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A Certain Essence Of The Sun: Byron Herbert Reece And The Southern Poetry Tradition, Alan Jackson

Doctoral Dissertations

This study of Byron Herbert Reece (1917-1958) seeks to provide a broad look at his life, his work, his reputation,and his contributions to poetry. The record of his life is largely contained in a biography. The Mountain Singer, byRaymond Cook and in several published remembrances. These Remembrances often conform to a common assumption, promoted by Atlanta newspapers and others, that Reece was a mountain man poet. The accuracy of that image is challenged in this book and shown to be more an attempt to simplify Reese's Character than to explore his complex nature or examine his unique poetic vision. Little …

Holistic Obstetrical Problem Evaluation (Hope) : Testing A Midwifery Theory To Predict Maternal And Perinatal Health Outcomes, Darlene Elizabeth Jesse

Doctoral Dissertations

The primary purpose of this study was to test the Holistic Obstetrical ProblemEvaluation (HOPE) theory, derived from Watson's Theory of Care (1979), by examining the relationship of socio-demographic factors, biophysical, psychosocial, spiritual and perceptual components to birth weight, gestational age, APGAR score and unplanned cesarean birth. A prospective correlational research design was used. A convenience sample of 120 pregnant women, between ages 14-44 and 16-28 weeks gestation from three prenatal sites was interviewed using; (1) Socio-demographic factors; (2) thePrenatal Psychosocial Profile tPPPl: (3) the Abuse Assessment Screen (AASV (4) theSpiritual Perspectives Scale (SPS); and (5) perception of pregnancy questions.Biophysical data …

Resource Use And Foraging Activity Of Mexican Free-Tailed Bats, Tadarida Brasiliensis Mexicana (Molossidae), Ya-Fu Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Foraging patterns and the food habits of insectivorous bats may evolve in response to a variety of intrinsic (e.g., energetic demands, nutrient requirements, and morphological or physiological constraints in acquiring and consuming food) and extrinsic factors (e.g., the distribution and abundance of insect prey, and interactions with other organisms). This study investigates the foraging behavior and ecology of Mexican free-tailed bats, Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana (Saussure, 1860) (Molossidae) residing in large colonies, with emphases on their dietary breadth and variation, their foraging activity, and their resource use patterns.

Food habits and dietary variation of insectivorous Mexican free-tailed bats were investigated at …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Experience Of The Spouse Of A Heart Transplant Recipient, Alice Hill Mccurry

Doctoral Dissertations

Heart transplantation is an increasingly common treatment for end-stage heart disease and often involves extended periods of waiting for the transplant, recovering from the surgery, and life changes related to compliance with subsequent perennial medical follow-up and treatment. Current research readily documents increasing success in cardiac transplantation and in the long-term quality of life of recipients.Relatively few studies, however, have explored the impact of this critical life event on the spouse and/or children of the transplant recipient.The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the experience of spouses of heart transplant recipients. The study used a phenomenological design …

Accountability In Public Agency Contracting : The Case Of Child Protective Services In East Tennessee, Christine G. Ludowise

Doctoral Dissertations

In the United States, units of local, state, and federal governments have contracted out for goods and services for decades. However, in recent years there has been a growth in the provision of social services by private, not-for-profit vendors. The development of privatized public services has led to questions about the nature of accountability in public-private partnerships.

Contracting out is often government's solution to political and social pressures to cut costs and to improve services and efficiency. Not many would argue that government should buy goods and services for cheaper than it can produce them. Contracts between government and service …

Living As Subject : The Stories Of Five Women With Disabilities, Lois M. Symington

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to increase our understanding of the processes by which a select group of women with disabilities have reached a position of subjectivity. Subjectivity is defined as a process of becoming—a process in which women placed on the margin of society define themselves and use power and agency to effect personal change as well as change in others. Women with disabilities are oppressed, perceived and portrayed as roleless, and considered objects of pity and sympathy.

The five women participating in this study have developed critical consciousness about their status in our society, and in …

Ruminant Respiratory Syncytial Virus Subgroup Distinction Using Synthetic Peptides From The Extracellular Central Region Of The Attachment Protein-G, Steven Timothy Grubbs

Doctoral Dissertations

Subgroup specific, peptide-based, enzyme immunoassays were developed from the unique extracellular, central region (residues 158-189) located between two mucin-like regions of the attachment protein-G from ovine and bovine respiratory syncytial viruses. Antigenic peptides [ovine (residues 173-189) and bovine (residues 171-187)] used to develop the enzyme immunoassays were identified by a combination of algorithms and epitope mapping from each G-glycoprotein. The negative threshold for each enzyme immunoassay was established as the mean optical density of indirect immunofluorescent antibody-negative bovine sera plus three standard deviations. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of each enzyme immunoassay was determined by comparison with …

The Relationship Of Parents'/Guardians' Self-Management To Their Children's Self-Management, Academic Performance, And Health, Nan Mccammon Gaylord

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined parents'/guardians' self-management and its relationship to their children's self-management, academic performance, and health. It also examined the relationship between these children's self-management and their own health and academic performance. The sample consisted of 94 seventh grade student and parent/guardian pairs from an inner city school in the southeast. A parental consent form, student assent form, consent form for the release of academic records, the Lifestyle Approaches Inventory (Williams, Moore, Pettibone, & Thomas, 1992) and the Lifestyle Approaches Inventory- Revised were sent home with every seventh grade student in the school. Participation was encouraged by offering incentives to …

The Ecology And Management Of Black Bears In The Tensas River Basin Of Louisiana, Keith Marshall Weaver

Doctoral Dissertations

The Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus)once was common throughout east Texas, Louisiana, and southern Mississippi. By the mid-1980's, extensive habitat destruction reduced its range by >80%, and long-term survival of the subspecies is now uncertain,was the pioneer investigation of the population status andResults were used by the U.S.This study ecology of D. a. luteolus.Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to address a petition to list the subspecies as federally endangered, and provided the basis for management recommendations intended to promote population recovery. Investigations were conducted from 1988-1991 in the Tensas River Basin of northeasternLouisiana, 1 of only 2 …

Perceived Effectiveness Of Problem-Focused And Emotion-Focused Coping : The Role Of Appraisal Of Event Controllability And Personality Traits, Lawrence Ira Marks

Doctoral Dissertations

Two broad types of coping labeled problem-focused and emotion focused have been used to classify the many ways of coping with stressful events. The goodness of fit between individuals' appraisals of control over a stressful event and their use of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies has been shown to be related to psychological adjustment.However, there is an absence of studies that examine individuals' perceived effectiveness of problem-focused coping and perceived effectiveness of emotion-focused coping in relation to appraisals of control. In addition, two of the five traits of the five-factor model of personality that have consistently been identified as being …

Intergenerational Programming: Yesterday's Memories, Today's Moments, And Tomorrow's Hopes, Kathleen Ann O'Rourke

Doctoral Dissertations

Even though the numbers and scope of intergenerational programs continue to grow, research about their impact is limited. The purpose of this study was to compare 12 behaviors of older adults in the presence of absence of children. Six adults with dementia, aged 57 to 86, were videotaped during 10 art activities, 5 with preschool children and 5 with peer adults. The design was a quasi-experimental applied behavioral analysis. Chi-square tests showed that the older adults' behaviors were significantly dependent on children's presence or absence. Repeated measures ANOVAs indicated that children's presence or absence had a significant effect on the …

Beyond The Glass Facade : Women Deans Of Education, Denise M. Harvey

Doctoral Dissertations

There are indications that the number of women in administrative positions in academia is growing. Much of this information is informal and anecdotal. This research focused on women who have become deans of education and the career paths used to reach the upper management level of education administration. This study investigated whether barriers referred to in the 1980's as the "glass ceiling," which slowed women's progress to the upper ranks of administration, still exist or have been compounded by the "glass facade." This term refers to the organizational and cultural impediments that women face when attempting to further their careers …

The Life World Of Centenarians, Susan Church

Doctoral Dissertations

The meaning of having lived a century was explored from a phenomenological perspective. Rorschachs and in-depth interviews were gathered from 11 centenarians who were asked to reflect on some times when it occurred to them that they had lived a very long time, and to describe those experiences in as much detail as possible. A thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews produced four interrelated themes: Being Special; Being Active, Doing and Working; Accepting Things and Being Satisfied; and Caring and Being Cared for. These themes were related to recurring Rorschach imagery of death and transformation. The study underscores the importance …

The Experience Of Coping With Chronic Pain : A Phenomenological Investigation, Dianne E. Briscoe

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this investigation was to describe the thematic structure of how people experience and cope with chronic pain. To accomplish this task, phenomenological interviews were conducted with twelve different participants who had chronic pain for at least six months duration.Participants responded to a research question which asked them to describe how they coped with chronic pain.All interviews were audio taped and then transcribed.Following this, individual protocols were interpreted within the context of a phenomenological research group. In this group, an attempt is made to describe the thematic structure of the experience of coping with chronic pain as articulated …

Middle-Class, White-Collar Offenders: Needy Women - Greedy Men?, Karen A. Mason

Doctoral Dissertations

Little research on white-collar offenders has focused on gender. This study focuses on previously neglected gendered dimensions of white-collar criminality by examining both motivations for crime and reactions to adjudication among men and women convicted of white-collar crimes. Data for this study were collected via in-depth interviews with 35 male and female white-collar offenders from the Eastern TennesseeFederal District. Information was also gathered from the offenders’ presentence investigation reports. The analysis suggests that gender differences among white-collaroffenders are not as stark as presented in previous research. Both men and women found to be equally represented among several categories of motivational …

Consequences Of Contingent Compensation, James Herschel Turner

Doctoral Dissertations

The principal objective of this study is the explication of the impact of incentives on measures of performance. The effects of contingent compensation (commissions and bonuses) on role stress, job attitudes, and performance outcomes were studied in a multi-industry sample of 255 employees.

It was hypothesized that as compensation contingency increases, role conflict and financial anxiety also increase and the increase in stress would be negatively related to in-role performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. Finally, it was hypothesized that as organizational commitment and job satisfaction are reduced, intent-to-leave will be increased and extra-role performance will be reduced. The sum …

Factors Indicating A Change In Battering Behavior During Pregnancy, Helene Kay Halvorson

Doctoral Dissertations

A conservative estimate of violence toward women in the United States is that more than two million women are battered every year, 32 percent of whom are revictimized within six months. These statistics make the consequences of battering a significant health problem for women. Early population surveys and clinical studies found that many women were pregnant at the time of battering, yet few studies specifically explored battering in prenatal populations. Significant findings in these studies include rates of physical violence ranging from 4 percent to 17 percent and outcomes such as inadequate prenatal care, low-birthweight infants, fetal injury, and maternal …

An Examination Of Case Management Nurses' Role Strain, Participative Decision Making, And Their Relationships To Patient Satisfaction : Utilization Of King's Theory Of Goal Attainment In A Managed Care Environment, Thomas A. Mckay

Doctoral Dissertations

One way of accommodating quality and cost contained health care in a managed care environment has been to incorporate a case management process. Producing Healthcare in this manner required the development of a new role, the Case ManagementNurse (CMN). Restructuring organizational communication processes, provides CMNs opportunities to collaborate with physicians to provide quality care. CMNs role strain,participation in decision making, and collaboration is examined in this study for their relationship with patient satisfaction.King's Theory of Goal Attainment guides this study using a model of transactions which includes feedback, perception, reaction, interaction, and transaction. This study expands King's Theory including physicians …

The Relationship Of Nursing Care To Health Outcomes Of Preterm Infants : Testing A Theory Of Health Promotion For Preterm Infants Based On Levine's Conservation Model Of Nursing, Linda Carol Mefford

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants born prematurely are suddenly and often traumatically thrust from a securehome in the womb into a foreign world for which they are not yet adapted to survive. The role of the neonatal intensive care nurse is to provide nursing care which both protects the infant from this foreign extrauterine environment and which also supports the adaptive efforts of both the infant and the family during this period of crisis. The purpose of this descriptive study was to examine the relationship of nursing care to the health outcomes of preterm infants by testing a Theory of Health Promotion for Preterm …

Gentlemen Prefer Modernism : 'Middlebrow' Culture And The Transmutation Of Realism In The Works Of Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, And Fannie Hurst, Stephanie Lewis Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the emergence of a modernist aesthetic in early twentieth-century America and its effect on women writers, particularly those with allegiance to the nineteenth-century realist tradition fostered by William Dean Howellsand Henry James. A number of the anxieties about authorship and aesthetics expressed by early twentieth-century women writers have their roots in the nineteenth century, a period when more women began careers as writers; therefore, I analyze Louisa May Alcott as a nineteenth-century exemplar of the limitations imposed by Victorian gender constructions, particularly as they are informed by the ideology of women’s “influence.” Ialso consider the aesthetic limitations …

Premedical Values Related To Rural Family Practice, Jeri Jones Veenstra

Doctoral Dissertations

While recent studies concerning values predictors for primary care have concentrated on family practice physicians and medical residents and students, there has only been speculation concerning the predictive role values may have on the eventual choices of entering freshmen medical students to choose family practice careers in rural medically underserved areas. The current study investigated the similarities and differences in values between premedical students and practicing rural family physicians in Tennessee. Further, this study was an effort to determine a possible predictive role personal motivational values may have on the eventual choice of premedical students for selecting rural family practice …

Impact Of Capitation On Clinical Judgement In Suicide Risk Assessment, Adair Allen

Doctoral Dissertations

The cost of mental health services has risen at an alarming pace in recent decades, making the need for cost-containment strategies unquestionable. The Aim of this study was to assess the impact of a capitated funding system (CPS)on clinicians’ judgment. As the focus on cost containment has been on inpatientservices, the variables which predict referral for inpatient care due to suicide risk in the six month period before and after implementation of CPS in a communitymental health center were examined. Variables coded from Mobile CrisisScreening forms were Age, Gender, Location of consultation, eight diagnostic categories. Examiner variables. Lethality at presentation, …

Kindergarten Dads : Paternal Participation In Early Childhood Education, Robert Michael Denn

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to learn about 1) the perceptions that fathers have regarding their role in their kindergartners' early childhood education, 2) how those perceptions manifest themselves in pedagogical interactions with their children and in other educationally-related activities, and 3) how their involvement/interaction with their children in this capacity makes them feel.

Data collection methods included participant journal writing, interviews, observations, document analyses, and a focus group discussion. The participants included 7 fathers, 5 mothers, and the classroom teacher who were selected from one kindergarten class in an elementary school located in the Southeast United States. …

Presidential And Political Perceptions Of Regional Accreditation Effectiveness And Reform, Nancy Benziger Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

Recently regional accreditation survived a major crisis during the fight over reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The crisis revealed an apparent gulf between how political leaders and the academy perceive regional accreditation. Thisstudy, which utilized a Likert-scale questionnaire analyzed with SPSS and three open ended questions, asked:1) Do the perceptions of regional accreditation effectiveness and reform by college presidents reveal significant variances when examined by: mission and classification of institution, experience level of the president,involvement of the president in accreditation, or by field in which the president earned his/her terminal degree? 2) Do the perceptions of regional accreditation effectiveness …

An Evaluation Of The Effect Of Solicitation And Independence On The Determination Of Corporate Bond Ratings, Martin Feinberg

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of this study is to determine the effect of solicitation and independence on corporate bond ratings. Moody's, S&P, and Fitch IBCA, are full-scale agencies that provide both solicited and unsolicited ratings. These agencies have the potential to provide biased ratings in both directions. Duff and Phelps provides only solicited ratings. It is the only agency that will honor an issuer's request not to be rated. This fully solicited agency also has the potential to provide biased ratings. Little or no prior research exists in this area.

MCM, an independent rating agency until it was merged into Duff and …

Ordinary Women: Government And Custom In The Lives Of New Hampshire Women, 1690-1770, Marcia Schmidt Blaine

Doctoral Dissertations

The prominence of patriarchy and common law has caused many historians to concentrate on the limitations placed on eighteenth-century Anglo-American women. The results often present women as objects, rather than subjects, of study. Using four major primary sources: Governor, Council and Assembly records, petitions, licensing materials, and treasury records, this study examines the relationship between ordinary women and the provincial government of New Hampshire in order to explain the customary options available to women in proceedings with the government. Even with a spouse still living, Anglo-American women acted as family agents and representatives when captured by the Native Americans and …

Motherwork, Artwork: The Mother/Artist In Fiction By Parton, Phelps, Chopin, Woolf, Drabble, And Walker, Nancy Hoyt Lecourt

Doctoral Dissertations

This study asks the question, What happens to a practicing (fictional) mother who also tries to be a practicing artist? How do literary texts represent such people? How do they represent the relationship between material and artistic work? The primary works studied are Sarah Parton's Ruth Hall, (1855), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Story of Avis (1877), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), and Margaret Drabble's The Millstone (1965). The conclusion focuses on Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use."

Mother-artists finds themselves on the "wrong" side of the nature/culture binary, where ideologies about "true womanhood" and …

Problem-Based Learning In Athletic Training Education, Kerri-Ann Catlaw

Doctoral Dissertations

The purposes of the study were first to identify the frequency and the degree to which athletic training educators employed Problem Based Learning (PBL), its variants, and traditional methods in their teaching; and second to solicit educators' judgments of the quality of educational outcomes in their coursework. A survey instrument was distributed to a random sample of 101 CAAHEP accredited curriculum athletic training educators. Eighty-three subjects returned the instrument, yielding a response rate of 82%. The survey contained 20 closed-response items and 3 open-response items, and was divided into three sections highlighting demographic information, teaching methods, and educational outcomes. The …

Memoirs, Movements, And Meaning: Teacher/Student Research In Freshman Composition, Carol Ann Hawkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The author interprets her memoirs as a reader and writer to describe how the movement from I to We, a process of "repositioning," shifted her perceptions from "hating school" to wanting to teach. She begins by tracing her roots as a "white," working-class woman from Cleveland (1952--1970) and ends by disclosing "what worked and what didn't work" when teaching freshman composition at the University of New Hampshire (1994--1997). She draws on feminist, ethnographic, rhetorical, and critical theory to compose "thick descriptions" of her reading, writing, and teaching life. She juxtaposes her struggles with Others', like Min-Zhan Lu, to identify, interpret, …

Using Writing Composition Pedagogy In An Introductory Teacher Education Practicum To Learn About The Motivations, Journeys, And Understandings Of Preservice Teachers, Daniel Archer Rothermel

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the last third of the twentieth century, best practice in America's public schools has evolved from a focus on the teacher's behavior in presenting material to a focus on whether and how students learn. Over that same period, writing composition pedagogy has focused on the emphasis on students' growth and development as they think reflectively, write drafts, and self-monitor. Integrating writing composition pedagogy in the education of preservice teachers, I use Exploring Teaching, a learner-centered introductory course in teacher education that I teach, as the specific context of my inquiry. As my students write Dear Classmates Letters, portfolio reflections, …