human benefits of physical and mental health, stress reduction, child surrogacy, loneliness reduction and more, there have been fewer investigations of pets as social status symbols. This thesis creates a more inclusive theoretical approach to commodities being used as status symbols. After a historical look at how the function of pets has evolved in relation to humans, the more inclusive theory is applied to real world examples of pets in modern affluent societies such as pet luxury items, designer breeds, market segmentation, and mass availability of those products.Item Status & solidarity through codeswitching: three plays by Dolores Prida(Texas A&M University, 2004-09-30) Anderson, Sheri L.This analysis employs the sociolinguistic framework of status and solidarity (Holmes, 2001) to examine the use of codeswitching on the relational development between the characters in three plays by Cuban-American playwright Dolores Prida. The three plays discussed are Beautiful Se?oritas (1978), Coser y cantar (1981) and Bot?nica (1991). Linguistic scholars recognize the lack of linguistic analysis of literary texts; specifically, codeswitching at present is not fully explored as a linguistic phenomenon in written contexts. Furthermore, Prida's works have never before been appraised using linguistic methodology. Hence, this work aims to add to scholarly research in the fields of codeswitching, discourse analysis, and literary linguistics, using the status and solidarity framework to examine the codeswitching in Dolores Prida's plays. Dolores Prida is a feminist and Hispanic dramatist whose central theme is the search for identity of Hispanic immigrants, specifically women, in the United States today. Due to her ideological stance, it is expected that a strong emphasis on solidarity rather than status and the use of affective rather than referential speech functions are present in the relationships in her plays. Accordingly, the analysis of Bot?nica reveals that indeed codeswitching between the characters does affect their relational development in maintaining solidarity and intimacy. However, the relationships found in Beautiful Se?oritas and Coser y cantar do not offer such conclusions, due to the variable nature of the relationships identified. Further analysis of these and other literary works will more accurately determine benefits of the status and solidarity framework as applied to the codeswitching research.