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Leader Type And Responses To State-Sponsored Terrorism, Arjun Banerjee

Doctoral Dissertations

State-sponsored terrorism (SST) has for long been used as a tool by countries to inflict costs on rival states without direct confrontation, as the latter risks inviting limited to full-scale war. The literature on SST has so far focused primarily on the motivations, facilitating factors, and the timing of state sponsorship. What has been insufficiently studied, however, are the responses of victim states to SST. Why does state response to SST vary spatio-temporally in different countries, under different governments, and even under different leaders of the same ruling political dispensation in a country? Under what conditions does a state respond …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Peer Engagement And Knowledge (Peak): A Community-Based Group Intervention For Youth In Hawai‘I, Jennifer T. T. Ho

Doctoral Dissertations

This study is a program evaluation with a mixed methods design that evaluated the effectiveness of Peer Engagement and Knowledge (PEAK), a six-week community-based group intervention that incorporates mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) to address multiple health behaviors for multiracial youth in Hilo, Hawai‘i. A total of 51 youth, ages 12-23 years old, participated in this study which included pre-/posttest analyses of health risk factors such as substance use and depression and health promoting factors such as resilience, self-esteem, and mindfulness. Responses from two subsets of participants, who engaged in a focus group (n = 11) and composed gratitude letters ( …

Politics At The Intersection Of Sexuality: Examining Political Attitudes And Behaviors Of Sexual Minorities In The United States, Royal Gene Cravens Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The existing political archetype of sexual minorities in the United States present lesbians, gays, and bisexuals as more ideologically liberal and Democratic than heterosexuals, as well as politically driven by issues specifically related to LGBT life. Ascribing political distinctiveness based solely on identification with a group, however, commits the fallacy of “difference-as-explanation” (Shields 2008:3030), equating a “shared [LGBT] history of sexual oppression and [LGBT] political sympathies” (Duong 2012:381).

Post-modern theories posit that social positions in society, i.e., socially-constructed categories of identity, exist as part of a simultaneously-experienced and mutually-reinforced “matrix of oppression” (Collins 2000:18). The personal meaning and political effects …

Why Foreign Counterinsurgency Campaigns Fail, Donald Frederick Butler

Doctoral Dissertations

Why have foreign counterinsurgency operations had such low success rates since 1945? While operations of this type succeeded at the rate of 85.71% during the period of 1816-1945, they declined by 56.30 percentage points to just 29.49% during period of 1945-1997 (Sarkees, 2000: 123-144). This occurred even though foreign powers were often fighting in the same territories where they had previously been overwhelmingly victorious.

I argue that military defeats suffered by European states during the Second World War convinced the peoples of the developing world that colonial control could be successfully challenged. As guerrilla struggles emerged in post-war Asia and …

Fracture Biomechanics Of The Human Skeleton, Anne M. Kroman

Doctoral Dissertations

Trauma analysis is a growing area of physical and forensic anthropology. The analysis of fracture patterns is useful in determining cause and manner of death, as well as making inferences about past populations. Traditionally, anthropologists have categorized bone trauma into the discrete categories of blunt, ballistic, and sharp trauma. While these descriptors provide a practical approach, anthropologists need to change the way that trauma is perceived and analysis of fractures is conducted. Bone trauma is best viewed as a continuum (rather than discrete independent categories), with the variables of force, acceleration/deceleration, and surface area of impacting interface governing the appearance …

The Pressure Model Of Terrorism: A Behavioralist Model For Ethnonational Terrorism In Western Europe, 1945-2000, Ole J. Forsberg

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine which factors affect an ethnonational group's decision to utilize terrorism to obtain their desired outcomes. Current theories have reached an answer, but theoretical underpinnings of those answers are disparate and weak. Thus, in answering this question, a new model of terrorism is necessary - one which spans the four primary levels of analysis. I do this using a weak rational choice model as a cross-level link, and using psychological models as a basis for the individual-level actions.

While the model is not unequivocally and universally supported by the tests, it is able …

An Investigation Of The Predictive Validity Of Broad And Narrow Personality Traits In Relation To Academic Achievement, Jessica A. Dunsmore

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to determine the ability of broad and narrow personality traits to predict academic achievement over time in adolescence. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 1328 adolescents from an archival data set. Students were in grades 6, 9, and 12 at time one, and measures were assessed over three consecutive annual testing occasions. Results from correlational analyses showed that all Big Five traits predicted academic performance at Time One and Time Two. All Big Five traits except for Openness predicted academic performance at Time Three. Additional correlational analyses demonstrated that the narrow traits of …

Women’S Experiences And Expectations Of The Physician-Patient Relationship, Jill Denise Compton

Doctoral Dissertations

Past research on gender and the medical encounter has tended to focus on gender differences in behavior of both patients and physicians. Less effort has been expended in assessing how gender shapes and structures the experience of the medical encounter. The present study aimed to provide insight into aspects of the medical encounter from the perspectives of women patients themselves and to offer insight into the ways gender emerges and is enacted in the medical encounter.

Seventeen women recruited from a population of undergraduate and graduate students participated in a semi-structured interview involving questions about their experiences with and expectations …