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The View From Ventress - 2019, University Of Mississippi. College Of Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts Newsletters

Cover Story: Arabic Language Flagship. "Here in Oxford, at the University of Mississippi, is one of the best Arabic programs in the country." - John Chappell, Rhodes Scholar finalist and Arabic Flagship graduate

Change Agents (2019), University Of Mississippi. Office Of Research And Sponsored Programs

Publications of the ORSP

This publication highlights a few of the significant research efforts at the University of Mississippi during the past year.

Institutional Factors That Affect Transfer Student Sucess At A University In The Mid-South Region Of The U.S., Patricia Ann Coats

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At a four-year university located in the Mid-South region of the United States, students who transfer do so with the likelihood of spending more time and money completing a baccalaureate degree than non-transfer students. This is what research scholar Kevin Dougherty (1992) entitled the Baccalaureate Attainment Gap or the transfer gap. In this companion dissertation, using a multi-method approach, we use the quantitative data of transfer student graduation and retention rates along with qualitative data from interviews conducted with administrative staff about transfer student success. We consider these selected outcomes and administrative staff interviews to be institutional factors that help …

Exploring The Impact Of Mississippi Virtual Community College Academy Professional Development For Online Teaching, Terry Woodrow Pollard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As online courses and programs continue to grow in number across Mississippi’s community college system, an examination of the system which trains and supports faculty has gone largely unexamined. The aim of this research was to study the impact of the Mississippi Virtual Community College Academy, the state’s online professional development system, on faculty. Structured interviews were conducted with nine faculty in four community colleges across the state to determine conditions that helped or hindered faculty in their implementation of content learned in online professional development courses on credit-bearing courses they would later teach. Analysis of faculty transcripts indicate faculty …

Relationship Of Expected Family Contribution To Student Success At Belhaven University, Kevin Alexander Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the relationship of expected family contribution (EFC) with student success for 427 freshmen students enrolled at Belhaven University in the Fall of 2016 and 2017. Success is measured by grade point average (GPA) and credit hours completed during the student’s freshman year. These two critical factors are used to determine a student’s satisfactory academic process (SAP). While measuring SAP is important, the contradiction between the university SAP and the SAP required by the state of Mississippi to remain eligible to receive funding are often in conflict.

Explication Of Moral Disgust: Assessing Physiological And Behavioral Responses To Disgust Eliciting Videos, Sarah Michelle Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Results indicate a significant self-reported disgust response among core animal reminder and contamination domains whereas the moral domains elicited both anger and disgust. Physiologically no change was measured in skin conductance; heart rate decrease in response to animal reminder contamination community and autonomy video clips. Significant behavioral avoidance was demonstrated when presented with the core and animal reminder video clips. Further when measuring facial muscle activation the levator labii was significantly activated in response to the core video clip but no others. The current study highlights the difficulty in establishing characteristic responses to disgust stimuli especially within the moral domain. …

Minimum Number Of Individuals: A Methodological Comparison Using Human Remains From Caves Branch Rockshelter In The Cayo District Of Belize, Caitlin Elizabeth Stewart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The analysis of human remains in archaeological contexts is often complicated by the presence of highly fragmented and commingled remains. The standard methods used to help quantify the number of individuals and elements in these contexts are based upon the segmentation of whole bones. The methods provide standardization and are flexible enough to allow for the idiosyncratic nature of each context. However, this results in a lack of transparency, which is necessary to reanalyze the same sample or to compare “like” contexts, as the data collected will vary.

Hurricane Landing: An Analysis Of Site 22la516 In Sardis Lake, Lafayette County, Mississippi, Joshua John Shiers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Site 22LA516, known as Hurricane Landing, is a single mound early Mississippian site located in the middle of Sardis Lake, Lafayette County, Mississippi. As part of a 2015 joint salvage archaeology project between the Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) and the Vicksburg District Corp of Engineers, nine pit features were excavated. Analyses of the ceramics and lithic remains recovered from the features, combined with AMS dates, were conducted with the focus of better understanding Hurricane Landing within its North Central Hills region of Mississippi. Hurricane Landing’s 2015 excavation ceramic collection contains shell tempered and grog tempered plainware with several shell …

My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism And Mobility In The Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866, Christine Antoinette Rizzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and …

Mandated Representation: The Effect Of Legislative Gender Quotas On Attitudes Toward Gender Equality, Rustin Suray

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Do gender quotas actually change attitudes toward gender equality? Research suggests that quotas influence gender norms but very little work has looked at whether individual attitudes themselves change when gender quotas are enacted. This paper attempts to fill this void by studying the relationship between quota implementation and gender attitudes at a cross-national level using longitudinal survey data from the World Values Survey in a two-level random intercept multi-level model. This type of model is appropriate because it does not assume that individual observations in the data are independent from one another. The individual respondents from the WVS data are …

Examining The Moderating Effects Of Defendant Characteristics On The Relationship Between Crime Type And Prosecutorial Decision Making, Caitlin Marie Howley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of plea bargaining was not compractice until the nineteenth century (Langbein, 1978; Alschuler, 1979). Before that time, criminal defendants lacked representation in the court, leaving the judge to determine sentencing and punishment. Plea bargaining has become the prominent practice, with around 90% of cases, state and federal, resulting in a plea (Rabin, 1972; Lagoy, Senna, & Siegel, 1976; Alschuler, 1979; Alschuler, 1983; Scott & Stuntz, 1992; Schulhofer, 1992; Starkweather, 1992; Ross, 2006; Silveira, 2017). The concept of plea bargaining is inevitably accompanied by discretion, specifically prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutorial discretion grants prosecutors power in deciding what charges they would …

Evaluation Of Confidential Informant Programs In Legal Settings: Why Do 10 When You Can Send A Friend?, Kennedy Marie Cuevas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is limited research regarding the use of Confidential Informants and related programming, including a consensus of Best Practices of these programs. The information available regarding CI use and its programming is limited to agency-produced literature and minimal peer-revieresearch. The present study sought to utilize the limited information available to develop Best Practices of Confidential Informant Programs by conducting an analysis of available literature to identify themes and policies that were present in a majority of the literature. Additionally, the aforementioned Best Practices were used to perform deductive qualitative analysis of the written policies of a Confidential Informant program in …

Collegiate Equity Mentoring Matrix: A Culturally Relevant Framework For The Meaningful Mentoring Of Black Male Students, Norris Allen Edney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reports on a qualitative analysis of the mentoring experiences of 22 successful Black males at the University of Mississippi. Several theories were used to frame the analysis. Bozeman and Feeney’s (2007) mentoring conceptualization helps to exact an operational definition for mentoring for the analysis. Theories describing the competition between the political interests which shape educational environments (Labaree, 1997) and student motivations to persist to graduation (Tinto, 2016) help to contextualize the barriers to success students encounter in college. Crisp and Cruz’s (2009) college mentoring theory helps to consider the potential for mentoring to support student success in college. …

Community Resilience: A Meta-Study Of International Development Rhetoric In Emerging Economies, Rachel Ann Haggard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Understood generally, community resilience is the ability of communities to adapt, absorb, mitigate, and recover from shocks and stressors in such a way that facilitates positive future outcomes and reduces overall vulnerability to future shocks and stressors (Adger, 2000; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche & Pfefferbaum, 2008; USAID, 2013; Walker et al., 2004). The core of this definition relates to sustainability and the capability of socio-ecological systems and communities to adapt and transform to both day to day fluctuations and stressors as well as major disasters (Milman & Short, 2008; Walker et al., 2004). This meta-study seeks to shed light on …

The Politics Of Place, The Urban-Rural Divide, And Geographic Identities In American Politics, Daniel Fudge

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To test these theories, I conduct a series of empirical tests using survey data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) and an original survey experiment. Chapter two examines how people’s ideological perceptions are moderated by living in a particular area. Using the ANES data, I conduct a regression analysis with an interaction of the respondent’s ideology and the geographic location. Chapter three analyzes how individuals perceive a political candidate based on partisan and geographic information presented to the respondent. Using an original survey experiment, this study seeks to illustrate how individuals across urban and rural America perceive Republican and …

Not All Scholars, But Gentlemen: The Making Of Virginian Manhood At St. Christopher's School, 1911-1969, Katelyn Frazer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through close study of St. Christopher’s School—an all-boys’ school in Richmond, Virginia—during its first fifty years, this thesis historicizes upper-class white masculinity in Virginia during the first half of the twentieth century. The school’s founder, Churchill Gibson Chamberlayne, linked the Lost Cause myth with other movements in education at the time, especially Muscular Christianity and the country day school movement. By looking at how students and administrators at St. Christopher’s made and remade traditions surrounding notions of masculinity, in addition to more muted manifestations of gender at the school, illuminate the existence of a gender hierarchy even before gender integration. …

What’S Going On? The Disproportionate Discipline Of Upper Elementary Male Students In Little Tiger Elementary School, Amy Katrise Sutton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This action research study investigates the problem of disproportionate male discipline at LTES, specifically through the implementation of the PBIS program. Both quantitative and qualitative data provide a thorough explanation of student misbehaviors and discipline reporting practices at LTES. Through the utilization of teacher surveys, interviews, descriptive statistics, and anecdotal notes, the researcher presents findings which provide hope for improving male student behavior and discipline reporting practices. The study focuses on answering the overarching question, did the action plan result in a 20% decrease of male student discipline referrals within the first year of implementation? To answer this question a …

The Last Of Anything, Malerie V. Lovejoy

Honors Theses

DR. MARCUS HALL BENNETT is lead archaeologist on a site in Northumberland, England dated after the Norman Conquest. The excavation seems standard until the discovery of Artifact XX.46.8.2, a collection of animal skins covered in writing. To translate the writing, Hall calls in DR. QUINN PRESTON, a linguist studying Middle English as a creole. As Quinn begins to analyze the writing, she realizes they have discovered a new pidgin—a perfect storm of changing language during a time of political upheaval. Through months of study, Quinn understands the text as a history of the tribe leading up to their extinction at …

Religion In Education: The Effects Of Political Ideologies On Andalusian Youth, Jessika Brittni Russell

Honors Theses

This study investigates the driving factors behind a student’s choice to take a class on Catholicism, or the alternative social and civil values class, throughout their educational career in Andalusia, Spain. Major sociological theories are used to understand how religion, education, and politics tie together in society, and additionally the impact they have on individuals. In order to understand the personal factors that play into one’s choice to take a class on Catholicism, a survey was created using the platform Qualtrics and afterwards sent out to students in Andalusia, Spain. The study uses a qualitative approach to analyze the data …

More Than Altruism: An Examination Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'S Involvement In The Chicago Campaign And Protest Of The Vietnam War, Stephanie Poiroux

Honors Theses

This mix-method study examines whether Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s writing reflects altruism. Utilizing content analysis, I examined 60 of King’s sermons, speeches, letters, newspaper statements, and telegrams about the Chicago Campaign and the Vietnam War over two separate two-year periods starting from January 1, 1965 to December 31, 1967. King’s documents were scored based on the Altruistic Personality Scale for Leaders and Protest, which was created based on the characteristics of both passive and active bystanders derived from studies written by scholars of psychology. After analyzing the range, complexity, and density of King’s altruism, this study shows that all …

The Haves And The Have Nots: Segregation And Marginalization In Puebla, Mexico, Jarvis Benson

Honors Theses

Beginning in the early 1990s, the city of Puebla, Mexico pursued an urbanization strategy based on converting the historic center into a hub for international tourism devoted to marketing colonial architecture and developing another section of the city, Angelópolis, as an affluent space for commerce and elite dwelling. This strategy produced a crowding out effect that relegated the lower and working classes to the peripheries of the city. There are currently high levels of marginalization in Puebla that negatively impact overall citizen well-being, with pockets of precarious populations living in zones with difficult social conditions. Though based on a small …

Silent Majorities: The Brief History Of A Curious Term, 1920-1980, Jordan R. Holman

Honors Theses

This paper examines the use of the term “the silent majority” from 1920-1980, tracing the term from its roots in the prohibition and moral movements of the 1920s and 1930s, to its resurfacing in the 1950s in connection to race and integration, to finally Nixon’s popularization of the term. The sources in which the term was used as such were located through Google Books, the University of Mississippi’s One Search tool, and the Chronicling America database. The Google Ngram Viewer was also utilized in creating a graph that tracked the usage of “the silent majority” in digitized literature through the …

We Gotta Work With What We Got: School And Community Factors That Contribute To Educational Resilience Among African American Students, Denae Bradley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how Black residents in the Mississippi Delta claim and deploy agency and resiliency in a rural community context entrenched in a legacy of oppression. Black, low-income communities are implicitly labeled non-resilient when macro-level community capitals and resiliency literature are applied. However, I find that resiliency is culturally distinctive and oftentimes detected in ritual, daily processes in Black communities. This thesis rejects dominant narratives that Black communities in Mississippi are only poor, backwards, and lacking. It questions the assumption that dominant institutions have created inescapable boundaries for Black people in this region and challenges the notion that the …

Institutional Factors That Affect Transfer Student Success At A University In The Mid-South Region Of The U.S., Elizabeth Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At a four-year university in the Memphis-metropolitan region of the United States, students who transfer do so with the likelihood of spending more time and money completing a baccalaureate degree than non-transfer students. This is what research scholar Kevin Dougherty (1992) entitled the Baccalaureate Attainment Gap or the transfer gap. In this companion dissertation, using a multi-method approach, we use the quantitative data of transfer student graduation and retention rates along with qualitative data from interviews conducted with administrative staff about transfer student success. We consider these selected outcomes and administrative staff interviews to be institutional factors that help shape …

Apply Now!: Utilizing Application Date To Predict College Enrollment, Jennifer Leigh Phillips

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Using Perna’s (2006) college choice model as the conceptual framework, the researcher utilized two data analyses to complete this study. First, multiple regressions were performed on three groups of variables: entrance examination, core high school gpa, and cumulative high school gpa; gender, ethnicity, and residency; and first-generation status and Mississippi congressional district. Second, a chi square test was completed to discover how likely it is that a student’s application date is related to the acceptance rate (likelihood of acceptance) and yield rate (likelihood of matriculating) of the University of Mississippi freshman class.

Former African-American Male Football Student-Athletes At Southeastern Conference Institutions And Their Transition From Athletics To Non-Athletic Careers, Deterrian L. Shackelford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The problem of practice for this dissertation will address the perceived deficiencies in the cultivation of workplace readiness and the projection of career success among former African-American football student-athletes at Southeastern Conference institutions. The focus of this dissertation in practice will be to examine the perceived lack of development of academic, social and psychological skills in order to achieve a successful transition from athletics to non-athletic careers. This study will identify the applicable career and academic developments, discussed and articulated by former African-American male football student-athletes, which directly influence their employability qualities. Manuscript two will review data generated from the …

Households And Changing Use Of Space At The Transitional Early Mississippian Austin Site, Benjamin Garrett Davis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Austin Site (22TU549) is a village site located in Tunica County, Mississippi dating to approximately A.D. 1150-1350, along the transition from the Terminal Late Woodland to the Mississippian period. While Elizabeth Hunt’s (2017) masters thesis concluded that the ceramics at Austin emphasized a Late Woodland persistence, the architecture and use of space at the site had yet to be analyzed. This study examines this architecture and use of space over time at Austin to determine if they display evidence of increasing institutionalized inequality. This included creating a map of Austin based on John Connaway’s original excavation notes, and then …

Validating Military Culture: The Factor Analysis Of A Military-Related Adaptation Of Acculturation, Mathew A. Tkachuck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of acculturation has a long history, and measures of the construct attempt to assess the degree to which attitudes and behaviors reflect the interaction between different cultures. Berry’s acculturation framework (1997) is arguably the most empirically-supported and well-known model of acculturation. Berry’s model posits that an individual may have difficulty appropriately adapting to a culture different than his or her own depending on how much they are oriented to either culture. Moreover, Searle and Ward (1990) hypothesized that an individual’s acculturation orientation, in addition to how different the dominant and non-dominant cultures are from one another, impacts psychological …

Crafting Stone Discoidals On The Frontier: Production And Identity In Southwest Virginia, Hamilton Hastie Bryant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stone discoidals are widely recognized as a class of artifacts associated with Mississippian cultural traditions and even some of its various descendant communities. Excavations at the Carter Robinson site a Fourteenth Century Mississippian frontier site in Lee County Virginia have revealed evidence of the production of stone discoidals. Although craft production in Mississippian societies has been the subject of much debate little to no attention has been given to the production of stone discoidals. The purpose of this thesis is to explicate the method of stone discoidal production at Carter Robinson and to explore how this production was organized overtime …

Moral Agency: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Its Scientific Foundations, Makensey Sanders

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a longstanding discussion of what the criteria are to distinguish science from non-science. In section one of this paper, I will focus on four demarcating criteria of a scientific theory: (1) value neutrality; (2) verifiability; (3) falsifiability; and (4) reproducibility. Keeping these criteria in mind, I will turn to the notion of moral agency (focusing on psychopathy, autism, and personal identity) and the question of whether the current way we conceptualize and research it can be deemed as scientific according to the four criteria.

In section two, I will discuss the role psychopathy and autism play in understanding …