To meet the demands of the changing labor market it is important for human resources management to improve and enhance their knowledge of the workforce. This report profiles the labor force in Southern California for Human Resources Round Table (HARRT) and presents key findings regarding diversity and aging. This report will provide employers with basic trends and implications and will help promote potential strategies to improve practice in shaping the quality of the workforce. This report is structured around five research objectives:

-Analyze labor force trends in Southern California from 1980 to 2010, -Compare Southern California to the state and nation. -Profile labor force by gender, ethnicity, education, etc. -Examine the size of the older labor force. -Identify implications for employers.

We conduct a historical and projected analysis of the labor force utilizing demographic and socioeconomic characteristics from 1980 to 2010. The presentation of results is divided into five sections:

-Overall Population Trends -Labor Force Trends -Labor Force Composition -Size of Older Work Force -Implications

To meet the demands of the changing labor market it is important for human resources management to improve and enhance their knowledge of the workforce. This report profiles the labor force in Southern California for Human Resources Round Table (HARRT) and presents key findings regarding diversity and aging. This report will provide employers with basic trends and implications and will help promote potential strategies to improve practice in shaping the quality of the workforce. This report is structured around five research objectives: • Analyze labor force trends in Southern California from 1980 to 2010. • Compare Southern California to the state and nation. • Profile labor force by gender, ethnicity, education, etc. • Examine the size of the older labor force. • Identify implications for employers.

The perception of engineering as intimidating contributes to a lack of diversity among aspiring engineers. My research develops a deeper understanding of tinkering spaces at public science centers as an accessible pathway towards engineering. I engage in cross-community collaborations with college engineering students, industry engineers, and informal science educators to design tinkering spaces, and I analyze the effect of these spaces on the learner experience. This dissertation explores these collaborators' processes of developing engineering design challenges as well as how these processes affect the students' and engineers' understanding of learning and engineering. A variety of observations, including ethnographic case studies of the cross-community design and a comparison of the visitor experience in the space with and without the cross-community design, are synthesized into practical guidelines for creating engineering tinkering spaces.

Focusing on visitors' design processes and perceptions, I find that (1) visitors are not just playing randomly, rather many are engineering deliberately; (2) visitors initially do not necessarily identify as engineers or understand engineering, and mostly associate engineering with building; and (3) constructing designs in these activities leads to the construction of identity and agency as engineers. In particular, the physical materials and the presence of other designs in the space play a key role in visitors' problem scoping, information gathering, and concept generation. Thus, the structure of these tinkering environments empowers visitors to engineer and to continue these experiences. The cross-community collaborators contribute uniquely to the design of the challenges: the educators contribute methods for accessible learning, while the industry engineers and engineering students contribute technical authenticity. Using a human-centered design process with science center visitors, the collaborators grow to view learning as a mutual experience involving contributions from the learners. Visitors at the collaborations' challenges engage in and identify broader engineering behaviors and are better able to connect the challenges to the real world when compared to visitors at challenges without cross-community design. These results provide the basis for guidelines to improve the perception of engineering through tinkering. My dissertation contributes to knowledge on the design of and learning in these tinkering spaces, particularly how learners' engineering design processes serve as a pathway towards becoming future engineers.

Los Angles County is home to the largest urbanized American Indian population in the country. This culturally diverse population has survived and maintained its identity despite centuries of oppression and a legacy of marginalization. Today, the American Indian population in the Los Angeles region is an economically disadvantaged group that is difficult to serve because of its geographic dispersion. Knowledge of the socioeconomic characteristics and spatial patterns of American Indians is critical to identifying the needs of this community and to improving programs tailored to it. This report contributes to our understanding of the needs of American Indians by examining census and enrollment data on the socioeconomic status and distribution of American Indians in Los Angles County. (Released in Conjunction with the United American Indian Involvement, Inc. of Los Angeles)