Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

National Material Capability Buildup And The Rank-Magnitude Distribution Of Wars, Matthew Felice

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Are there physical laws, rather than conventions like diplomacy, that determine when war will break out and how severe it will be? On the eve of World War II, L. F. Richardson discovered a curious pattern: Major wars are rare and minor wars are common to such a predictable degree that the size-frequency offset can be plotted with a straight line. Complex-systems theorists have since confirmed those findings and tested them with computer models. Yet none of the research has fully synthesized this law-like observation with the established theoretical approaches in international relations that would apply, such as power transition …

Children's Creative Processes In Music Composition Through The Orff-Schulwerk Approach, Ashley Viera Espinal

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study was to explore the creative processes of elementary school students in music composition through the Orff-Schulwerk approach. Twenty-two 5th grade students and a music teacher with all three levels of the Orff-Schulwerk certification participated in the study. There were three main focal points that were investigated within a span of five-weeks: 1) children’s creativity in an Orff-based composition task, 2) children’s perceptions of their creative processes employed during the composition task, and 3) the teacher’s perceptions of teaching/learning music composition through the Orff-Schulwerk approach. Data were generated through observations, field notes, interviews with …

Social Processes Through The Lens Of Network Science In Spider Monkeys, Emily R. Boeving

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a series of empirical studies which aim to deepen and broaden what is known about social processes in spider monkeys. In recent decades, the burgeoning field of network science has brought a new perspective to many disciplines. Although network science has emerged in multiple content areas (e.g., neuroscience, economics), the application and utility of social network analysis to quantify social processes has seen great advances. Sociality and component processes have been described as mystifying and left many perplexed at the basic question, “What is social?” There is no easy answer to this question but one issue is …

The Bolivarian Dream: Alba And The Cuba-Venezuela Alliance, Victor Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to answer why the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has failed to achieve its two major goals: to create a socialist alternative to neoliberalism and foster mutual cooperation among the members. Important constructivist works from Nicolas Onuf and Alexander Wendt were used throughout. Emphasis is given to the debate between social construction and material reality that has hindered ALBA’s goals.

Three reasons led to why ALBA could not achieve its two major goals. First, the successors to the founding leaders of ALBA did not share the same sympathy toward socialism, and instead carved …

A Rising Regional Power: Making Sense Of Ethiopia's Influence In The Horn Of Africa Region, Yonas K. Mulat

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the conditions under which a state’s regional influence increases, or a state becomes a regional power, using an in-depth analysis of the case of Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. I make a two-fold argument (a) developments in the Horn of Africa over the last two decades show that the regional influence of Ethiopia has been growing, and (b) analysis of attributional capabilities – population, military, economy – alone do not fully explain this development. This dissertation tests a hypothesis derived from neo-classical realism recognizing that relative power (vis a vis the neighbors), although key to …

Religion, Place, And Identity At The Intersection Of Cultural Bricolage: The Miami Santo Daime Church Revisited, Alfonso Matas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of the Santo Daime Church in Miami, focusing on the challenges of balancing institutional stability with continual growth and innovation. Santo Daime—whose central ritual entails the consumption of the mind-altering ayahuasca brew—is a new religious movement that amalgamates indigenous Amazonian, Afro-Brazilian, and popular Catholic traditions. Between June 2016 and December 2018, I employed participant observation, semi-structured interviews, exegesis of sacred songs, and document analysis to investigate the meanings and lived experiences of church leaders and adherents as they relate to their religious identity and agency. Specifically, this study asks three research questions: What global processes …

Applicant Reactions To Organizations That Allow Religious Expression: The Role Of Interviewer And Organizational Characteristics, David A. Beane

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the 21st century we desire to express who we are across all domains – including the workplace. This is due, in part, to the fact that we spend more time at work than we ever have. Part of this awakening has included expressing our religion. However, while people desire to express their religion they simultaneously do not want to be impinged upon by other’s religious expression - as numerous legal cases demonstrate (Malone, Hartman, & Payne, 1998). This contrast is the basis for an ever-burgeoning conflict in the workplace for which HR managers have no legal or philosophical framework …

Intermedialidad En El Documental Cubano Contemporáneo, Esteban Alfonso Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cuban documentaries, which have experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, are now more in tune with the most recent global trends in cinema. However, the scarce implementation within the documentary genre of other perspectives and modes of analysis, outside those that are purely cinematographic, has stalled investigations in the field, thus creating a disengagement with the structural and thematic renovation that has been taking place within the discourse of contemporary Cuban documentaries.

My dissertation “Intermedialidad en el documental cubano contemporáneo” examines a select sample of representative texts and Cuban documentaries, with a view to adapting and/or developing an …

Considering Culture And Context: A Mixed-Methods Approach To Examining Adolescent Engagement And Parent Satisfaction In Urban Out-Of-School-Time Programs, Jacqueline Oluwakemi Moses

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adolescents of color living in poverty are at elevated risk for mental health problems with limited access to quality care, and 21% of youth in poverty are diagnosed with mental health disorders that, left untreated, lead to significant long-term consequences. Positive future orientation – optimistic expectations for graduation, gainful employment, and healthy relationships – among vulnerable adolescents has been identified as a unique protective factor associated with positive mental health trajectories. Out-of-school-time (OST) programs in neighborhood settings can promote positive future orientation and maximize benefits for adolescents, but we know little about cultural and contextual influences on youth enrollment and …

Promoting School Readiness In At-Risk Children: An Evaluation Of A Behavioral Parent Training Program In An Early Childhood Community Setting, Randi J. Cheatham-Johnson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Behavioral parent training (BPT) is the gold standard for the treatment of externalizing behavior problems in young children. However, many programs have failed to consistently replicate positive outcomes in economically and socially disadvantaged populations. Given the lasting negative impact of early behavioral problems on youth, families, and society as well as the heightened risk such families face, it is important to examine BPT within particularly vulnerable populations. A pilot open trial of a novel BPT, the School Readiness Parenting Program (SRPP), was conducted to examine the acceptability, feasibility, and promise of the manualized treatment as a standalone intervention for economically …

Disaster Aid, Non-Governmental Organizations (Ngos), And Development: A Critical Analysis Of The Post 2010-Disaster Aid In Haiti, Jean Max Charles

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates both the effectiveness and the limitations of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) aid as it relates to efforts to provide sustainable development outcomes in the wake of disasters. Focusing on the case of Haiti, and the billions of dollars of disaster aid that the country received through NGOs for relief and reconstruction of the country in the wake of the 2010 magnitude 7.0 earthquake, this dissertation explores ways in which the delivery and management of disaster aid can be organized to produce long-term sustainable results. My research is formulated around the argument that, to produce long-term outcomes, disaster aid …

Automatic Learning Of Document Section Structure For Ontology-Based Semantic Search, Deya Banisakher

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modeling natural human behavior in understanding written language is crucial for developing true artificial intelligence. For people, words convey certain semantic concepts. While documents represent an abstract concept---they are collections of text organized in some logical structure, that is, sentences, paragraphs, sections, and so on. Similar to words, these document structures, are used to convey a logical flow of semantic concepts. Machines however, only view words as spans of characters and documents as mere collections of free-text, missing any underlying meanings behind words and the logical structure of those documents.

Automatic semantic concept detection is the process by which the …

The Legacies Of Vagrancy Law In Contemporary Homelessness Regulation: A Global Historical And Ethnographic Examination Of Tokyo, Japan And Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rayna Marlene Rusenko

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation illustrates how contemporary policy responses to homelessness in Tokyo, Japan and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia have tapped into historically-entrenched policy ideas and institutions and been shaped by varied experiences with transnational policy networks from the time of each city's mid-19th century integration into the world economy. Using archival and ethnographic methods, I trace links between past and present policies and practices related to homelessness management while underscoring the locally-distinct yet globally-connected nature of policy variations and impacts, including street-level experiences. I take a distinctly broad view of homelessness regulation to consider the criminal justice, welfare, and urban development policies …

A Framework For Understanding Poverty Among Refugees In The United States, Mitra Ahmadinejad

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a set of three interconnected studies, this dissertation proposes a multidimensional poverty framework for adult refugees with a focus on their first five years in the United States. In the first study, refugee poverty was quantified using the 2016 Annual Survey of Refugees (ASR) dataset. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to calculate optimal cut-off points for income levels maximizing the sensitivity and specificity of the multidimensional poverty index utilized in the study. Guided by Ager and Strang’s (2008) refugee integration framework and using the 2016 ASR dataset, the second study explored factors associated with poverty. Using three …

A Novel Approach To Studying Human Intelligence-Gathering: Employing A Realistic Paradigm For The Study Of Elicitation Approaches, Sarah A. Shaffer

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is often necessary to interrogate sources of information when threats to national security (e.g., impending terror attack) are present. However, the overwhelming majority of research focuses on the interrogation of criminal suspects despite the arguably greater consequences of the former context, known as Human Intelligence (HUMINT) collection. The present study is the first to examine a highly successful approach to collecting information from sources of human intelligence (HUMINT)- the Scharff Technique.- within a novel and highly realistic paradigm. Participants were recruited for a study on group interaction. Every group contained a study confederate posing as a participant who gave …

Isolating Critical Components Of A Pediatric Obesity Intervention: Does It Really Take A Village?, Jennifer Coto

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current work examined healthy lifestyle interventions in different settings and their associated child and parent outcomes. Specifically, the first study examined, via a randomized trial, the efficacy of the Healthy Lifestyle Summer Camp and Parenting program (HLSC+HLPP) compared to the Health Lifestyle Summer Camp (HLSC) on improving child and parent health outcomes as well as mechanistic outcomes. Various anthropometric, fitness, nutrition, home environment, and parenting outcomes were collected for both children and their parent pre- and post-intervention. Results indicated that both HLSC+HLPP and HLSC were feasible and acceptable. There were no statistically significant differences between groups, however, both groups …

Latina Youth And Suicidality: A Cross-Sectional And Longitudinal Analysis, Janice J. O'Driscoll

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: This study aimed to understand which factors correlated to a likelihood of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts in Latina youth and how that may or may not differ from female youth of different racial/ethnic groups. Additionally, this study sought to explore which predictors increased the likelihood of suicide attempts as youth aged into adulthood.

Method: The study was a secondary data analysis of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) using binomial logistic regression and generalized estimating equations. The sample consists of 10,480 youth at Wave 1, who were followed with repeated measures 1, 6, …

Three Essays On Music And Consumer Behavior: The Impact Of Music Type On Product Evaluation And Purchase Intent, Gregory G. Maloney

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Music is omnipresent in consumer environments and is classifiable by multi-dimensional measures of affect. This research explores the relationship between affect perceived within music, and how the resulting affective state created by music influences product evaluations.

Three essays explore the relationship between affect valence and purchase intent, the moderating influence of music arousal, and the effect of positive affect cues perceived in products. Four studies provide supporting evidence that music influences product evaluations in the same direction as the music affect valence. Experienced affect in the listener mediates the relationship between music affect and product evaluations, and arousal moderates the …

Assessing The Strategic Use Of Evidence Using A Psychologically Realistic Paradigm: Improving Diagnosticity Of Elicited Information In The Interrogation Room, Amelia R. Mindthoff

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) is an interrogation method that uses strategic timing (e.g., early vs. late disclosure) and framing of evidence disclosure to elicit verbal cues that can help interrogators discriminate between liars and truth-tellers. Despite mounting empirical support for its efficacy, there are gaps in the SUE literature that the present research addresses (e.g., studying SUE using a psychologically realistic interrogation paradigm). In Study 1, community members engaged in a supposed government-funded knowledge test. During testing, a research assistant posing as another participant prompted (guilty condition) or did not prompt (innocent condition) participants to cheat. An interrogator …

Understanding The Individual And Organizational Attributes Of Servant Leadership In Local Governments, Pallavi Awasthi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Servant leaders are driven by a natural feeling to serve first which manifests into a conscious desire to lead. The servant leadership style emphasizes internalizing ethical behavior, along with empathy and service orientation in creating value for the community which is critical in public administration. While the servant leadership concept has gained much interest among business management scholars, it has received little attention in public administration. This dissertation aims to fill this wide gap in public administrative leadership scholarship by investigating the role of servant leadership in public administration.

Specifically, the dissertation seeks to understand individual (servant identity and moral …

Informants' Memory For Conversations: The Examination Of The Investigative Utility Of The Cognitive Interview, Danielle Sneyd

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In human-intelligence-gathering contexts, informants or persons of interest are often interviewed about a conversation they overheard. The information gathered from these conversations may be important for national security, and therefore, the most accurate information needs to be elicited. The current project consisted of two studies that extended the previous literature on the Cognitive Interview (CI). Study 1 (1) tested the CI (compared to a structured interview, SI) in the context of memory for conversations and (2) investigated the effects of modality by comparing in-person interviews to telephone interviews. The CI is a theory-based interview protocol that has been shown to …

Development Of Prefrontal Structure And Connectivity In Typical Children And Children With Adhd: Association With Language And Executive Function, Dea Garic

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The structure and connectivity of the prefrontal cortex has been extensively studied for its contribution to language and executive function (EF) development, but many questions still remain whether its microstructural tissue properties can reliably predict behavioral outcomes in very young typically and atypically developing populations. In particular, the bilateral frontal aslant tract (FAT) has garnered increasing interest with respect to its potential association with both language and EF, but has yet to be examined in childhood attention disorders, such Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). At the same time, with advances in diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), new diffusion models offer more …

Examining Maternal Emotion Regulation In Children With And Without Adhd: A Multimodal Approach, Alexis Garcia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: Our study utilized a multimodal approach to explore profiles of emotion regulation (ER) in mothers of young children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We also sought to understand how parent factors (i.e., skills, stress, ADHD symptoms) as well as child factors were associated with membership to these profiles. Methods: The final sample consisted of 182 parent-child dyads. Sixty-six children were in the typically developing group (Mean age = 5.47, SD = .90, 74.2% males), and there were 116 children in the ADHD group (Mean child age = 5.41, SD = .75, 80.2% males). Dyads completed a stress-inducing task …

Three Essays Of Assessing The Risk, Adaptation And Resilience To Natural Disasters, Mohammad Asif Hasan Khan

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters in environmental and natural resource economics. In the first chapter, using survey data, I investigate what factors are important in people's evacuation decisions in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. I examine if temporal spillover is present in their decision making and how significant the spillover effect is. With that objective in mind, I examine the effect of previous evacuation experience on future evacuation decision. I also analyze how network effects influence people's evacuation decisions during a natural disaster.

As the threat of climate change grows, communities around the world are facing the dangers of …

Representative Bureaucracy In Government Contracting: Examining Supplier Diversity Policy Implementation, Evelyn Trammell

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Government organizations have struggled to balance democratic values of inclusiveness and equity with an efficient and effective bureaucracy since the early years of the administrative state. A representative bureaucracy offers a solution where effective and efficient public service delivery can be achieved while reflecting the interests of historically underrepresented social groups in policy decisions. The theory of representative bureaucracy states that organizational actors that share characteristics with constituents are more likely to respond to their interests through policies and implementation activities. Employing a mixed methodology, this study examines whether and how representativeness of local government decision-makers affects contracting policy implementation …

Community-Engaged Development Of A Parent-Child Book Reading Wise Intervention, Po-Hun Chou

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Children living in communities with high rates of poverty experience significant detriment to their academic skills and social, emotional, and behavioral health. Though a range of evidence-based interventions exist that aim to reduce these disparities, they face substantial barriers (e.g., related to financial and human resources, opportunity cost to target families, variable fit across the diverse populations in low-income households). In contrast, wise interventions use psychologically precise pathways to produce small, recursive changes that result in significant benefits. As such, they represent a resource efficient strategy with the potential for considerable impact with contextual adaptation. The current study utilized social …

Dysfunctional Uses Of Performance Information In Public Organizations: Understanding The Determinants Of Gaming Behavior, Shawn Benaine

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The use of performance information in decision-making is central to the practice of public management and is a common feature of modern governance (Kroll, 2015; Moynihan, 2008). The purposeful use of performance information brings about many benefits for public organizations, such as enhanced democratic accountability and responsiveness, as well as improved managerial decision-making in the public interest. However, there are dysfunctional uses of performance systems, such as performance gaming. This is a behavior where organizations or individuals manipulate data or effort in a way that undermines organizational goals. The dissertation seeks to understand what factors mitigate performance gaming. Prior research …

Understanding The Factors Determining Green Public Procurement Practices Among Local Governments In The United States, Ana Maria Dimand

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the wicked problems communities face worldwide is climate change. Among potential solutions and current efforts is green public procurement (GPP), an innovative policy approach to change business as usual in the governmental sector. Local governments in the U.S. annually spend approximately $1.72 trillion on purchasing goods and services. Given substantial purchasing power of municipalities, GPP practices at the local level can incite a transition toward a more sustainable society. This study is the first to delineate the levels and variations of existing GPP practices among U.S. localities and examine the factors that facilitate or hinder GPP engagement.

Collaborative …

Mind Wandering As A Mechanism Of Attentional Dysfunction Among Children With Adhd, Brittany Merrill

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current study aims to experimentally investigate the occurrence of mind wandering (MW) among children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Participants included 59 children with ADHD and 55 typically developing children. Participants completed a sustained attention task that included non-target photos of people to which children were told to respond and target photos of animals—e.g., birds, bears, cows—that children were instructed to withhold response to. Non-target photos included photos of children doing activities such as sports and birthday parties, a portion of which were the participant’s own photos (self-referential [SR] photos) in order to experimentally increase SR internal distraction or …

The Effects Of Individual Differences On Employment Incentives, Andrew J. Laginess

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation sought to examine the interaction between employment incentives and various individual differences. The main objectives were to create a taxonomy of incentives, explore how personal characteristics influence individuals’ attraction to different types of incentives, and shed light on how individual differences affect preferences for incentive systems that are tied to performance versus those that are independent of performance. Four studies were conducted to achieve those objectives, utilizing expert ratings and data from over 800 undergraduate students. A preliminary categorization system with 14 types of incentives was developed, which served as a framework for the subsequent exploration of incentive–individual …