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The purpose of this study is to investigate the informal micro-level mechanisms through which caregivers maximize their health literacy and caregiving skill-set, particularly in cases of emergent, pervasive health disorders. Specifically, I investigate how important micro-level social factors, such as lay self-education and local community networks, mitigate extensive experiences of medical uncertainty that are associated with caring for a child with autism. This study theorizes a series of processes of becoming lay health care professionals (HCP), which serve as effective health care interventions and ways to secure vital resources for patients and their families.

This study uses qualitative research methods in the form of 50 individual intensive interviews with primary caregivers of at least one child under the age of 18 with an official autism diagnosis, as well as two years of participant-observation at two primary sites that are autism parent and caregiver resource meetings, both located in Northern California.

This study first demonstrates the major institutional limits and gaps involved in health-related caregiving for children with autism. Next, I define the processes through which caregivers challenge these institutional constraints and fight for life altering resources for their families, which include becoming a lay diagnostician and expert caregiver. Here, I demonstrate a sophisticated set of health literacy skills and key local community-based ties that caregivers develop and rely on, which affords families the tools to overcome diverse institutional obstacles in health-seeking and health care access.

The families in this study are predominantly white, middle-class, and reside in California. For future research, the scope of the study could be expanded by increasing the sample size and including greater geographic and demographic diversity.

This study contributes vital, yet missing, pieces to the autism puzzle, which currently focuses on prevention, the fight for a so-called “cure,” and the role of vaccines in disorder prevalence. In the meantime, families are living with autism each day and are struggling for understanding and knowledge, and to secure adequate support services. In doing so, this study sheds light on current institutional gaps and limits in health care and delivery for children with autism, and suggests specific effective health care interventions applicable to other cases of emergent illnesses and disorders.

Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

This chapter argues that Eminem and Rihanna's 2009 “Love the Way You Lie” is a cultural artifact representing contemporary attitudes about domestic violence; thus, this chapter models a trauma-informed methodology for guiding students through analysis and discussion of these narratively violent texts. In so doing, instructors can help students recognize the discursive strategies through which stories about gender violence are constructed and examine what is at stake in telling and circulating these stories. The chapter begins by defining trauma-informed pedagogy and critical pedagogy, arguing that when used together in the classroom, they can promote empathy, self-advocacy, resistance, and resilience. The chapter then contextualizes the song and music video within the context of the #MeToo movement, encouraging instructors to validate the perception of students who experience allyship with Rihanna as a survivor. The chapter moves on to provide instructors with a model for guiding students both through semiotic analysis and close reading of the song's and video's narrative and visual discourses. This model pays attention to the lyric's reliance on the point of view of the unreliable narrator and pronoun shifts to interpellate listeners into the abuser's world view while also truncating the victim's testimony; this model also examines the content of the lyrics to identify gender violence mythologies constructed within both the abuser's and victim's narratives. Equipped with these insights, instructors can help students deconstruct the visual discourses of the video, which repeat the gender violence mythologies of the song lyrics.

The organised self-help approach successfully enhances urban low-income earners' (LIE) homeownership in some developing countries. The technique can enhance urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership. There is a paucity of studies concerning sustainable homeownership for Nigeria's urban LIE through a self-help approach. The study investigated the housing needs of the urban LIE via organised self-help mechanisms and how the same can enhance urban resilience for sustainable homeownership in the Ancient City of Benin, Nigeria.

Given the unexplored nature of the issue, 20 face-to-face interviews were conducted with experts and analysed through a thematic approach.

Findings identified eleven main barriers faced by the urban LIE. This includes the absence of government housing policy, funding frameworks, urban land scarcity, high property development costs, naira devaluation, high-interest rates, inflation, bribery and corruption, lax mortgage sub-sector, high cost of infrastructure, and government bureaucracy.

This study will contribute to pioneering the role of organised self-help mechanisms in urban resilience for sustainable LIE homeownership in developing cities via a qualitative approach. Also, findings would significantly contribute to developing countries' sustainable housing and urban resilience literature.

Individuals, organizations, firms, and governments have been making strenuous effort to promote sustainable and green consumption. However, it is noticeable that a large amount of unattractive produce is ruthlessly discarded and wasted around the globe, resulting in unsustainable consumption behavior, harming long-term business development, and breaking the harmonious relationship between humans and nature. Therefore, to increase consumer literacy toward unaesthetic produce, this research investigates the pivotal role of “natural” labeling in increasing purchase intention toward visually unattractive fruits and vegetables.

By recruiting participants from one of the largest online crowdsourcing platforms (the Credamo), this research conducts three online experimental studies (with two pilot studies) to test three hypotheses based on the cue utilization theory and the lay belief theory.

The results show that unattractive produce with the “natural” label could significantly increase consumers' purchase intention compared with those without specific labels. The results also reveal that consumers' lay beliefs that natural foods are perceived to be tastier and healthier mediate the positive effects of “natural” labeling (vs no specific labeling) on willingness to purchase.

This research explores competing lay beliefs about unattractive produce. It identifies the positive effects of lay beliefs “natural = tasty and healthy” through “natural” labeling appeal, thus attenuating the misapplication of lay beliefs “unattractive = tasteless and unhealthy” and broadening the application scope of consumer lay belief theory. The findings also contribute to the cue literature by manifesting the positive consequences of the “natural” label playing as a cognitive cue in priming lay beliefs about naturalness. In addition, it also paves a positive way for business practitioners and marketers to develop the produce industry sustainably.

Predatory trading is a stock market trading technique in which certain market participants exploit information about other market participants' need to trade. Predatory trading often harms others. Hence, this paper examines the determinants and effects of financial practitioners' and lay people's judgments of predatory trading. Specifically, it investigates how the public availability and reliability of the exploited information affect their ethics and legality judgments and how the latter influence their behavioral intentions and regulation support.

The authors conducted two scenario judgment studies. In the first study, participants were financial practitioners, and in the second – lay people.

Practitioners often judge predatory trading to be ethical. Practitioners and lay people incorporate in their ethics and legality judgments the public availability of the exploited information but tend to discount the legal reliability criterion. Lay people justify their ethics judgments using harm, legal or profit maximization principles. Practitioners' intentions to engage in predatory trading and lay people's intentions to let predatory fund managers invest their money depend on their judgments, which influence their regulation support.

This paper is the first to explore people's judgments of predatory trading. It highlights that despite the harm that predatory trading involves, practitioners often judge it to be ethical. Although law tends to lag behind financial innovation, people base their judgments and hence also behavioral intentions on their interpretation of the regulation. Hence, it reveals a dark aspect of the relationship between ethics and legality judgments.

This study aims to examine whether consumers’ lay theories of emotion play a moderating role between self-threat and their choice of threat-coping strategies (direct resolution and escapism) and product preference.

The present research uses the methods of experimental design and surveys to collect data and verify the hypotheses we assumed.

Study 1 indicates that in self-threatening situations, people who perceive emotions as fleeting (lasting) are more likely to use a threat-coping strategy of direct resolution (escapism). Study 2 demonstrates that people who believe emotions are fleeting are more likely to choose problem-solving products; people who believe emotions are lasting are more likely to choose emotion-enhancing products. Study 3 further demonstrates that the direct resolution (escapism) strategy plays a mediating role between the interaction effect and consumer preference for problem-solving products (emotion-enhancing products). Study 4 replicates the results of Study 2 by incorporating the manipulation of lay theories of emotion transience in a product evaluation context.

A limitation of the present research is that this paper puts focus on exploring the effects of self-view threat (e.g. intelligence and competence) on consumer product preferences. Another issue for future research is the extent to which emotion-transience theories hold for specific emotions. Given that distinct emotions of the same valence differ in their antecedent appraisals and that specific emotion could lead to different subsequent behaviors (Lerner and Keltner, 2000), future research may need to explore the roles of specific negative emotions triggered by self-threat in consumers’ product choosing behaviors. One potential direction for future research is to examine whether the perceived locus of control affects consumers’ choice of threat-coping strategies and product preferences.

Marketers could use product tactics for motivating consumers to restore their self-perceptions on the threatened attributes and address the self-threat, such as product attributes, advertising copy or promotional appeals that insert people who are more motivated to directly resolve the threat. Marketers can nudge consumers toward a direct resolution strategy by posting prompts such as, “I can do it!” For example, the slogan of Nike – “Just do it” and the 2012 award-winning campaign by Nike Spain have told consumers: “If something is burning you up, burn it up by running” (Allard and White, 2015), which suggests that consumers experiencing self-threat may resolve the negative self-discrepancy through the acquisition of the products in the advertisement. Another important implication suggested by the findings is that product consumption can be a way of helping consumers escape from self-threats. For example, the slogan of Coca-Cola – “Taste the feeling” resonates with consumers and stimulates their basic hedonic needs.

First, this research extends previous research by demonstrating that lay theories of emotion serve as a motivator of the selection of threat-coping strategies. Second, this research is conducive for literature to examine how differences in lay theories of emotion affect consumers’ product-choosing behaviors to cope with self-discrepancies. Third, the present research extends the broad marketing literature by differentiating problem-solving products from emotion-enhancing products.

To provide an overview of building use in Lied Library at UNLV from the Library's opening in 2001 through early 2004 and to provide and update on the implications of the ramifications of that use for staff and users.

Use and visitation statistics are highlighted and factors associated with the use, such as overall design, policy changes, new services and resources as well as campus context are presented.

The experiences at UNLV's Lied Library indicate that the concept of “library as place” still matters; that an awe‐inspiring and esthetically pleasing design can produce a very functional building and that still matters; that continually evolving user‐focused services still matter; and that, for the library to continue to matter in the lives of its users, it must continue to adapt to its campus context, to collaborate successfully with campus partners and to respond effectively to the constantly changing context of information delivery and knowledge promotion.

It is important that librarians working in new libraries take time to review the successes and possible unintended consequences or shortcomings that result from their building projects, to identify the toll that success may take, and to appreciate the value and necessity of continued evolution even in a new building.

The observations presented may prove useful to librarians preparing for and assessing post‐move‐in experiences in their new libraries. Practical tips on preparing for and handling national and international visitors are also provided and suggestions for future action are given.

Structural factors during Chinese and Japanese immigration and settlement processes required families to adapt in ways that altered traditional gender behaviors. This study examines how two factors – spousal immigration order and family economic structure – affected the gendered division of labor and how gender roles consequently were reconstructed for first and second generation Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans. These issues are investigated through secondary data analysis of 21 in‐depth interviews with daughters of Chinese and Japanese immigrants on the West Coast.