Digital Commons Network^™

At-Risk Youth, Jeremy Hall

Second-Year Seminar Posters (COE 202)

By creating more upstanding citizens through youth programs, as well as increasing the amount of youth programs, the culture of crime can be reversed in Las Vegas.

Intersections Between Gender, Race, And Justice-Involvement: A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Women's Experiences In The Oregon Criminal Justice System, Breanna Lynne Boppre

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Since the 1970s, the rate of female incarceration in the United States skyrocketed, with highest imprisonment rates among Black and Latina women. Nonetheless, few studies examined disparities in female imprisonment and the distinct experiences of women of Color within the justice system. To fill this gap in the literature, this dissertation utilized conflict and intersectional perspectives to assess the differential treatment of women in the Oregon justice system. Using a convergent mixed methods design, this dissertation examined disparities in female imprisonment using state-level prison admissions and population data from 1983-2014 in conjunction with qualitative interview and focus group responses among …

Is It Still Impossible To Be Black And American?, Darrian Carroll

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis engages Bill Clinton’s presidential rhetoric to investigate how liberal rhetorical practices can be used to extend and sustain the oppression of Black Americans. By adopting Du Bois’ concepts of the color-line and double-consciousness this thesis examines how Bill Clinton was able to recreate the color-line in the Mason Temple speech and benefit from and recreate a world devoid of consciousness in other selected speeches from his corpus. This project takes up three separate speeches by Bill Clinton as texts. The second chapter focuses on Bill Clinton’s “Remarks to the Rainbow Coalition” and “Remarks announcing the initiative” to make …

Police Interventions, Public Perceptions, And The Rdfc Interaction Model, Stacey L. Clouse

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Procedural justice and police legitimacy research suggests that perceptions of legitimacy are based on the credibility of police (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003). However, highly publicized incidents of police use of force serve to threaten that credibility. High profile incidents between police and citizens in Black communities have contributed to national protests and, as some data suggest, increased violence toward the police (FBI.gov, 2016). Extensive media coverage of these incidents has contributed to an increased sensitivity toward police- citizen interactions leading to incidents of civil unrest (Weitzer, 2002). The incidents of civil unrest suggest that we should more closely examine factors …

A Quantitative Study Of Mitigating Resistance To Change Through A Neuro Linguistic Approach: With The Use Of Narratives And A Neuro Linguistic Pattern, Mary J. Sanders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Resistance to organizational change by employees and management delays implementation, creates emotional stress for both, and reduces the potential savings from rapid change implementation. The delay comes from organizational members’ beliefs stuck in the status quo thus reducing the change’s potential improvement in productivity and effectiveness. If beliefs about the change could be embraced creating organizational readiness, these negative effects could be mitigated and improvements in productivity could be realized sooner.

Reducing the resistance to organizational change through the use of metaphors and a specific neuro linguistic programming pattern (NLP) is the focus of this research study. NLP was originally …

Catholic Charities Of Southern Nevada, Ye Eun Nam

Second-Year Seminar Posters (COE 202)

The social issue addressed by CCSN is the prevalence of hunger for homeless, families, and elderly.

Tinh Do Tu Vien Temple, Brandon Lu

Second-Year Seminar Posters (COE 202)

The purpose of Tinh Do Tu Vien Temple is not just to help around the community but to help other communities as well.

Girls On The Run, Reyna Ash

Second-Year Seminar Posters (COE 202)

Girls on the Run addresses many different social issues. The biggest ones would be poverty and education. They provide a safe haven and teaching program for young girls who do not have people to turn to or people that care about them.

Fathers’ Caregiving In Fragile Families: Variation By Family Contexts, Gender Ideology, Race And Ethnicity, Rachel Teressa Macfarlane

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, I explore factors that predict fathers’ caregiving for children up to five years old. I study the role of social contexts in fathers’ caregiving trajectories for their young children, including family dynamics and parent’s gender ideology, across ethnoracial groups. I use OLS regressions to investigate how fathers’ early caregiving experiences, their linked-lives with others, and their attitudes about the fatherhood role predict later caregiving for their children, and how those patterns very between families with different ethnoracial backgrounds. I use summed averages of itemized caregiving by fathers, rather than proxy …

Man Vs Car: The Ultimate Clash Designing A Safer Walking Experience For Las Vegas Pedestrians, Jenn Wong

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

The car has become a common weapon of choice for terrorists and others hoping to do harm to unsuspecting pedestrians. There is a pressing need for the development of effective, preventive design strategies to stop vehicular attacks before they cause pedestrian fatalities. Vehicular violence has broader consequences beyond the pedestrians directly involved in specific incidents. The fear created by vehicular attacks undermines public trust and unity, resulting in harm that is less obvious than the immediate casualties, but is just as damaging. Is it possible to design the fear away? Do street safety devices enhance pedestrians feelings of safety?

& One Night The World Will Have Changed, Hanna Andrews

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

& One Night the World Will Have Changed is a collection of poems largely concerned with thresholds—what does one have to reconcile when standing at a precipice, when grappling with a crisis of faith, and how does one begin again? The collection is marked by three distinct sections: the first section of poems considers the effects of a devastating storm along with the emotional upheaval of abandonment (both the act of having been left, and then later, of leaving behind one life for a different one.) The second section is a series of prose poems that narrate the aftermath in …

Contesting And Constructing Gender, Sexuality, And Identity In Women's Roller Derby, Suzanne Becker

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation project I use the case of women’s roller derby to examine gender resistance in spaces produced and dominated by women. I examine the challenges and strategies roller derby participants deploy in resistance to the gender binary and its gender mandates, and whether or not these strategies and cultural expressions are oppositional or political. Through a combination of ethnography, participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of web and print media on roller derby, I explain how women’s roller derby participants construct identity, varying types of femininities, and engage in forms of cultural resistance through their sport. I analyze the …

Using Pictorial Action Instructions To Train Low-Literacy Adults To Construct A Basic Humanitarian Engineering Project, Kathleen Paco Cadman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often disproportionately faced with environmental hazards, which can cause adverse health outcomes. Although humanitarian engineering projects have been created to mitigate these hazards, LMICs are also frequently impacted by literacy deficits, creating a barrier in training low-literacy individuals to construct these projects. The purpose of this dissertation was to develop, refine, and test the usability of pictorial action instructions (PAI) in training low-literacy individuals to construct a humanitarian engineering project. A concept analysis was completed, including the creation of an operational definition, for “lay worker health literacy.” This analysis and definition set a foundation …

Mixing The Business Of Pleasure: How Mixing Shaped The Labor And Narratives Of Female Entertainers In Mid-Twentieth Century America, Evan Maryl Casey

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In mid-twentieth century America, the practice of mixing – the required visibility of performers outside of their time on stage for an economic purpose – cut across the various genres of sexualized female labor, from showgirls to exotic dancers and the professional women who occupied the space between. Mixing required performers socialize with patrons, encouraging them to buy drinks and was expected of a wide variety of female professionals in the decades following the Second World War, including burlesque performers, gogo dancers, exotic dancers, and showgirls, hostesses, waitresses, and B-girls. Women’s bodies have historically been a part of a commercialized …

Media Portrayals Of Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Cars2 And Frame Analysis Of The Sesame Street Character Julia, Sallyann Ficarrotta

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Media Portrayals of Autism Spectrum Disorder: A CARS2 and frame analysis of the Sesame Street character Julia Media portrayals of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are grossly exaggerated and inaccurate. Julia, a Muppet with ASD, is not depicted as having high-functioning autism, but most of the exaggerated portrayals depicted in movies and television are of a person on that end of the spectrum. The current study, a quantitative content analysis of Julia from Sesame Street, draws from framing theory, most importantly stigmatizing cues, and utilizes the professional assessment tool, the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS2). The tool was used to rate …

Money Matters: Exploring The Financial Resources For Sports Medicine Programs In Public And Private Secondary Schools--A Qualitative Study, Natalie Mercedes Aviles Flores

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Context: Institutional funding and strained school budgets are a barrier to placing certified athletic trainers (ATCs) in secondary schools. The size and location of a school appear to be coinciding limitations (Mazerolle et al, 2015), but what is lacking in the literature is an

evaluation of how schools manage to provide adequate medical coverage. Resources are available, but there is question as to whether these schools consider or even utilize them.

Objective: The aim of this qualitative study is to explore the funding techniques and budget sources of high school athletic training clinics from the perspective of both private and …

Waiting For Nothing, Jiwoong Hyun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In fulfillment of my MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction), I have written a thesis in the form of a novel entitled Waiting For Nothing.

In brief, my novel is about young people struggling to define their existence--or perceive a meaningful trajectory--within the troubled, detached-seeming technological present. Structurally speaking, it follows Tom, a young college graduate, who suffers from existential malaise and feels at a loss for what to do with his life. He drifts through vague, short-lived relationships with others, chooses to have only a few friends, spends a lot of time on the internet and its subcultures, and generally …

Reimagining High School Writing: A Multi-Case Examination Of The Impact Of External Pressures On High School Writing Contexts, Nicole Elizabeth Klimow

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research concerning teachers’ pedagogical beliefs shows a strong relationship between planning and instruction; however, the sources of pedagogical beliefs have not been researched thoroughly. Because teachers bring their histories and experiences to their interactions with students, their pedagogical beliefs may also be present in their instruction, mediating the relationship between knowledge (planning) and action (writing instruction). Framed by Sociocultural Theory (SCT), the purpose of this qualitative, multi-site, multi-case case study was first to understand teachers’ expectations for teaching writing based on their beliefs about learning. A secondary intent was to examine ways in which high school English teachers’ learning expectations …

Power And Authority Of Royal Queen Mothers: Juxtaposing The French Queen Regent And The Ottoman Validé Sultan During The Early Modern Period, Reneé N. Langlois

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Women and their relationship to sovereignty, during the early modern era has become a rapidly growing topic, given that during this period an unprecedented number of women rose to high positions of power. This paper aims to compare the lives of the queen regents in France with their counterparts, the validé sultans in the Ottoman Empire, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when both groups of royal women acquired substantial power. Although these women were prohibited from ruling in their own right, the paper explores the ways in which queen regents and validé sultans used both official …

Investigating The Role Of Liminality In The Cultural Transition Of The Late Eighth Millennium Bc On Cyprus, Levi Keach

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Near East has the earliest and best documented Neolithic in the world. However, most research attention has focused on the mainland. The spread of the Neolithic to the adjacent Mediterranean islands was once considered relatively late. The last three decades of research has changed this perception, demonstrating that the spread of the Neolithic to Cyprus was contemporary with its continental development.

This work addresses the change between the archeologically defined cultures of the Cypro-Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (Cypro-PPNB) and the Khirokitian Culture (KC) on the island of Cyprus between the 9th and 6th millennia cal BC. The purpose of this …

School Bullying: Exploring Juvenile Victimization Trends With The Ncvs School Crime Supplement (Ncvs-Scs), Matthew Morris Le Claire

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bullying is broadly defined as the act of repeatedly exercising superior strength or social capital to intimidate an individual or group and is enacted by different modes. This research is the first to distinguish between traditional modes (direct and indirect bullying) and contemporary modes (cyberbullying) of bully victimization using the National Crime Victimization Survey’s School Crime Supplement (NCVS-SCS). While establishing new conceptual criterias for defining bullying modes, the study explores the relationship between demographic variables (i.e., agre, gender, and race), socioeconomic disadvantage (i.e., hate words present on school premises, households earning less than $25,000 per year, perceptions of controlled substance …

The Importance Of Cultural Competence: The Defining Characteristic Separating Veteran Treatment Courts From Other Specialized Dockets, Kyle Nathan Rodgers

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The current study provides a systematic review of veteran treatment court research with two main purposes in mind. The first is to establish whether and how the courts adhere to current evidence-based best practices, and if such practices differ from other specialty court programs. The second is to establish whether and how the concepts of “moral injury” and “posttraumatic growth” are incorporated in current veteran treatment court research and court practices, as an indicator of the cultural competency of both researchers and practitioners. This is a groundbreaking study that expands current research on moral injury and posttraumatic growth from the …

Cohousing Design Strategies For Active Aging, Marisela Thompson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Objective:

Evaluate and identify approaches to the physical design, with emphasis on the interior design, of a cohousing model can be adapted to support the physical, cognitive and social health aspects of active aging.

Background:

Housing models evolve with the needs of society. Today, the societal practice of living in traditional nuclear-family based housing is challenged by the lack of financial resources(Blanchard 2017) and the need to care for an aging population. This project attempts to identify a housing model that promotes multigenerational co-housing as a means to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of the elder population.

One factor …

Mate Preferences Among Single Mothers, Carol Yvette Franco

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As individuals become parents, they shift time and energy towards parenting to ensure the survival and wellbeing of their offspring. However, it is not uncommon for a romantic partnership between parents to dissolve, which may lead a single mother to pursue a new partner in the future. But how does having a dependent child influence whom she will choose for her new partner? And how will resource availability and assistance from family influence the decisions she makes? A significant amount of research has been conducted on female mate preferences in the United States and elsewhere, yet little is specifically focused …

“Everyone Wants That Ring, And I Have It”: A Content Analysis Of Identity Expressions From Female Castmembers On The Reality Television Series Wags (Wives And Girlfriends Of Sports Stars), Kaitlyn Millican

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Identity formation has been conceptualized in communication studies, but holds reduced presence as applied to contemporary cases involving the reality documentary television genre. This study investigates identity formation by examining the reality television series WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends of Sports Stars). This study utilized social identity theory as a lens through which an examination of how female partners of professional sports stars manage identity via the social medium platform of Twitter, with consideration to whether the identity management reinforces or negates identities portrayed on WAGs. In order to examine if the identity management reinforces or negates identities portrayed on WAGs, …

Assessing The Potential For A Backfire Effect On Citizen Perceptions: A Test Of Hot Spot Policing In Las Vegas, Steven Andrew Pace

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Objects: In this dissertation, I explore whether the use of motorized police saturation patrol in high crime neighborhoods negatively impacts citizen perceptions of police activity, opinions about the police, and perceived safety level. This research focuses on evaluating

whether or not any backfire effects were attributed to the use of the hot spot policing tactic. Methods: I report on survey data from the Smart Policing Initiative (SPI), which entailed face-to face interviews in 12 hot spot neighborhoods (n=1,005) (6 paired locations) as part of an evaluation from the SPI on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Mobile Crime Saturation Team. …

Combining Community-Engaged Research With Group Model Building To Address Racial Disparities In Breast Cancer Mortality And Treatment, Faustine Williams, Graham Colditz, Peter Hovamd, Sarah Gehlert

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Although patterns of African American and white women breast cancer incidence and mortality in St. Louis, Missouri is consistent with those seen elsewhere in the United States, rates vary greatly across zip codes within the city of St. Louis. North St. Louis, whose neighborhoods are primarily African American, exhibits rates of breast cancer mortality that are among the highest in the city and higher than the state as a whole. Based on information that up to 50% of women in North St. Louis with a suspicious diagnosis of breast cancer never enter treatment, we conducted three 2-hour group model building …

Household Financial Assets Inequity And Health Disparities Among Young Adults: Evidence From The National Longitudinal Study Of Adolescent To Adult Health, Shiyou Wu, Xiafei Wang, Qi Wu, Kathleen Mullan Harris

Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice

Introduction: Research has established a strong relationship between financial resources and health outcomes. Yet, little is known about the effects of assets disparities on health outcomes, especially during the critical period when adolescents transition to adults.

Methods: Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 10,861), this study investigated the relationships between three household total assets value groups (low, moderate, and high assets) and three net worth groups (negative, neutral, and positive) on young adults’ general health, obese, and depression.

Results: Both assets and debts were related to young adults’ health status, …

The Las Vegas Rescue Mission, Rhealyn Boquiren

Second-Year Seminar Posters (COE 202)

Currently, the LVRM, a nonprofit Christian organization, instills hope for those in need by providing shelter, food, and addiction recovery.

Golden Arm: A Probabilistic Study Of Dice Control In Craps, Donald R. Smith, Robert Scott Iii

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

This paper calculates how much control a craps shooter must possess on dice outcomes to eliminate the house advantage. A golden arm is someone who has dice control (or a rhythm roller or dice influencer). There are various strategies for dice control in craps. We discuss several possibilities of dice control that would result in several different mathematical models of control. We do not assert whether dice control is possible or not (there is a lack of published evidence). However, after studying casino-legal methods described by dice-control advocates, we can see only one realistic mathematical model that describes the resulting …