Community-based Research Commons^™

Investigating Perspectives Of Rural Nevadans On Climate Change Solutions, Tricia Dutcher

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Rural perspectives are important for the issue of climate change. Rural areas are high concentrations of active voters who deny the problem of anthropogenic climate change. Rural residents also face decisions about inviting large, utility scale renewable energy developments in their areas. This research examines rural Nevadan’s perspectives on climate change to offer insights about the relationship between climate change perceptions and communication strategies. The research offers policy implications that address context specific issues, solution-oriented dialogue, and interest matching to mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

From Ashes To Architecture: Memorialization At Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Sara Elyse Kaplan

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Buchenwald concentration camp, located in Weimar, Germany, was a place of suffering, cruelty and death during World War II and during the first five years of the cold war. As many were tortured and perished there, it has since become a place of remembrance. Being one of the few concentration camps to not be destroyed by the Nazis before they could be liberated, since its final closure in 1950 numerous memorials have been erected to commemorate the events that took place and the people who fell victim to those events. Following several theorists four of the memorials at Buchenwald are ...

Evaluating The Impact Of Team Policing In Las Vegas, Nevada, Natalie N. Martinez

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Team policing involves the continuous geographical assignment of both patrol officers and investigators to the same, defined area, which allows them to become familiar with area residents and knowledgeable about community concerns and thus, enables them to develop individualized strategies to resolve the neighborhood problems that can lead to crime and disorder. This study evaluates the impact of a team policing intervention in Las Vegas, Nevada that combines an emphasis on community outreach with problem-focused policing strategies to determine the effectiveness of team policing as a crime control strategy. The results indicate that the team policing did not result in ...

Juror Typologies And Dna Comprehension:Who Benefits From Jury Trial Innovations?, Mari Sakiyama, Joel D. Lieberman

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

When DNA evidence is presented in the courtroom, it is typically accompanied by complex testimony conveying information such as the method of generating population frequencies, match criteria and probabilities, as well as laboratory errors and error rates. Although this evidence may have high probative value, the legal community has expressed growing concern regarding jurors’ ability to comprehend it. However, courts have implemented a variety of jury trial innovations to facilitate jurors’ ability to process complex information. Although these innovations may have a positive effect on comprehension of complex trial evidence, it is unclear whether some jurors are more likely to ...

Survivors Of Childhood Sexual Abuse:What Heals And What Hurts In A Couple Relationship, Laura Smedley, Kathy Disney-Fairchild, Stephen Fife, Colleen Peterson

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a significant trauma that affects a person’s self-concept and ability to form healthy intimate relationships later in adulthood. Approximately 20% of adults who experienced childhood sexual abuse go on to evidence serious psychopathology in adulthood (Harway & Faulk, 2005). Knowledge of how relationship partners affect the healing of the survivor may be very beneficial to couples’ therapists, to survivors themselves, and to their intimate partners. The purpose of this qualitative study is to increase understanding of the survivor’s experience of what is helpful and what is counterproductive in their healing process within the construct ...

States And Multicultural Education Policies: A Multinomial Logit Analysis, Leander D. Kellogg

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

This research evaluates the factors that facilitate or constrain the adoption of multicultural education policies in the fifty US state at the state legislature and state bureaucracy levels. According to the 2010 Census, the majority of children under age two—for the first time in US history—are minorities. Furthermore, 11 states and the District of Columbia already have a “minority-majority” population of children under age five. Seven more states are expected to join them in the next decade. Previous research has found that multicultural education policies have been increasingly adopted but are not yet widespread across the states. This ...

Does Movie Viewing Cultivate Unrealistic Expectations About Love And Marriage?, Lauren Galloway

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

The present study investigated the connection between romantic movie viewing frequency and endorsement of dysfunctional beliefs for romantic relationships in a university-based sample of 228 participants. Respondents completed a questionnaire in which they reported demographic information as well as responses to the several scales that measure endorsement of romantic ideals. I base this investigation of Segrin and Nabi’s (2002) examination of television viewing habits and proclivity for unrealistic expectations of sex, love, and marriage. Both the current study and the investigation conducted by Segrin and Nabi (2002) support the supposition that media play a part in reinforcing beliefs about ...

Building A Taxonomy Of Player Types And The Effects On The Self And Interaction Between Players, Kyle Yim

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

This paper conducted a literature review of current research examining fantasy football participants. Fantasy football has become popular in recent years due the attention from the media, most notably sports shows providing more coverage of fantasy football. Theories that have examined fantasy football include gambling theory, and uses and gratifications. Motivational types also provide categories to describe players. Additionally this theory also provides a method to measure these players called the Motivational Scale for Fantasy Football Participation (MSFFP). Thus the purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore the literature in fantasy sports; propose to build taxonomical categories for serious ...

Police Responses To Domestic Violence And Public Perception, Kelly Stout, Alexis Kennedy

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Domestic violence, also known as, intimate partner violence (IPV), has become an epidemic in the United States. This research is intended to explain the types of IPV, describe the effects of severe IPV, look at the change in public perceptions of IPV situations, and explore the police responses to such situations. Students at UNLV participated in the “Police Responses to Calls for Service” survey, that was created to determine the public’s level of awareness of IPV situations and whether that awareness increases support for police policies in responding to intimate partner violence calls.

Socioeconomic Effect On Crime In The Southwest United States Pre- And Post-Great Recession, Kristina Donathan, Jaewon Lim

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Facing the Great Recession, the Southwest megapolitan cluster in the United States including Las Vegas, Southern California and Sun Corridor in Arizona had a massive negative economic shock. Skyrocketing unemployment, massive foreclosures and other socioeconomic factors may negatively affect our safe environment with changing patterns in crime. This study aims to investigate the impacts of socioeconomic factors on different types of crimes committed in the megapolitan cluster of the Southwest United States. Using annual crime datasets, we look at the three years before the Great Recession and subsequent three years (2005-2010). The metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV ...

Media Bias Through Facial Expressions On Local Las Vegas Television News, Jessica Zimmerman

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Trust in news media has been considered an important base for social order and cohesion in society and is a crucial variable for evaluating news media. Media credibility has been questioned by the audience for some time and the audience’s trust in the media has been slowly diminishing over the years. When a news broadcaster communicates a story on local television news, it is possible for his own opinions and beliefs to leak through nonverbal communication, specifically facial expressions. This presentation explores the four main local Las Vegas television news stations’ anchors and reporters to visually analyze whether facial ...

Police Injury Crashes And The Intersections Of Policy, Technology, And Culture, Carol Servino

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA)

Motor vehicle crashes caused the majority fatalities to police officers in the U. S. for more than a decade, yet little is known about factors contributing to injury crashes. This research project required original data collection. A national survey of police chiefs in state, county, and local agencies of all sizes was conducted online in June and July, 2012. Questions focused on various driving policies and practices, including those related to communication technology commonly used in police patrol vehicles. Other questions included hypothetical situations to explore the culture of driving safety in individual police organizations. The majority of chiefs clearly ...

Not Quite Out On The Streets: Examining Protective And Risk Factors For Housing Insecurity Among Low-Income Urban Fathers, Colleen E. Wynn

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

It has long been acknowledged that housing is essential for access to employment, social services, healthcare, and other forms of assistance that help move people out of poverty. Through identifying dimensions of housing insecurity, policymakers, as well as researchers, will have a better understanding of the protective factors that make families more secure and the risk factors that raise their level of insecurity. These analyses use resident and non-resident, low-income, urban fathers’ responses to the five publicly available waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (n = 4378) dataset to examine the relationship between protective and risk factors and housing ...

Life Cafe, Michelle Panko

Anthropology Undergraduate Research (COLA)

Challenges of Health and Conservation in Las Vegas

-Las Vegas is a very large and busy city, with locals operating on a very hectic agenda often times resulting with a need for instant gratification.

-Because of this, many food industries in Las Vegas tend to distribute unhealthy foods in large Quantities.

-According to the Springs preserve NV blog, Las wastes produces 9,000 tons of trash a day

Ethnicity And Breastfeeding In Kenya, Brooke Meredith Watson

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Community-Based Disaster Coalitions Training: Participants' Manual, Center For Leadership In Public Health Practice

Community-Based Disaster Coalitions

This training will help program participants to develop the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities to organize a Community Disaster Preparedness Coalition or strengthen an existing Coalition that integrates public health, human services, and emergency management systems into their county's disaster preparedness, response, and recovery structure.

The Impact Of Home Visitor Relationship Quality On Parenting And Child Outcomes: Does Maternal Age Matter?, Elizabeth A. Colsey

Senior Honors Papers

Early Head Start (EHS) is an early intervention program that seeks to mitigate the effects of risk for those families with young children. Consistent with attachment theory, the home visiting component of EHS targets parent-child relationships in order to combat negative child outcomes. Research indicates that children of adolescent mothers are susceptible to poor outcomes both in childhood and adulthood. The current study utilized EHS data from 1198 parent-child dyads to assess the indirect relationship of home visitor quality on child aggression through parent quality, as moderated by maternal age. Findings indicated that home visitor quality may have a greater ...

The Characteristics Of Women Seeking Funding From The Dc Abortion Fund, Karin Elizabeth Bleeg

GW Research Days 2013

Objectives: To determine whether the population DCAF serves, based on current research, are those most in need of its financial services. Describe the population that DCAF is supports by age, race and ethnicity, poverty, educational attainment, union status, contraceptive method used, referral source, and number of prior pregnancies.

Methods: An adapted version of The Guttmacher Institute's National Patient Survey will be used to collect data from women who contact DCAF for financial assistance for their abortion (n=150). The data will be collected for one month and then analyzed in SPSS.

Results: Between January and March 2013 approximately 400 ...

Defining Safety For Universities: The Slippery Conceptual Slope, Pam Jenkins

DRU Workshop 2013 Presentations – Disaster Resistant University Workshop: Linking Mitigation and Resilience

In this presentation, we address the issue of the fragility of campus safety. The uniqueness of a college campus creates a context for safety that requires an intentional and specific understanding. Campus life for many is no longer (or perhaps never was) ‘an ivory tower’— a place separated and protected from the rest of the community. However, many still have the attitude that a campus is not like the real world in the United States. And in fact, colleges and universities are often much safer and more open than communities around them. Yet, ask any student affairs director or safety ...

At The Nexus Of Scholarly Communication And Information Literacy, Marianne A. Buehler, Anne E. Zald

Faculty Publications (Libraries)

Introduction

Graduate students embarking upon a new phase in their educational careers may not realize the range of expectations, particularly the cocurricular or extracurricular expectation to participate in the scholarly communication process. Unforeseen faculty expectations may include a requirement to publish or copublish an article in order to pass a graduate course or to engage in grant-funded research that will result in conference presentations or publications. Learning about the publication process provides a key transitional experience between the independent intellectual endeavor of conducting research for course assignments and the social dynamics of being a professional researcher or scholar, interacting with ...