Digital Commons Network^™

Blended Family Dynamics And Executive Functioning In Preschoolers: A Cross-Sectional Study, Kayla Butler

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Policy Whiplash: Tariffs And Uncertainty Among Firms And Investors In 2025, Boau Lilly Shepherd

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

On April 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a series of reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners, set to be implemented on April 9, 2025, a day he referred to as “Liberation Day”. Although these tariffs were paused almost immediately, they were subsequently renegotiated and revised throughout the summer of 2025. This paper finds evidence that Liberation Day caused a spike in uncertainty among firms and a spike in volatility among investors, while the subsequent summer revisions reduced uncertainty and volatility, despite tariff levels remaining substantially higher than those at the start of the year. These findings suggest that firms …

Predictors And Outcomes Of Reading Intervention Success In Autistic Children: Memory And Brain Connectivity, Meagan Elizabeth Beckerson

ETDs from 2020-2029

Reading comprehension is a complex skill that relies on linguistic and cognitive abilities, including executive control processes. Creating a cohesive representation of text involves maintaining visual and verbal information in short term memory (STM) and using executive control skills to integrate information, apply it to questions, and draw inferences. Many autistic children demonstrate strong individual word reading (decoding) but poor comprehension, resulting in a discrepant reading profile. The role of STM and executive control—along with the underlying neural systems that support these processes—in reading comprehension and response to intervention has not been examined in autistic children with this profile. The …

Pieces Of The Pathway: A Qualitative Exploration Of Social Support For Individuals Navigating Houselessness, Desiree' Jane Duboise

Dissertations and Theses

Houselessness has long been an issue of pressing concern in the United States; and in Multnomah County, Oregon, approximately 10,526 people are experiencing houselessness. Social support has been identified as a critical factor in helping people navigate houselessness and will be explored in the current study. Specifically, the current study examines social support among populations with lived experience of houselessness as they navigate pathways through houselessness. The current study is situated within a broader study examining journeys through houselessness called the Pathways study, and it utilizes a subsample of individuals involved in the Pathways study. The Pathways study and the …

The Relationships Between Adult Cyberbullying Victimization, Introversion, Extroversion, And Demographic Variables, Amber Paige Arrington

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Spread Of Competing Narratives In Multimodal Social Media Network, Mayor Inna Gurung

Theses and Dissertations

Social media has fundamentally transformed how narratives are produced, contested, and disseminated, enabling competing interpretations of the same event to spread rapidly across networked populations. Understanding how narratives gain traction over others in these environments is critical for addressing misinformation, supporting informed public discourse, and designing effective counter-messaging strategies. Yet existing research largely treats narrative propagation as a single-process phenomenon and focuses predominantly on textual data, overlooking both the competitive dynamics between opposing narratives and the growing role of visual symbolic communication in shaping how narratives are received. This dissertation addresses these gaps through a multi-platform, multimodal framework applied to …

Mapping Themes, Aligning Strategies: Institutional Research Analytics With Bertopic And Genai, Danping Dong, Pin Pin Yeo

FORCE 2026

Libraries and research offices are increasingly tasked with making sense of unstructured institutional data, such as research publications and strategic documents. These insights help inform decision-making and leadership planning. This session shares how SMU Libraries leveraged BERTopic, an open-source topic modeling tool, together with generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, to extract meaningful insights from faculty publications and support institutional sensemaking.

In one use case, we applied BERTopic to university-authored publications to surface thematic groupings related to research about Asia. Generative AI tools were then used to summarize each cluster into human-readable narratives, enabling research landscape mapping, identification …

Researcher Impact Framework: Building Audience-Focused Evidence-Based Impact Narratives, Giovanna Lima

FORCE 2026

While a wealth of resources has been developed to help researchers plan for and communicate their projects anticipated impact when applying for funding proposals, not many resources have been developed for researchers when communicating their own impact as researchers at an individual level.
To support researchers in doing this Dr Giovanna Lima and Sarah Bowman have developed the Researcher Impact Framework (RIF). This framework helps to better share a broad spectrum of the researcher’s achievements in generation of knowledge, development of individuals, forming collaborations, supporting the research community and broader society.
The RIF provides a structure for crafting audience-focused evidence-based …

A Developing Critical Lens Based On Distinct Scholar Experiences In Scholarly Communication, Angel Y. Ford

FORCE 2026

Scholars around the world, even from core research locations, express frustration at the processes of sharing and disseminating research. Scholars discuss the confusing or conflicting reviews they receive, and the astronomical fees to publish in Open Access (OA) journals, but when these global factors are combined with regional factors for scholars in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the view of the scholarly communication landscape can quickly go from challenging, to treacherous and at times a career stunting topography with a variety of obstacles and barriers. The terrain scholars cross to obtain, produce, and disseminate research outputs looks different based on …

Opening Keynote: From 'Publish Or Perish' To Purpose And People: Going Together On Research Assessment Reform, Lily Kong

FORCE 2026

Universities hold a unique position as the brain trusts of society — creating knowledge, countering misinformation, and catalysing innovation that drives societal progress. Yet the cultures of "publish or perish" and competitive rankings have led academia to focus on certain metrics, and in so doing, chase misplaced goals. This has resulted in some misdirections: misconduct, data manipulation, mistreatment of early-career researchers, and a troubling misalignment between what scholars pursue and what society needs. How can we begin to rethink research impact beyond standard metrics to embrace both academic excellence and societal contribution? In the spirit of FORCE 2026's theme, Prof …

Cross-Cultural Differences Among Children And Youth With Special Health Care Needs: A Mixed-Methods Analysis Of Chinese, Spanish, And English-Speaking Families, Kathleen Mcgrath, Miriam Franco, Amy Morales-Lara, Karen Bonuck Phd, Joanne Siegel

Developmental Disabilities Network Journal

One in five U.S. children has a special health care need, with prevalence rates rising each year. Children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) from immigrant and/or non-English speaking families face heightened barriers to care, unmet health needs, and worsened health outcomes. This mixed-methods study explores cross-cultural similarities and differences among English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking families of CYSHCN across four key domains – (1) the diagnostic process, (2) access to essential services, (3) community integration, and (4) social supports. As part of a statewide, New York State Department of Health funded initiative implemented across three University Centers for …

Pre-Conference Workshop 2: Toward A Shared Understanding Of Data Use: Bringing The Data Usage Typology Into Practice, Evgeny Bobrov, Scott Edmunds

FORCE 2026

As open data becomes an increasingly key practice in research, understanding how data are used is becoming essential to inform data policies and facilitate inclusion of data in research assessment. Different groups have started categorizing uses for their own purposes, but the community lacked consensus on how to conceptualize the types of uses of datasets. This hinders comparison of reports on the uses of data, and their transferability into evaluation processes. The FORCE11 Data Usage Typologies Working Group is creating a community-led typology to capture the diverse ways in which datasets are (re)used, and to enable a shared understanding of …

User Interaction, Service Effectiveness And Digital Resource Utilization In Private University Libraries Telangana State: An Empirical Study, Chandra Chary Sreeramoj, Dr. M. Sadik Batcha

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this study is to observe the operational design, cognizance levels, complications faced and complete fulfillment of users regarding numerical resources in designated private university libraries in the state of Telangana. The study predominantly emphasizes on graduates, postgraduates, research scholars, and faculty members of Malla Reddy University and S.R. University. The study adopted quantitative descriptive design, and data were collected by means of a Google Form survey, resulting in 1796 legal valid responses. The examination included descriptive statistics, Chi-square tests and ANOVA to classify variances across different user groupings. The outcomes reveal that most respondents are mindful of …

Does The Availability Of An Additional Set Of Bunker Gear Impact Firefighter Health, Safety, And Operational Readiness?, Ryan Riley

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Firefighting is a complex and inherently dangerous profession. Firefighters today face a growing array of occupational hazards, not just from the effects of being exposed to fire and smoke, but also from the personal protective gear they wear, commonly referred to as “bunker” or “turnout” gear. While this gear is designed to protect firefighters in dangerous environments, prolonged use and repeated exposure to smoke, chemicals, and products of combustion can compromise the gear. Research has shown that bunker gear contains and can also retain cancer-causing chemicals. To this end, this paper examines whether the availability of an additional set of …

The Spring 2026 Issue, Destiny Dehart, Sara Gonzalez, Crystal Walker, Karen Winstead, Anthony Toledo, Lauren Nimon-Viola, Tristan Mioduszewski, Fatima Al Jaberi

Fonds and Feathers

The theme of this issue is "we explore what matters" – what matters to us, what matters to archives, and what matters to libraries. Different voices are reflected by writers in the formats of poetry, artwork, research, and articles.

Disaster Justice: Queer And Disabled Mobilities And Infrastructures Of Care In The Pacific Northwest, Rachel Springer

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines the social, political, and environmental pressures that drive LGBTQ+ migration to the Pacific Northwest and the social infrastructures people find on arrival. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ adults who relocated between 2022 and 2025, it argues that these movements are best understood as responses to slow-onset disasters produced by the compounding interaction of legislative targeting and infrastructural violence.

State-level legislation targeting LGBTQ+ people—particularly transgender individuals—has fractured the geography of safety in the U.S., producing a landscape where civil rights, healthcare access, and everyday security vary dramatically across space. For those navigating these conditions at the …

National Agricultural Library (Nal) Search., Leah Everitt, Sonya Lemke

Publications

SEARCH is the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL)'s main discovery platform that provides integrated access to the NAL Digital Collections, Special Collections, PubAg and AGRICOLA. NAL SEARCH is a valuable tool for health science librarians, students, and professionals seeking veterinary science, nutrition, or animal experiment alternatives. This article aims to give users a comprehensive overview of this resource.

Values Driven Priming: Engaging Ai With Reflective, Purposeful Interaction, Carrie Fry, V. Dozier, Amanda Makula

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

This librarian-led immersive session seeks to set the human at the center of Generative AI use, beginning by exploring the themes and connections between the foundations of Catholic higher education and the integration of emerging technologies, and then moving to a practical exploration of how the tools can be primed to give outputs that reflect those values.

Librarians are uniquely positioned in AI discussions because of our background in information literacy, and our training in the evaluation of data including provenance of data, reducing misinformation, and bias awareness. Librarians are also interdisciplinary mediators with cross-curricular reach, and connections with student …

Wrack Lines Spring-Summer 2026 Volume Number 1, Margaret Cozens, Johann Heupel, Owen Placido, Paul Salopek, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

“Building community around the places we love,” is the theme of the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Wrack Lines magazine. Learn about the work of the Six Lakes Park coalition in Hamden, Riverfront Recapture in Hartford, MyCoast in southeastern Connecticut and the statewide land conservation conference. Additional stories tell about the artistry and mission of photographer-videographer Tomas Koeck, and National Geographic explorer Paul Salopek, who is traveling the world on foot.

Proper Imposters: Four Novellas, Allison Faix

The Southeastern Librarian

Authors: Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Jason Ockert, & Jeff Parker

Pensacola: Panhandler Books, distributed by University of Florida Press, 2025

ISBN: 9780991640485

206 pp. $24.95 (Pbk)

Southeastern Librarian 74(1) Spring 2026 (Full Issue), John H. Barnett

The Southeastern Librarian

Complete issue of the Southeastern Librarian, Volume 74 Number 1, Spring 2026

“I Was Well Informed. It Was A Great Advantage”: Pre-Arrival Information Seeking, Information Intelligence, And Immigrants’ Settlement, Nafiz Z. Shuva, Paulette Rothbauer

Publications and Research

This study reports on the role of pre-arrival information seeking and informed decision making in the settlement experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants in Canada. Despite the importance of immigrants in shaping Canada’s future in innovation, economy, and population, this research shows a significant mismatch between immigrants’ expectations and their actual settlement experiences, particularly in terms of their employment. This mismatch can lead to depression, frustration, and anxiety, affecting integration into Canadian society. While there has been a recent increase in immigrants’ settlement information behavior research in LIS, most focus on post-arrival information needs and seeking. Research findings of this study contribute …

Transitioning To Privatization With An Employee-First Approach: The Role Of The Employee Success Team, Hanna E. Andersen

Certified Public Manager® Applied Research

Convention centers are vital economic and cultural assets, driving commerce, tourism, and local engagement. In addition to hosting conferences and trade shows, they serve as gathering spaces for civic events and community celebrations. Like many municipalities, the City of Waco shifted the Waco Convention Center from direct municipal operation to private management to improve efficiency and service quality. Guided by its commitment to community assets, the city adopted an employee-first approach through its Employee Success Team (EST). The EST addressed the challenges of privatization—such as staff uncertainty and restructuring—by placing employees in roles within the city or with the new …

Character Demographic Assessment In An Academic Library's Graphic Novel Collection: Implications For Collection Development, Bridgette L. Whitt

The Southeastern Librarian

This article presents an analysis of the main character demographics across a graphic novel collection housed at the Paul Meek Library, University of Tennessee at Martin. The study evaluates the presence of specific identified character traits such as race, ethnicity, ability, emotional or psychological themes, and the settings of the 451 evaluated titles. The assessment also evaluates the genre distribution of fiction, nonfiction, and biographical content and how often the novels were set outside of the United States. The goal of this study was to better understand the narrative scope and representation within the graphic novel collection, with a focus …

Mob Rule In The Ozarks: The Missouri And North Arkansas Railroad Strike, 1921-1923, Kristine Stilwell

The Southeastern Librarian

Author: Kenneth C. Barnes

Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781682262627

304 pp., $24.95 (Pbk)

Building Community At An Academic Library With Bilingual Story Trails, Laura Bright, Janice S. Lewis

The Southeastern Librarian

A story trail is an activity that combines exercise and literacy as visitors read sequentially displayed book pages while walking. Story trails are often set up outdoors along existing paths and feature rotating selections of children’s picture books. Many story trails are set up and maintained by community groups, public libraries, or schools. Academic libraries can use story trails as opportunities to promote literacy, foster a sense of local community, support families, and encourage healthy habits. The authors of this article use City of Greenville (North Carolina) StoryWalks® created by staff at East Carolina University’s Joyner Library as an example …

Chet Atkins: Mr. Guitar, David W. Young

The Southeastern Librarian

Author: Don Cusic

Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2025

ISBN: 9780820373393

464 pp. $24.13 (Hbk)

Cultural Humility In Libraries: A Call To Action And Strategies For Success, Megan Callaghan

The Southeastern Librarian

Authors: Shannon D. Jones & Beverly Murphy, eds.

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024

ISBN: 9781538162156

196 pp. $39.95 (Pbk)

Life Sustaining Well-Being Practices And Physiological Health Among Black Men, Dakota W. Cintron, Monique N. Golden, Jennifer M. Boylan, Julia K. Boehm, Tomiko Yoneda, Hebi Wang, Erik M. Hines, James L. Moore Iii

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Objective

To identify culturally grounded well-being practices among Black men in midlife and examine their associations with physiological health.

Methods

Analyzing data from the 2004–2005 Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, we examined, 116 open-ended responses to the question, “What do you do to make your life go well?” Network topic modeling identified six topics: (1) interpersonal kindness and positive mindset; (2) caring for children; (3) practicing spirituality and faith; (4) maintaining social connections and well-being; (5) avoiding stress; and (6) meaningful work and daily activities. Topic scores, reflecting participants’ tendency to discuss these themes, predicted allostatic load and …

The Sustainable Autonomy Framework: Explaining Autonomy In Aceh And Southern Yemen, Abdulsalam Saad, Arie Kusuma Paksi

Jurnal Politik

This article examines why post-conflict autonomy consolidates into durable self-governance in some cases while remaining fragile and externally dependent in others. While Aceh has maintained stable self-governance since the 2005 Helsinki Agreement, Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council remains a fragmented authority sustained by external patronage. To explain this divergence, the article develops the Sustainable Autonomy Framework (SAF) and asks: under what conditions does post-conflict autonomy become viable and sustainable? The SAF argues that durability depends on the alignment of three mutually reinforcing pillars: elite legitimacy, resource sovereignty, and mediation credibility. Using a most-similar systems comparison of Aceh’s Free Aceh Movement and …