Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Genealogy Tells: Informing Health And Aging Policies Using East Tennessean Older Women's Family Histories, Perceptions, And Experiences Of Health Inequity, Heather Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

Older women face unique health inequities challenges. This study aims to provide an understanding of older women’s perceptions and situated experiences regarding the gendered health inequities they face and the social determinants (SDH) thereof. It examines how these health inequities are situated in older women’s genealogical (familial) and geographical health and mortality outcomes histories and how their perceptions and experiences of health inequities and their familial mortality outcomes histories are characterized by the geopolitical and social norms in which they live. The purpose of this project is to present policy and decision-makers with insights about and recommendations from older women …

Mining Public Opinion On Covid-19 Vaccines Using Unstructured Social Media Data, Chad Aaron Melton

Doctoral Dissertations

The emergence of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and the necessary separation of populations led to an unprecedented number of new social media users seeking information related to the pandemic. Nowadays, with an estimated 4.5 billion users worldwide, social media data offer an opportunity for near real-time analysis of large bodies of text related to disease outbreaks and vaccination. This study investigated and compared public discourse related to COVID-19 vaccines expressed on two popular social media platforms, Reddit and Twitter. Approximately 9.5 million Tweets and 70 thousand Reddit comments were analyzed from dates January 1, 2020, to March 1, 2022, and …

Evaluating Barriers To And Impacts Of Rural Broadband Access, Javier Valentín-Sívico

Doctoral Dissertations

"The lack of adequate broadband infrastructure persists in many rural communities. Beyond funding, additional barriers persist, such as digital literacy and community-level self-efficacy. As a result, the first contribution articulates barriers at the organizational level. This work proposes a framework based on the Theory of Planned Behavior to highlight stakeholder dynamics that have constrained Regional Planning Commissions from advancing broadband infrastructure in rural areas. One approach to address these barriers is to provide stakeholders with analytical tools to evaluate the benefits and costs of various broadband options for their community since there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. To this end, …

Diffusion Of Policy Innovations: State Adoption Of Value-Added Models In K-12 Education, Kirsten England

Doctoral Dissertations

Schools chase test scores as a means of validating educational practices. Having imposed high-stakes testing, public schools were still not generating the student test scores under policies such as No Child Left Behind, the Department of Education thought would ensue. To hold accountability on the part of the classroom teacher, Race to the Top, and with it, merit pay was imposed by most states within the United States.

Using policy innovation and diffusion frameworks, this research looks at how over time states have come to adopt value-added policies for teacher evaluations. The research takes into consideration the sociopolitical systems that …

Representing Uncertainty: Beliefs And Habits In The International Development Evaluation Context, Christina Peterson

Doctoral Dissertations

Evaluation can be imagined as an uncertainty management strategy and evaluators as a class of professionals whose role is reducing uncertainty for decision-makers. In the development sector, uncertainty about the efficacy of various interventions exists and evaluations are needed to improve organizational resource utilization. Representations of uncertainty impact decision-making. Evaluator beliefs and routines regarding uncertainty representation in evaluation reports contribute to the ability of evaluation to influence decisions about development programs and policies. This study aimed to explore these beliefs and habits and to understand how they are influenced by the evaluation context. Social Representations Theory is used to situate …