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Bridging Mind And Body In Sports: Performance, Psychology, And Buddhist Tradition, Gavin Jones

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

The Meaning And Measurement Of Unrealised Fertility: A Comparison Of Measures Among Women Ages 40-49 In The United States, Kathleen Broussard

Faculty Publications

Unrealised fertility – when people fall short of their childbearing goals – is inconsistently defined and measured, leading to wide variation in estimates of its prevalence and implications for health and well-being. Using a nationally representative sample of U.S. women aged 40–49, this study compares four potential approaches to measurement, finding prevalence estimates that range from 3.5% to 22.4% across indicators. Multivariable logistic regression models reveal that the social and reproductive health correlates of unrealised fertility also vary according to the selected indicator. Improved measures of unrealised fertility are needed to inform our understanding of fertility barriers, including who is …

Direct Democracy In The Twenty-First Century: Massachusetts Open Town Meeting And Citizen Participation, Daniel W. Santos

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Town Meeting is a unique system of democratic governance that can be found only in New England towns, where it has been the primary form of local government for nearly four centuries. Town Meeting is a type of direct democracy where laws, policy, and decisions are made by a plurality of a town’s eligible voters acting as its legislative body. There is limited scholarship addressing Town Meeting, with much of the extant literature focusing on the benefits of the direct democracy aspect of this form of government. Town Meeting has been generally known to be poorly attended by citizens. The …

Law Enforcement Active Shooter Preparedness Grading System: A Campus Police Officer’S Perspective, Sean Patrick Gilligan

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Treatment Providers’ Perspectives On Reintegration Of African American Registered Sex Offenders With Intellectual Disabilities, Laneka Sherelle Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Crime, Economic Forces And Trucks Crossings In The Us–Mexico Border Region, René Cabral, André Varella Mollick, Eduardo Saucedo

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We investigate northbound loaded truck crossings from Mexico to the United States between 2015 and 2023. A weaker peso, exports and US industrial production positively affect loaded containers. Truck robberies at the municipal level show no statistically significant relationship with truck loadings, whereas truck robberies at the national and state levels present a negative, persistent association. Results suggest that Mexico–US trade would benefit from lower average Mexican crime rates. In addition to comparing Texas with other border states, this study documents the role of crime specific to the transportation sector as a negative relevant driver of truck crossings to the …

Prostitution And Opioid-Related Death Rates In A North Carolina City After The Implementation Of The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program, Tomeka Scarboro-Hedrick

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Corroboration Doctrine In Sexual Violence Cases, Chris Cox

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Worker Voice Gap: How Much Say Do Workers Want—And How Much Do They Actually Experience?, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Thomas A. Kochan

Upjohn Institute Policy Papers

•The worker voice gap—the difference between the influence that workers want and what they experience—is very large. Nearly three-quarters of American workers want more voice at work than they currently have in three key areas: 1) compensation, 2) working conditions, and3) use of new technologies at work.

• The voice deficit is largest for compensation, but majorities of workers also express voice gaps over working conditions and the use of new technologies in their workplaces.

•Although voice gaps are relatively widespread, women tend to report larger voice gaps than men, and younger and middle-aged workers tend to report larger gaps …

All But The Death Penalty: Incomplete Protection For Civilian Internee Mothers, Minju Kwon

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

How did unrecognised gender biases impact the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL)? While recent studies on IHL have highlighted historical lawmaking processes, little research has examined gender biases behind the codification of the “Protection of Women” in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols. This study examines gender biases and state interests reflected in the codification process by focusing on Article 76§3 of the 1977 Protocol Additional I, which incompletely protects civilian women internees who are pregnant or have dependent children by prohibiting execution but leaving room for pronouncement of the death penalty. Referring to the theory of benevolent sexism, …

Internalized Homophobia As An Influence On Participation In Hiv Prevention Among Young Men Who Have Sex With Men (Ymsm), Kasey I. Brazee

Honors Scholar Theses

Stigma is a known barrier to accessing preventative services for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), however, the types of stigmas involved in this relationship remain not well defined. Homophobia, or negative attitudes directed towards homosexuality, is a particularly important type of stigma considering the disproportionate effect of HIV on men who have sex with men (MSM). Young MSM (YMSM) are especially impacted, making them a key population in the context of HIV prevention research.  Internalized homophobia, which refers to homophobia that one directs towards themselves, is under researched regarding its role in participating in HIV prevention. In this study, we aimed …

Urban Sociology Oer Syllabus, Can Ersoy

Open Educational Resources

This is a zero cost textbook syllabus for undergraduate level urban Sociology course. It includes readings and visual materials for 6 learning modules, and instructions for a semester-long neighborhood study.

Symmetry And Psychosocial Adaptation To Trauma, Illness And Disability Part I: Views From Physics, Medicine And Psychology, Hanoch Livneh

Leadership, Learning and Counseling Faculty Publications and Presentations

The aim of this two-part paper is to discuss the concept of symmetry and its derivatives, symmetry breaking and asymmetry, and the role they assume in elucidating the structure and processes that underlie psychosocial adaptation to traumatic experiences. To achieve this aim, in Part I, first, a cursory review of symmetry is undertaken as it applies to physics, including conservation laws, the forces of nature, and leading theories of nature. Second, the paper addresses how symmetry is perceived in biology and medicine, including symmetry within biochemical and genetic structures, the human body, and the onset of disease processes. Third, the …

Examining The Impact Of A Self-Employment Vocational Program In Texas On Black Men And Their Recidivism Rates, Alain Marie Matigi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Mnar Attrition On Estimation Of Latent Growth Curve Models With Binary Observed Variables, Jason T. Newsom, Brian T. Keller, Mallory R. Kroeck, Nicholas A. Smith

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

A Monte Carlo simulation was used to evaluate the performance of latent growth curve (LGC) modelswith binary observed variables when the attrition pattern was missing not at random (MNAR) for fivetime points. Parameter and standard error biases for three estimation methods were compared:weighted least squares with mean and variance adjustment (WLSMV), categorical robust marginal max-imum likelihood (categorical MLR), and Bayes. The results indicated that robust diagonal weightedleast squares paired with multiple imputation (MI) performed best when values were missing at ran-dom. When data were missing not at random, Bayesian estimates performed best.

Women Self-Help Groups As Drivers Of Community Development In Rural Kenya, James Kariuki, Bhoke Chacha

Journal of Global Awareness

Self-Help Groups (SHGs) are informal grassroots associations of people who have similar objectives and concerns working cooperatively and collectively to meet their needs and improve their living conditions. SHGs are known to contribute towards the development and welfare of their members. This paper examines the role of SHGs in community development in Kenya with a focus on selected women groups in Migori and Makueni Counties. The study adopted a mixed research approach that provided both qualitative and quantitative data, and it was anchored on two interrelated theories of community development: empowerment theory and social capital theory. The researchers interviewed 80 …

Caring For The Carers: Exploring The Mental Wellbeing Of Informal Palliative Caregivers Of Cancer Patients In Kenya, James Kariuki, Rose Njiraini

Journal of Global Awareness

Cancer cases have been on the increase globally, and this has led to economic burden on the affected households. One way of reducing the cost of care is through home-based care by informal palliative caregivers who include family members, friends, and other people assigned by the family members to take care of the patient. The objectives of this study were to assess the status of the mental wellbeing of palliative caregivers of cancer patients; to examine the relationship between the ability of the patient to cope with cancer diagnosis and the mental wellbeing of the caregiver; and to investigate the …

Improving Human-Wildlife Coexistence: An Ecological And Educational Approach To Rewilding Grizzly Bears (Ursus Arctos Horribilis) In California, Amanda C. D. Rosales

Master's Projects and Capstones

Megafauna extinction during the Holocene has been both caused and amplified by climatic changes and human influence. By the last half century, large carnivores were diminished in Europe and the United States, but policies increasingly addressed species decline and their territories expanded. This research examined large carnivore rewilding across the European Union and United States, specifically for rewilding brown bears, Ursus arctos, in historic habitat. Next, case studies for the health status of climate-impacted whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis, a high energy food for bears, was assessed. Ultimately, research case studies, human perspective surveys, and the California Department of Education content …

La Maquiladora De Sueños Is Where The “American Dream” Ends: The Socio-Cultural Impact Of Hai(T)Ijuanenses In The United States-México Borderlands, Pedro Aleman Perfecto

Master's Theses

Historically, Tijuana has been the destination for migrants who have been left out from the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world. The city is at the epicenter of globalization where many transit, leave, and arrive. Sometimes considered a “third country” due to its binational and bicultural identity with its sister city, San Diego, California. The growing number of Haitian refugees that arrived in Tijuana in the mid 2010s to seek asylum in the United States overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and left the Haitian community vulnerable, yet it created new opportunities and reshaped new identities in the region. …

Hidden Behind Happiness: Bhutan’S Global Image And Ethnic Exclusion, Deepesh Das Shrestha

Master's Theses

Bhutan has gained international recognition for its philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which promotes holistic development through principles of well-being, environmental sustainability, cultural preservation, and good governance. Yet this celebrated image conceals a darker history: the systematic expulsion of the Lhotsampa, the Nepali-speaking ethnic minority of southern Bhutan. This study critically explores the contradiction between Bhutan's international image as a model of happiness and the lived experiences of Lhotsampa refugees who were displaced during the early 1990s.

Using a qualitative phenomenological research design, the study draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with six resettled Bhutanese Lhotsampa refugees living in the …

Perceptions Of Care: An Exploratory Case Study On Residents’ Perceptions Of Neighborhood And City Maintenance, Taylor Coats

Transforming Communities

Where one lives impacts both their physical and mental well-being. Though one’s builtenvironment is an important factor, the perception of one’s environment influences mental well-being. This qualitative study examines what influences residents’ perceptions of theirneighborhood and local governmental efforts to maintain and improve their community. Thisstudy utilized a case study methodology to interview residents, stakeholders, and politicians intwo neighborhoods in a mid-sized urban city in the Midwest (N = 16). This study identified threecore aspects that influence participants' perceptions of their neighborhoods and city efforts tomaintain and improve their community: 1) history with the city; 2) geographic location withinsegregated neighborhoods; …

Kev's Dinghy Boat Workshops, Ruiyang Xiao

Masters Theses

In a culture where convenience replaces process, this project argues that making — even when inefficient, imperfect, or unnecessary — enables forms of engagement that buying cannot.

Technologies and Services nowadays are able to fulfill human’s desire to travel and explore at ease. However, this convenience proposes a mode of engagement based only in deeper knowledge of context and thus our experience with the world around us is hence diminished. Our engagement with the world becomes heavily mediated, regulated and controlled.

This project investigates how hands-on engagement with water can reintroduce + restore our sense of joy, curiosity, consequence, and …

Elevating Voices: Exploring The Impacts And Experiences Of Required Workplace Dei Training, Marika Barto

Dissertations

Mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is a common element institutional DEI initiatives in their response to dismantling racial inequity in government organizations; yet, the lived experiences of racially marginalized participants remain critically underexamined—particularly in government settings, where the bureaucratic structures implementing these trainings are themselves racialized. This research was conducted during one of the most politically hostile environments for DEI work in recent memory. Federal executive actions in 2025, specifically the “Bondi memo,” directed entities subject to federal antidiscrimination laws to cease DEI practices, creating immediate chilling effects that directly impacted this study and reminded us that the …

Embodied Leadership And Conditional Legitimacy: Critically Conscious Male Leaders Navigating Systems Of Power, Luis A. Legaspi

Dissertations

Leadership is not a neutral concept; it is shaped by overlapping systems of power, including empire, whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. These interlocking systems influence how leadership is defined, recognized, and legitimized, often privileging particular identities and forms of authority. The persistent underrepresentation of people of color, women, and queer individuals in positions of leadership reflects how dominant conceptions of leadership remain closely aligned with historically entrenched structures of power.

This critical narrative inquiry study examines how men, who disproportionately occupy positions of social and institutional authority, make meaning of masculinity, power, and leadership within these systems. Drawing on relational …

Burning Out: A Narrative Exploration Of The Adaptive Challenge And Scaffolds Built Toward Sustenance Among Immigrant Rights Activists In San Diego County, Anna C. Runion

Dissertations

Activist burnout has been identified as one of the greatest threats to social movement sustainability, and the lived experience of paid immigrant rights activists remains undertheorized. This narrative inquiry explored activist burnout among 10 San Diego County immigrant rights activists, revealing how this community understands burnout, what factors contribute to its production, and how activists sustain themselves within it. Using Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry methodology, the researcher conducted in-depth individual interviews with ten activists representing a range of intersectional identities and roles. Narrative profiles were analyzed through holistic narrative reading, narrative reporting, structural and emergent coding, and cross-narrative …

Investigating The Impact Of Employment And Demographic Factors On Health Among Bereaved Adults: A Quantitative Approach, Dorothy L. O'Hagan

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Although the death of a loved one is a universal experience, grief and bereavement may affect employees in the workplace. Prior research on grief and bereavement in the workplace has been largely qualitative. Little attention has been given to how bereavement, employment-related factors, and demographic characteristics are associated with health among working-age adults. The Georgia Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) offered a large dataset for examining these relationships.

This retrospective, exploratory, correlational quantitative study used the 2019 and 2022 Georgia BRFSS datasets to examine self-reported health among bereaved and non-bereaved adults ages 18 to 64. Analytic samples included …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Decision-Making In Early-Stage Startups: How Venture Capitalists And Angel Investors Evaluate Uncertainty, Andrew M. Pence

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how venture capitalists (VCs) and angel investors (AIs) make investment decisions regarding early-stage startups. Using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) framework—consisting of three core components: phenomenology, hermeneutics, and idiography—this study draws upon three decision-making models: the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Heuristics and Biases model (H&B), and the Naturalistic Decision-Making model (NDM) to explore what motivates VCs and AIs to choose, for instance, “Company A over Company B.” Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 experienced venture investors to examine how they evaluate risk, assess founders and teams, and navigate the persistent uncertainty …