Sociology Commons^™

Eighteen Blind Library Users’ Experiences With Library Websites And Search Tools In U.S. Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study, Adina Mulliken

Publications and Research

Telephone interviews were conducted with 18 blind academic library users around the U.S. about their experiences using their library and its website. The study uses the perspective that blind users’ insights are fundamental. A common theme was that navigating a webpage is time consuming on the first visit. Issues identified include the need for “databases” to be defined on the homepage, accessibly coded search boxes, logical heading structure, and several problems to be resolved on result pages. Variations in needs depending on users’ screen reader expertise were also raised. Suggestions for libraries to address these issues are offered.

What Explains The Rise Of Majority-Minority Tensions And Conflict In Xinjiang?, Reza Hasmath

Reza Hasmath

Project Renew Worcester, Danni Yue, Amy Zhang, Jing Han, Omid Ashrafi, Yiming Xu

School of Professional Studies

n The client for this capstone project is RENEW Worcester which is a fledgling solar power project whose main goals are to bring renewable energy in the form of solar power into local, primarily low-income communities and are committed to the mission of making the transition off of fossil fuels to clean, renewable power. Based in Worcester, Massachusetts, they are a local chapter of Co-op Power which is a consumer-owned sustainable energy cooperative (co-op) made up of numerous different local chapters all over the New England area as well as the state of New York. The problem that we will ...

Highly Skilled Immigration In The United States In An Age Of Globalization: An Institutional And Agency Approach, Marcela F. González

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation proposes an institutional and agency approach in order to answer a new question to a new set of conditions, processes, and architecture of the new immigration trend for highly skilled immigration in the United States that emerged in the 1990s. The complexification of visa policies for highly skilled immigrants since the 1990s forces many immigrants to follow a multi-step legal pathway to acquire legal permanent residency: first, immigrants have a variety of temporary legal statuses or no legal status, and in a subsequent stage they achieve legal permanent residency. The central question that organizes the dissertation has two ...

Explicit, Implicit, And Behavioral Stigmatization Of Mental Illness, Jessica S. James

Dissertations

Mental health concern is a public health concern that continues to be stigmatized. While the dual process model has been applied to other areas of social cognition (e.g., racism), this framework has not previously been frequently used to examine the stigmatization of mental illness. The current study sought to examine the stigmatization of mental illness within a dual process model to determine the relationship between explicit and implicit stigmatizing attitudes and behaviors. A total of 104 undergraduate students from the University of Southern Mississippi participated in this study. Participants completed multiple implicit and explicit measures of stigmatizing attitudes and ...

Why Do They Do That? Understanding Factors Influencing Visitor Spatial Behavior In Parks And Protected Areas, Abigail M. Sisneros-Kidd

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visitors to parks and protected areas within the United States and worldwide often visit these areas with a particular destination in mind, such as seeing Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone National Park or standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon in Grand Canyon National Park. These visitor use destinations, and the pathways leading to them, such as trails and roadways, see high levels of use, and as a result, impacts to soil, vegetation, air, water, soundscapes, and night skies that result from this use. The field of recreation ecology studies these impacts to park and protected area resources resulting ...

Socioeconomic Status Influence On Mothers’ Interactions With Infants: Contributions To Early Infant Development, Krista L. Gurko

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds often have different long-term outcomes in terms of school, language, and emotional wellbeing. At this time, no reasons for these differences have been agreed upon by experts across disciplines. Parents with different personal characteristics and life situations use different types and amounts of interactions with their infants. The social interactions infants experience during their first year of life provide the start of their developmental path in the areas of language and executive control while also guiding their expectations for interactions with people around them.

This study used previously unpublished data from a sample of 79 ...

Djembe Drum Carving In Accra Cultural Market, Kevin Booker, Aaron Carter-Enyi

Africana Digital Ethnography Project

Dean Kevin Booker of Morehouse College recorded this video of his last name being carved into his new djembe purchased in the Accra Cultural Market, next to Kwame Nkrumah Memorial.

Monomyth, Transformation And Inspiration: The Hero’S Journey In The Extreme Fitness Exercise Infomercial, James K. Beggan

Heroism Science: An Interdisciplinary Journal

The monomyth or hero’s journey is often described as containing the stages of journey, transformation and return. Less attention has focused on a fourth stage, called inspiration, which discusses how the hero can then motivate and mentor a new generation of heroes. The present paper describes how the success stories of people profiled in extreme fitness infomercials can be understood as conforming to the structure of the monomyth. The way in which the infomercials document how the success stories can also be used to motivate and mentor future heroes illustrates the role of inspiration as the final component of ...

On(Line) Being Relational: A Case Study, Carol Isaac, Arla Bernstein

The Qualitative Report

This study describes a master’s program cohort in the Southeast transitioning from a traditional to an online paradigm. This study examined through narrative analysis the online dialogue of engagement between students and faculty through the lens of social constructivism, specifically focusing on barriers creating monologue and facilitators creating “online” dialogue (Gergen, 1999). Transformative dialogue was more difficult in the online transition because of technology structures and differing expectations. Results suggest that faculty and students must be prepared to use online technology in a pedagogical setting that requires greater responsibility for students to “manage their education.” The “boundedness” of an ...

Visual Inspection Of Sequential Data: A Research Instrument For Qualitative Data Analysis, Alaa A. Aldahdouh

The Qualitative Report

Sequence analysis has been widely used to investigate the patterns of similarities and differences of sequential data in biology and sociology. However, the debate on the usage of sequence analysis in social sciences has not been settled yet. Among a long list, sequence analysis methods have been criticized for ignoring the qualitative information behind the sequences. This paper presents a new instrument for inspecting sequential data visually in qualitative studies. The method includes building a hierarchical tree of relations among the categories which is then used to recode the categories systematically. The recoding process is meant to give meaning to ...

Elderly Patients’ Perception Of Pain Management After Open And Reduction Internal Fixation Surgery, Sharon M. Whyte-Daley

The Qualitative Report

Little is known about pain and pain management in older adults who experience open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF) surgery. This qualitative descriptive phenomenological study explored two research questions: (a) What are the perceptions of pain and pain management in patients between 65 and 75 years of age, 48 hours after ORIF surgery in a community hospital? (b) What are the perceptions of adaptation after ORIF? A pilot study included four patients in two units of a Southern California hospital, followed by open ended, semi-structured interviews with 10 participants. Four themes emerged: (a) elderly patients experience different patterns of pain ...

Incorporating Spiritual Analysis: A Review Of Jing Li, Rebecca Oxford And Tom Culham’S Toward A Spiritual Research Paradigm, Stephanie Fitzsimmons

The Qualitative Report

Toward a Spiritual Research Paradigm is one of those books that forces readers to push the boundaries beyond the “traditional paradigms” and then push a little bit further. I found this book spoke to me on a primal level helping to bridge connections between what I have been taught so far, my personal experiences and what is in my spiritual life. Throughout reading the book, I noticed my perspectives expanded beyond what I expected and I found myself thinking of applications for my current and possibly even future studies.

Handwritten Notes, Edna Louise Saffy

Saffy Collection Textual

Handwritten notes on The Breakers , Palm Beach Florida notepad.

Edna Saffy - Paca Nametag

Saffy Collection Textual

President's Advisory Committee on the Arts The John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts name tag. No date given.

Brazilian Ambassador Honoring Paca: Program, Dinner Menu, And Name Card

Saffy Collection Textual

Menu, place card, and program for the dinner in honor of the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts held on December 6, 1977 at the residence of the Ambassador of Brazil and Mrs. Flecha de Lima, Washington D.C.

Paca Save The Date

Saffy Collection Textual

Save the date flyer for the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts Meeting, March 1998, San Diego, California.

Save The Date For Paca 1999, Hawaii

Saffy Collection Textual

Save the date flyer for the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts Meeting, February 17-21, 1999, Kauai, Hawaii, The Princeville Resort.

Kennedy Center Brunch Invitation

Saffy Collection Textual

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts brunch invitation celebrating the 1995-96 performance season held at The Roof Terrace Restaurant, Kennedy Center, September 10. Open House festivities immediately following to kick off the 25th Anniversary Season.

Numbers Games: Review Of The Tyranny Of Metrics By Jerry Z. Muller (2018), Joel Best

Numeracy

Jerry Z, Muller. 2018. The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 220 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-17495-2 (also available as an e-book).

The historian Jerry Z. Muller argues that quantitative metrics to assess performance have spread throughout many institutions. This trend poses problems when people begin to game the numbers, to focus on achieving good scores rather than on meeting the institution’s goals.