Digital Commons Network^™

Pineal Gland Abnormalities And The Relationship Of Melatonin To The Development And Symptom Severity Of Schizophrenia: An Integrative Review Of The Literature, Kathryn Margretta

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to critique the literature focusing on the role of pineal gland volume and function and the development of schizophrenia by asking the question, "What is the relationship between pineal gland physiologic function and development and symptom severity of schizophrenia? It is crucial that health care providers continue advocate for better understanding of schizophrenia in order to develop a more appropriate treatment and relive the suffering of those with schizophrenia. A review of published literature focusing on the pineal glands association with schizophrenia was performed using several databases including: ScienceDirect, PubMED, Google Scholar, Cumulated Index …

Gastrointestinal Symptoms And Belly Pain During The Phases Of The Menstrual Cycle In Healthy Young Females, Preethashree Anbukkarasu

Honors Undergraduate Theses

There are significant differences between the incidence of gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms between males and females. A recent review found that females report having more severe GI health problems compared to males. One explanation for the higher reporting rates of GI symptoms in females could be attributed to menstrual cycle influences rather than GI processes.

This research aims to examine the relationship between how gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms experienced by women covary with the different stages of the menstrual cycle. Additionally, a secondary purpose is to determine the moderating effect of health anxiety on the severity of menstrual and GI symptoms.

Responses …

The Moderating Effect Of Organizational Policies And Procedures In Relation To The Consequences Of Sexual Harassment Of Women, Nicole Aranda

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Sexual harassment is common in the workplace and leads to negative outcomes for individuals and organizations. Previous research has shown that turnover is a negative outcome of sexual harassment. Organizations can implement policies and procedures, but little research exists examining the impact of these policies on employee perceptions and intentions. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine perceived enforcement of organizational policies and procedures as a moderator of the relationship between sexual harassment and turnover intentions. Social exchange theory is used to explain this concept between women from male-dominated professions and gender-balanced professions. Participants were 66 employed females …

A Right To A Pollution-Free Environment Through The Right To Life, Natalie S. Mousa

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Since humans have existed on Earth, the environment has been one of the primary resources contributing to humans' ability to live life adequately. Pollution has not only destroyed natural life, but it has also diminished humans' right to life. The United Nations 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantees "every human being has the inherent right to life," but how can one exercise this right in an environment that is degrading through pollution? This is the basis of which this thesis is surrounded; the issue of environmental pollution hindering humans' right to life. Thus, this thesis …

The Role Of Islam In Establishing Women's Rights In The Muslim World, Assad Khan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This paper examines the literature surrounding women's rights in the Muslim world to determine the factors that have contributed to the oppression of women in the Muslim world and to understand the role that different interpretations of Islam can have on either restricting or improving the status of women in the Muslim world. The practices of Muslim people as a population deviate from what is prescribed by Islam in some cases, contributing to the misconception that the restrictive practices toward women in many Muslim-majority countries are founded in Islamic teachings. Factors such as individual levels of religiosity and adherence to …

A Model For Assessing Staff Resilience To Improve Organizational Resilience In Emergency Departments, Stefani Baz

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Organizational Resilience is defined as the ability of an organization to anticipate sudden disruptions, effectively respond, and adapt in a changing environment to deliver its objectives, as well as successfully recover. In order to increase resilience at an organizational level, it is important to understand how individuals collectively contribute to resilience capability of an organization. Emergency Departments (EDs) are considered to be particularly well suited to investigating resilience capability due to their highly unpredictable and complex operating environment. Further, the resilience capability of EDs and their staff is suggested to be essential to successful delivery of safe, high-quality, and timely …

Designing An Expressive Writing Unit For Students With Asd In Mind: The Synthesis Of Social-Emotional Learning And Writing Strategy Instruction, Maya Govea

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In general education classrooms across the United States, students with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn how to write and cultivate their writing skills. Teachers of students with ASD have the unique responsibility of carrying out effective instruction to all students. However, the growing body of research around evidence-based practices and approaches for students with ASD is limited. Two effective practices that have shown positive statistical significance for students with ASD are the self-regulated strategy development model (SRSD) and the social-emotional learning (SEL) framework. General education instruction faces a research-practice gap because of the widespread lack of strategy instruction and lack …

Domestic Migrant Workers In Lebanon: Between Precarity And Resiliency, Jasmine L. Masri

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The proliferation in the number of domestic migrant workers (DMWs), who travel from poorer countries to work in homes in wealthier countries, represents an essential dimension of globalization in the 21st century. This project focuses on DMWs in Lebanon. In an increasingly globalized world, the study of DMWs, who number around 250,000 in Lebanon (Amnesty International, 2019), provides a critical case to understand how the transborder movement of humans generates unique and challenging human rights issues. Lebanon practices the kafala system, which is prevalent in other Middle Eastern countries and makes foreign workers legally dependent on their employment. This system …

Examining One Teacher's Practices In Supporting Students With Exceptionalities In An Online Setting, Alyson L. Hepler

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis explored how students with exceptionalities learned literacy skills in an online learning environment and how the teacher was supported in the online classroom environment through professional development. Analysis of classroom observations and interviews with a teacher resulted in five findings: (1) There was limited professional development for teaching exceptional education students online. (2) Meeting exceptional student educational needs in the online environment was challenging for the teacher. (3) During the teacher's online lessons, there were some elements of literacy present such as comprehension and real-world examples. (4) The teacher missed out on some key components for literacy development …

Disease And Democracy: Understanding The Impact Of Disease Burden On Civil Liberties And Civil Society In Sub-Saharan Africa, Abigail E. Reynolds

Honors Undergraduate Theses

What is the impact of disease burden on democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Despite increasing interest in the implications of health crises for state stability, there has been a dearth of literature exploring the relationship between disease burden more generally and democracy specifically. This thesis takes a comprehensive approach to bridge this gap in the literature. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, it draws on data from the Global Burden of Disease database and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset to analyze this relationship. The diseases studied are categorized as long-wave (e.g., HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis), short-wave (e.g., Ebola and lower respiratory infections), …

The Stability Of Two-Dimensional Cylinder Wakes In The Presence Of A Wavy Ground, Matt Duran

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The following study investigates hydrodynamic stability for two-dimensional, incompressible flow past a cylinder and compares it alongside four different variations of a wave-like ground introduced within the wake region of the cylinder wake. These different variations include changing the distance of the cylinder both horizontally from the wave-like structure and vertically from the ground. The geometry and meshes were initially constructed using GMSH and imported into Nektar++. The baseflows were then obtained in Nektar++ using the Velocity Correction Scheme, continuous Galerkin method, and Unsteady Navier Stokes solver. Then, the Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Method driver was used to retrieve the various …

The Relationship Between Creative Hobbies And Visual Spatial Ability, Victoria Alexander

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Recent developments in educational practices have identified the teaching of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) areas as important, but this emphasis on STEM fields has sacrificed educational focus on the Arts (Cohen, 2016). This is a significant loss, not only in terms of the loss of humanities education in itself, but through the potential loss of foundational skills through practice in artistic areas. The current paper explores this idea by investigating the correlational relationship between visual spatial abilities and participation in a variety of creative activities. Spatial ability is known to be a cognitive skill that underlies success in …

The Mobilizer And The Mobilized: An Exploration Of "Latinx", Marisa E. Norzagaray

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In this project, I endeavor to bridge the gap between these two by analyzing "Latinx" as a symbol that functions distinctly when employed as a personal or group identity. My argument for this thesis can be broken into two main parts: its significance as an identity, and its tangibility. As a group identity, I argue "Latinx" represents a social movement for liberation, visibility, and minority allyship. While this is not unconnected to its personal meaning, individual embodiment of the term involves the performance and realization of the intersectional. In other words, it gives those with overlapping queer and Latina/o identities …

Physicians And Their Patience: Redefining Healthcare Relationships Through Readability Optimization, Rachel V. Ball

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The present study takes legibility research and extends it to the medical setting. Internal Medicine Physicians from UCF developed six passages of medical text detailing a History of Present Illness (HPI) Report from an emergency department as well as comprehension questions for the purpose of our study. In our study, we first presented non-medical passages and comprehension questions in six common fonts to identify participants' individual fastest and slowest fonts. We then gave participants medical passages in both their best and worst fonts while measuring reading speed and comprehension. This study was delivered to a population of Amazon Mechanical Turk …

Can Underdog Stories Help Students To Overcome College Barriers? A Study On Gender And Ethnic Differences, Daniela Gonzalez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Previous organizational research has shown that people who perceived discrimination can bounce back from their negative experiences by constructing underdog stories: narratives in which others do not believe an individual could succeed, but in the end, the person succeeds. However, this concept has not been tested in the educational setting. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine if constructing underdog stories can influence how college students perceive potential barriers in education. Participants were randomly assigned conditions: Underdog and control (neutral stories) condition. We hypothesized that creating underdog stories would reduce perceived barriers in college. We further hypothesized that …

Stock Returns By Sector And Industries In A Year Into The Covid-19 Pandemic, Simon Alvin A. Casas

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In the COVID-19 stock market industries reacted and were affected in different ways. This paper will use Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to look at how sectors and selected industries fared after a whole year in a pandemic. This will be accomplished by comparing 2019 stock returns to 2020 stock returns with a t-test and estimating the effect of COVID-19 positive case and death increases using a pooled OLS regression. All SIC sectors A-J were analyzed as well as 18 selected industries such as food stores, real estate, oil and gas extraction, health services, and communications. Results show a significant …

Traditional Healing Beyond The Homeland: Yezidi Shamanic Healing In The Diaspora, Sophia G. Griemert

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The goal of this qualitative study is to evaluate whether shamanism, practiced by koçeks and faqrya (the Yezidi terms for traditional shamanic practitioners), continues as a practice among diasporic Yezidis, and, if so, in what manner. I accomplish this through a series of oral, remote interviews with Yezidis living in Germany. The interview subjects comprise a cross-sectional sample that includes men and women from the three Yezidi castes (Sheikh, Pir, Murid). Through the multiple testimonies these interviews garnered regarding shamanic praxis in the context of Germany, I determine that, in spite of the disruptions of forced migration and geographical distance, …

The Readability Of Cochlear Implant Brochures: A Potential Factor In Parent Choice, Jennifer Dannemarie La Scala

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The early diagnosis of hearing loss can be a life-changing event for families. Parents are required to make several prompt decisions where they might be overwhelmed with all the information being shared with them. Patient education materials (PEMs) are often provided by clinical health professionals – yet these materials are often written above the average reading level of adults in the United States, thus presenting an additional challenge to many parents.

The purpose of this study was to examine the ease of reading cochlear implant (CI) brochures that are provided to parents who are making informed decisions about the management …

Examining Everyday Literacies: An Autoethnographic Analysis Of Mundane Textualities, Kyle J. Mauter

Honors Undergraduate Theses

As a way of extending perspectives of writing and learning, this thesis explores everyday literacy activities and their role in function in shaping people's activities. Taking up an autoethnographic approach to studying the mundane literacies of everyday life, this thesis offers a fine-grained analysis of the processes and practices involved in two specific literate activities I have engaged in over the two years: creating a mixtape for a friend and streaming my participation in online video games. As key findings, the analysis of these everyday literate activities suggests that the interactions between people and social contexts figure prominently in the …

Characterization Of A Label-Free Fluorescent Assay For Point Mutation Discrimination Based On Split Aptamer Probes, Shannon A. Beaton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Due to the misuse of antibiotics, multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have become more rampant in our society; these MDR have given rise to diseases that are not readily curable. One such agent is the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, which is a causative agent of tuberculosis (TB). Timely diagnostics of the bacterial infection and detection of bacterial drug-susceptibility profiles helps to initiate the necessary treatment in a timely fashion and to limit transmission of the disease. For more affordable detection of bacterial diseases, such as TN, tag-free split aptamer probes are advantageous. This proposal aims at designing split aptamer probes for detection …

Constitutional Camouflage: How Constitutional Methodologies Act As Smoke Screens For Supreme Court Justices, William J. Lijewski

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The Supreme Court Justices of the United States sit on the highest court of the land. The justices have the ultimate say as to the meaning of the Constitution, and their role could aptly be summarized as interpreters of the Constitution. They decide what the words of the nation's founding document mean and therefore help to determine the rule of law for the social, political, and economic areas of society. To help them analyze the text of the Constitution and decide what it means and subsequently apply it to cases, justices use constitutional methodologies. Constitutional methodologies are algorithms or ways …

Populism's Historical And Contemporary Manifestations, Horacio Pla

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In the following thesis, American populism's many manifestations throughout American history as well as its current forms in contemporary politics will be analyzed mainly through the lens of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are two prominent political figures that have managed to amass a considerable degree of support. In Trump's case, his populist rhetoric and authoritarian slant has allowed him to garner enough support to ascend to the position of President of the United States of America, arguably one of the most powerful political positions on planet Earth. Current trends such as dissatisfaction amongst the voting constituencies of Democrats …

Recapture: A Virtual Reality Interactive Narrative Experience Concerning Perspectives And Self-Reflection, Indira Avendano

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project presents a virtual reality (VR) Interactive Narrative aiming to leave users reflecting on the perspectives one chooses to view life through. The narrative is driven by interactions designed using the concept of procedural rhetoric, which explores how rules and mechanics in games can persuade people about an idea, and Shin's cognitive model, which presents a dynamic view of immersion in VR. The persuasive nature of procedural rhetoric in combination with immersion techniques such as tangible interfaces and first-person elements of VR can effectively work together to immerse users into a compelling narrative experience with an intended emotional response …

3d Mri Investigations Of The Musculus Uvulae In Children With 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome, Riley Cashon

Honors Undergraduate Theses

22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome (22q) is the most common genetic cause for velopharyngeal dysfunction. Several velopharyngeal muscles in children with 22q have been shown to be hypoplastic, but no studies to date have examined the musculus uvulae in children with 22q. This study aimed to investigate the presence and characteristics of the musculus uvulae in children with 22q using3D modeling software MRI scans of 13 children (8 with 22q and 5 control participants) were used to measure the musculus uvulae using Amira 6 visualization modeling software. The muscle was segmented by selecting voxels displaying the musculus uvulae on successive oblique coronal …

A Mixed Methods Study On Food Insecurity Screening And Patient-Centered Care: Perspectives Of Patients And Healthcare Providers On Practices And Barriers To Effective Screening In Outpatient Medical Settings, Christina Bernhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The purpose of this study was to better understand the relationship between elements of patient-centered care and patient/provider comfort with conversing about food insecurity and related social determinants of health. A mixed methods study was conducted. Patients and healthcare providers were surveyed on their experiences with patient-centered care and comfort discussing food insecurity and related social concerns. Telephone interviews were conducted to gain a richer understanding of the concepts under investigation. In the survey and telephone interviews, both samples were also asked about changes in communication during COVID-19 times. Quantitative findings show that patient involvement in care and cultural sensitivity …

Brain Interhemispheric Alterations In Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Using Structural Neuroimaging Features, Cintya Dutta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This dissertation examines brain lateralization and interhemispheric asymmetry patterns found in youths with Attention-Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Prior research groups have found mixed findings with respect to left and right hemisphere alterations from ADHD subjects using structural magnetic resonance imaging. In these investigations, we propose the use of Asymmetry Index (AI), a subject-specific metric that quantifies the extent of brain asymmetry and allows each subject to serve as their own control, thus reducing variability when pooling across different sites. We compare AI metric with laterality across volumetric, surface area, thickness, morphology, and white matter measures in order to characterize …

Predicting Employee Performance: A Meta-Analysis And Systematic Review On Data Mining Methods, Turku Erengin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Data mining methods have been used to study a variety of topics in industrial and organizational psychology, including predicting employee performance. With the increased interest in predictive analytics in human resources, the present study aimed to review and explore the application of two commonly used data mining methods, decision trees (DTs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs), for predicting employee performance in organizational settings. Out of 103 studies reviewed, eight studies were retained and used for the meta-analyses. The number of employee performance classifications meta-analyzed was 2430 in total. The results suggested that both data mining methods showed good performance in …

Monitoring Of Microscopic Traffic Behavior For Safety Applications Using Temporal Logic, Mariam Wessam Hassan Mohamed Nour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Smart cities are revolutionizing the transportation infrastructure by the integration of technology. However, ensuring that various transportation system components are operating as expected and in a safe manner is a great challenge. One of the proposed solutions is traffic monitoring systems which collect and analyze traffic data for the safe operation and management of the overall system. Even though traffic safety analysis has been tied to crash data, surrogate safety measures (SSM) have recently emerged as a replacement. SSM can provide a convenient alternative for understanding the impact of conflicts on overall road safety. Traditionally, conflicts were studied through manual …

Exploring The Academic Workload Of Second Year Medical Students, Jason Pollock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Excessive academic workload has been cited as a leading cause of medical student stress, depression, and drop out. A study was conducted at a Southeastern Medical School to identify a relationship between institutionally prescribed workload (objective workload) and the students' perceptions (subjective workload). The existing school workload policy and the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence workload estimator were utilized to calculate time to complete two types of academic artifacts: (1) assigned (required) course materials and (2) recommended (optional) course materials, which we compared at the Module level to identify difference in objective workload. The students' perceptions of workload were …

Comparing Teacher Responses To The Covid-19 Pandemic In Venezuela And The United States, Maria Spinetti Rincon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted the entire world. Teachers have been challenged throughout this time to adapt their teaching practices amidst a constantly changing environment. The purpose of this study was to answer the research questions: (1) how did teachers' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic vary between the United States and Venezuela? And (2) what do teachers perceive they need to better support children in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic? This research used an interpretive, case study approach through kindergarten teacher interviews and curricula analysis. Teachers were included in the study if they had taught for more than five …