Digital Commons Network^™

Disabled Rooms In Hotel Industry: A Research On Perception For Disabled Rooms, Osman N. Ozdogan, Cihan Yilmaz, Eva Abramuszkinova Pavlikova

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Hotel businesses are required by law to have a certain proportion of disabled rooms according to the number of rooms they have. In addition to these legal obligations, the participation of disabled people in tourism activities is supported by the businesses and people in empathetic way. Although the hotel rooms built for disabled people are designed to be more spacious and facilitate the movements of the disabled, these rooms do not only serve the disabled people. It is offered to non-disabled guests especially during peak seasons when the room occupancy rate is high. In this study, the facilities provided by …

Methadone Patients In Vietnam: Substance Use Patterns, Reasons For Entering Treatment, And Methadone-Related Attitudes, Tram Hoang Huyen Tran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Objectives. Vietnam has high rates of opioid addiction, but methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) only became available in Vietnam in 2008. To date, MMT has expanded nationwide serving about 51,000 patients. As MMT is relatively new in Vietnam, additional research on methadone patients is still needed. This dissertation aims to address two important issues related to MMT that have been understudied: the extent/type of substance use (SU) among MMT patients in Vietnam; and the low utilization of MMT among women.

Methods. This dissertation contains three separate, but related studies. Study 1 systematically reviewed 20 studies and summarized the literature on the …

Temporal And Spatial Properties Of Orientation Summary Statistic Representations, Jacob S. Zepp

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of the current work was to determine the amount of information that contributes to the formation of summary statistical representations (SSRs), as well as the time course over which these representations are formed. While the prevailing interpretation of SSRs within literature is that the summaries are formed through a compulsory rapid integration across all information in a scene, debate exists on the necessity of this unique processing mode. To investigate the formation of SSRs, two experiments were conducted. In the first, results from an orientation averaging task were compared to results from a whole-report task, over equivalent stimulus …

Constructing Frameworks For Task-Optimized Visualizations, Ghulam Jilani Abdul Rahim Quadri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visualization is crucial in today’s data-driven world to augment and enhance human understanding and decision-making. Effective visualizations must support accuracy in visual task performance and expressive data communication. Effective visualization design depends on the visual channels used, chart types, or visual tasks. However, design choices and visual judgment are co-related, and effectiveness is not one-dimensional, leading to a significant need to understand the intersection of these factors to create optimized visualizations. Hence, constructing frameworks that consider both design decisions and the task being performed enables optimizing visualization design to maximize efficacy. This dissertation describes experiments, techniques, and user studies to …

Exposure To E-Cigarette Marketing And Product Use Among Highly Educated Adults, Onur Sahin

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Although the use of e-cigarettes is new compared to conventional cigarettes, the rate of use is increasing rapidly. E-cigarettes, unlike traditional cigarettes, are not subject to marketing limits. The relationship between e-cigarette advertisement exposure and e-cigarette perception, susceptibility, and usage in a sample of highly educated adults is investigated in this research. A total of 482 fully completed questionnaires were obtained in an online survey, and 463 of the respondents were aware of e-cigarettes. The relationship between e-cigarette exposure, marketing, and current and ever usage, as well as perception and susceptibility to use e-cigarettes among never e-cigarette users, was investigated …

A Gap Analysis Of Satisfaction Among International Students Studying In The United States, Sandy C. Chen

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

International students brought a broad range of benefits to the United States before the COVID-19 pandemic, from billions of dollars of tuition and fees directly paid to host universities to economic impacts on the country’s inbound tourism made by the students’ families. Nevertheless, the choice to study in the United States presented many challenges and problems for them. A survey of the existing literature showed that expectations of and perceptions toward their academic studies and professional development of these students, particularly those from mainland China, has been less explored. This paper was thus designed to fill this void by collecting …

An Exploratory Study On Cognitive Internship Perception Of Tourism Students, Ozge Buyuk, Gulsah Akkus

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Tourism and hospitality education fills the need of skilled employees for tourism industry. Turkey has many vocational schools which provide the qualified personnel need. Students training in these institutions concerned carry out compulsory internships in tourism enterprises. Internship is a beneficial process that leads students the opportunity to transform their theoretical knowledge into practice. However, many problems exist during the internship. During this period, interns recognize both the sector and themselves further. Positive perceptions of internship period increase the willingness of students to work in the tourism industry after graduation. So defining the students’ perceptions and complaints during the internship …

Designing The Haptic Interface For Morse Code, Michael Walker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two siblings have a muscular degenerative condition that has rendered them mostly blind, deaf and paraplegic. Currently, the siblings receive communication by close range sign language several feet in front of their vision. Due to the degenerative nature of their condition, it is believed that the siblings will eventually become completely blind and unable to communicate in this fashion. There are no augmented communication devices on the market that allow communication reception for individuals who cannot see, hear or possess hand dexterity (such as braille reading). To help the siblings communicate, the proposed communication device will transmit Morse code information …

Attitudes Toward Statistics Studies Among Students With Learning Disabilities, Orly Lipka, Itay Hess

Numeracy

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of a support course to change attitudes toward statistics studies of post-secondary students who were diagnosed with learning disabilities (LD) and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The participants were 22 students in a support course that was provided over a single academic term on a weekly basis. The design of the study was according to 'Pre-Post' comparison. The effects on attitudes toward statistics were examined quantitatively and qualitatively to provide a comprehensive methodology for the research purposes. Results suggest that the weekly support course model that was taught simultaneously to the on-line course …

A Socio-Ecological Model Of Affordable Care Act Acceptance, Pratiksha Vaghela

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Background: Since 1965, there have not been any major revisions of the healthcare laws in the United States, until the recent implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, ACA is not well understood and is often controversial. The purpose of this study is to: (1) evaluate the relationship between the employers’ and the employees’ perceptions regarding the ACA mandates for small businesses, (2) evaluate the relationship between the self-reported and the tested knowledge of individuals regarding the ACA mandates for small businesses, and (3) determine if socio-demographic factors influence individual’s perception of the law. Based on the gathered information, …

Blue Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: A Cross Cultural Study On Color Perception And Memory, Mark Douglas Lowry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

According the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the language one speaks affects how one thinks. Because languages differ in how they categorize color, linguistic relativity has often been tested by conducting experiments on color perception and memory. This study examines the linguistic relativity hypothesis using ecologically valid stimuli: pictures of eyes. Because Russian-speakers are more likely to describe blue/grey eyes as grey, whereas English speakers are more likely to describe them as blue, English and Russian participants were asked to match the overall color of blue eyes to a color scale. There were three conditions. In the first condition (perception), participants saw …

Children's Values And Attitudes About The Wild Vicuña (Vicugna Vicugna) In Andean Argentina, Ana Celeste Wawrzyk, Bibiana Vilá

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

Vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) are South American camelids whose valuable fleece led to their overexploitation and near extinction in the 1960s. Since then, conservation measures enabled the wild population to rebound, and vicuñas are now viewed as strategic resources for the development of Andean communities. Perceptions of wild vicuñas are changing owed to a transition from strict conservation to managed harvest of fleece from live-shorn animals. Understanding the values and attitudes of human populations toward wildlife is important in the frameworks for developing conservation and sustainable management plans. Attitudes of children are an overlooked area of focus in this field. We …

Female Teachers As Sexual Predators: A Qualitative Study Of Grades 7-12 In The State Of Florida's Public Schools, Jayme Lynn Joslyn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study's purpose was to discover commonalities and differences among female predators and Florida female teachers who are perceived and reported to harass students sexually. When perceived and reported female sexual harasser and student safety was researched, a breath of studies did not occur. When current studies were reviewed, teacher sexual harassment continued to occur. In this qualitative study, ten Florida public school female teachers who were perceived and reported to sexually harass students were randomly selected. Findings indicted that further research is still needed on female teachers who are perceived and reported to sexually harass students. When researching the …

Spoken Word Recognition In Quiet And In Noise By Native And Non-Native Listeners: Effects Of Age Of Immersion And Vocabulary Size, Astrid Zerla Doty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In spoken word recognition, high-frequency words with few neighbors and less frequently occurring minimal pair neighbors (lexically easy words) are recognized more accurately than low-frequency words with many and more frequently occurring neighbors (lexically hard words). Bradlow and Pisoni (1999) found a larger easy hard word effect for non-native than native speakers of English. The present study extends this work by specifically comparing word recognition by non-native listeners with either earlier or later ages of immersion in an English-speaking environment to that of native English speakers. Listeners heard six lists of 24 words, each composed of 12 lexically easy and …

Clear Speech Effects For Vowels Produced By Monolingual And Bilingual Talkers, Teresa Demasi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

'Clear speech' is a speaking style that talkers often employ when they know they may have trouble being understood, as when speaking in noise or to a person with a hearing loss. When 'clear speech' produced by native talkers is presented in noise to native listeners, it has been shown to be about 10-15 percentage points more intelligible, on average, than normally produced speech. Recent research has shown that bilingual listeners may experience a smaller intelligibility benefit than monolingual listeners from 'clear speech' produced by monolingual talkers. The present study compares the ability of monolingual and bilingual talkers to produce …

The Influence Of Performance Background On Instrumentalists' Ability To Discriminate And Label Cornet And Trumpet Timbre, Gary Compton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was an examination of timbre discrimination and labeling, with specific consideration of the soprano-brass timbres of cornets and trumpets. This study sought to determine whether instrumentalists differed in their ability to label and discriminate cornet and trumpet timbres, and whether these abilities were influenced by the instrumentalists' performing instrument and years of playing experience. Wind, brass and percussion players (n=100) from existing instrumental groups in the Tampa Bay area participated in the study. These groups were collegiate trumpet majors from a large public university school of music, a collegiate wind ensemble from a private university, and a brass …

An Investigation Of The Effects Of Perceived Feedback Accuracy On Performance, Ashley A. Gray

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study built upon the theoretical feedback process of Ilgen, Fisher and Taylor (1979), as refined by Kinicki, Prussia, Wu, & Mckee-Ryan (2004), to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism underlying an individual's response to performance feedback. The feedback model implicates source credibility and the feedback-rich environment as critical elements in the process explaining recipient accuracy perceptions and responses. Thus the sign and perceived accuracy of performance feedback were investigated in a 3 x 3 (plus control) experimental design. One hundred fifty-six undergraduate students were randomly assigned to feedback conditions, in which they performed on a three-trial …

Effect Of Age On 11- To 18-Year-Olds’ Discrimination Of Nuances In Instrumental And Speech Phrase Interpretations, Andrew Sioberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation was a continuation of study on a theory of a learning window for the perception of expressive qualities in music and speech. The proposed theory suggested that a practice window must overlap a learning window before it closes around the age of 10. This dissertation sought to determine whether children older than the proposed learning window continued to improve in speech and musical discrimination skill, or leveled off in this ability. It also examined the impact of gender and private lesson experience on discrimination ability.

Instrumental music students (n = 292) attending a public magnet school for visual …

The Effect Of Conducting Gesture On Expressive-Interpretive Performance Of College Music Majors, Ronald Wayne Gallops

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of non-verbal conducting gesture on musicians’ stylistic response and whether conducting gestures alone elicit consistent musical responses from musicians. Through an analysis that utilized a Gestural Response Instrument (GRI) it was determined that, even if the use of verbal and facial cues were eliminated, some experienced conductors successfully utilized non-verbal conducting gestures to communicate specific musical interpretations. It appeared that musicians responded in specific ways to the musical interpretation of conductors who had command of a variety of conducting gestures. The results illustrated the existence of a perceptual contract that …