Do College Students Support Multiculturalism and What\u27s behind Their Attitudes: Demographic, Ideology, Contact, Race Perceptions or University Factors?

A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Sociology by Hideko Asada on December 7, 1998

Strategies of Impoliteness in Japanese Spontaneous Talks

If, on the one hand, Japanese language, with its richness of marked allomorphs used for honorifics, has been considered one of the most attractive languages to investigate the phenomenon of politeness, on the other hand, a very small number of studies have been devoted to Japanese impoliteness, most of them limited to BBSs’ (Bulletin Board System) chats on Internet. Interestingly, Japanese native speakers declare, in general, that their language has a very limited number of offensive expressions and that ‘impoliteness’ is not a characteristic of their mother tongue. I tried to analyse some samples of spontaneous conversations taken from YouTube and other multimedia repertoires, in order to detect the main strategies used in Japanese real conversations to cause offence or to show a threatening attitude toward the partner’s face. It seems possible to state that, notwithstanding the different ‘cultural’ peculiarities, impoliteness shows, also in Japanese, a set of strategies common to other languages and that impoliteness, in terms of morphology, is not a mirror counterpart of keigo

The Acceptance of Multicultural Curriculum among Appalachian College Students

This study explores the multicultural predispositions of 437 students in a Central Appalachian university. After selecting students from a wide range of majors, this article shows which sort of multicultural programs garner weaker and stronger support in this undergraduate population. Following this descriptive elaboration, a set of OLS regressions tests a wide range of competing explanatory prepositions. Some of the explanatory models draw from familiar demographic and university-effect variables. However, this article expands on the education literature by drawing from some sociological, psychological and political science studies of American reactions to other multicultural programs (i.e., Affirmative Action, school desegregation, and welfare reform). By adding the variables on symbolic racism, authoritarianism and beliefs in American meritocracy, the final mix of 21 independent variables produces a somewhat robust model. Moreover, this analysis also identifies which educational practices seem to encourage a greater appreciation of a multicultural learning process. Finally, we address issues of generalizing to a national population by comparing our findings to case studies of multicultural education at other universities