Browsing by Author "Wittberg, Patricia, 1947-"

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    Coping with Stigma: An Adult Learners' Perspective
    (2010-07-19T19:38:50Z) Solinski, Cynthia Leigh; Seybold, Peter James, 1950-; Wittberg, Patricia, 1947-; Leland, Christine
    This study contributes to the research on stigma and adult literacy by giving voice to an understudied and marginalized group. It allows adults with literacy challenges to elaborate on how they accomplish everyday activities, to describe what strategies they use to manage stigma, and to tell their stories about how stigma has affected various domains of their lives. This study also explores some participants' experience with stigma during childhood and its impact on their self-esteem and self-efficacy for learning. It situates these findings in a larger social context by analyzing changes in self-concept and lifelong learning goals of adult learners who have been participating in a literacy program for at least two years.
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    Gender division in American Baptist families : second and third shifts
    (2013-12-16) McCloud, Janice Sue; Wittberg, Patricia, 1947-; Haas, Linda; Littlefield, Marci
    The division of labor in households is an important topic in marital relationships. Families are not static; they are in a constant state of change. Employment, individual family members’ schedules, and religious beliefs can impact how couples divide household tasks. This particular study draws on in-depth interviews of four married couples from American Baptist churches to explore how couples within this type of church divide household tasks. The interviews focused on the management of second- and third-shift household tasks, as well as childcare. The purpose of obtaining this information was to see if the way American Baptist couples handle second-, third-shift duties, and childcare is more consistent with general population couples or more consistent with Evangelical/Conservative couples. Husbands and wives were interviewed separately to obtain individual thoughts and opinions. The interviews revealed that when it comes to second-shift tasks and child care, American Baptist couples are more in line with general population couples. As far as third-shift duties, Evangelical, general population, and American Baptist couples are all currently handling in very similar ways with the female performing the majority of third-shift tasks.
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    Performing arts centers : does uptown culture stimulate downtown vitality?
    (2013-10-07) Chu, Jane; Wittberg, Patricia, 1947-; Bielefeld, Wolfgang; Rushton, Michael, 1959-; Saxton, Todd, 1963-
    Performing arts centers have been touted as a strategy for revitalizing downtowns by increasing activities that bring in residents with higher incomes, tourists, arts employees, educated workers, and housing. Despite their popularity, civic leaders have encountered complexity in these projects, from financial challenges, to delayed openings and operating deficits. Previous downtown studies examine public facilities, such as stadiums and cultural institutions, through essays, surveys, case studies, or by quantifying transactions exchanged between the public and the facility. This dissertation focuses solely on performing arts centers, excluding all other forms of public facilities and cultural venues, by examining self-collected data on literature-based characteristics of 218 downtowns with and without performing arts centers, all over a seven-year period of time. It was hypothesized that the presence of a performing arts center would contribute to increases in the values of all downtown revitalization characteristics, and community characteristics, as well as organizational attributes of the performing arts center itself (age, size, and revenue types) would in turn, increase the values of the overall health of the performing arts center. Through the use of multiple linear regressions, this research shows that performing arts centers can play a role in revitalizing downtowns. This research also shows that a single characteristic is not solely responsible for revitalizing downtowns; rather, the increased vitality results from a confluence of the characteristics. Endogeneity tests show that a performing arts center is less likely to enter a deserted downtown bereft of vitality. Instead, performing arts centers serve as harbingers of revitalization, confirming the presence of downtown vitality, before they proceed to activate vitality further. Finally, through the use of binary logistic regressions, community characteristics are identified in order to determine the conditions of downtowns that would be most equipped to open a performing arts center, as compared with downtowns that could not.
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    The Philanthropic Behavior of Nonprofit Hospitals
    (2010-02-02T20:14:17Z) Lyons, Alvin L.; Steinberg, Richard; Wittberg, Patricia, 1947-; Morrison, Wendy; Katz, Robert
    The study of the nonprofit sector has traditionally focused on nonprofit organizations as recipients of charity. A perspective that has been relatively neglected is that of nonprofit organizations as not only recipients but also as donors of charitable resources. This dissertation explores the phenomenon of philanthropic behavior of nonprofit organizations, using studies of the contributions and community health programs of nonprofit hospitals in Indiana as an example. Philanthropic behavior is defined as actions and programs initiated by a nonprofit organization to meet additional community needs – beyond its primary mission or services. It presents the hypothesis that such activities are undertaken for reasons similar to for-profit organizations – and have comparable organizational benefits. The studies reported in the dissertation show a wide variation in reporting such activities as well as of the organizational structures in place to manage such behavior. This variation is seen even in seemingly similar hospitals such as religious hospitals within an identified system. The dissertation discovers that while nonprofit organizations may engage in philanthropic behavior, these practices go largely unrecognized. Because the actions are not systematically noted or recorded, some very significant residual benefits that nonprofits provide for their defined communities are also unrecognized. It also finds that when these activities are evident, they are driven more by the professional values and actions of individual employees than by organizational policies. The dissertation concludes that drawing conclusions from this study of the data on Indiana hospitals – both from state reports and the IRS Form 990s – is difficult. There is an inconsistency between the two databases as well as within each of the datasets that makes any specific conclusions as to the relative values of different hospitals or to standards is suspect. It notes that while the revised Form 990 should help in overall transparency, the reporting of areas such as health education and donations will most probably continue to be inconsistent. This inconsistency makes the information difficult to use as either an evaluation tool or as policy to encourage community-serving behavior.