Digital Commons Network^™

Deposition Of Abp. John C. Wester, Hall & Monagle, Llc

Other Depositions

No abstract provided.

Exploring Clinically Useful Definitions Of Treatment Success For Individuals With Alcohol Use Disorder, Megan Kirouac

Psychology ETDs

Given the widespread costs associated with alcohol use disorder (AUD; World Health Organization, 2011), it is unsurprising that many treatments exist for AUD. Moreover, many treatments have been rigorously studied via experimental research designs. In such research, treatment success has been defined predominantly as abstinence from alcohol or, more recently, no heavy drinking days. Consumption-based definitions of treatment success, rather than alternative non-consumption based definitions, have dominated in the field for at least two reasons. First, there are multiple measures of similar non-consumption constructs (e.g., quality of life, psychosocial functioning), and very little research has been conducted to direct researchers …

Analyzing Social Construction Of Knowledge And Social Networks In Online Discussion Forums In Spanish, David R. Gomez

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

This mixed methods research project examined social construction of knowledge and social networks in three non-structured student centered online discussion forums, which were part of a graduate online course on web conferencing in Spanish within the Mexican sociocultural context. The purpose of the study was to identify interaction patterns among twenty-one graduate students by analyzing discussion forum posts, measuring student centrality, and generating social network diagrams in order to explain the characteristics of posts and social networks that may contribute to social construction of knowledge.

The researcher used a sequential approach, starting with the application of an interaction analysis model …

The Effects Of Prenatal Alcohol Exposure On The Resting State Functional Brain Connectivity In A Sample Of Individuals With Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, Carlos I. Rodriguez

Psychology ETDs

It is well established that alcohol exposure during prenatal development can lead to a heterogeneous and wide ranging set of morphological and neurobehavioral deficits that are collectively known as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs). Previous neuroimaging research conducted on individuals with FASD has primarily employed graph-theoretical based analysis methods on functional imaging data to elucidate the impact of prenatal alcohol on brain connectivity. This study applied a widely used computational algorithm, group independent components analysis (gICA), to extract coherent sets of voxels that were correlated with one another as a measure of functional network connectivity (FNC) in a sample of …

Teaching Problem Solving Therapy To Alleviate Depression And Anxiety: A Focus On Caregivers For Intellectually Disabled Adults Who Reside In A Community Setting, Jeanine Forsythe Ms

Individual, Family, and Community Education ETDs

Eighty six professional caregivers of adults with mild intellectual disabilities who reside in community group home settings were recruited for this quantitative study on the application of Problem Solving Therapy in the Albuquerque, NM area. Problem Solving Therapy is often used to alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety for caregivers and to improve their quality of life as a professional caregiver. The experimental group were taught a five week program on Problem Solving Therapy. Anxiety, depression and quality of life as a caregiver were measured via pre and post testing using the Kessler 10 (K10) Psychological Distress Scale and the …

Decolonial Gestures Of Andean Bilingual College Students Promoting Quechua: Community-Based Participatory Research With Photovoice, Yuliana H. Kenfield

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Andean college students in Cusco, Peru, struggle to overcome discrimination against bilingualism during their pursuit of higher education. To examine this situation and possibilities for change, I employed a participatory method, photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1994) within a community-based participatory research framework, to facilitate Quechua-Spanish bilingual college students’ exploration of Quechuan practices in their university. Participatory research methodology promoted critical dialogues to challenge ideologies that have obstructed the revitalization, maintenance, development of the Quechua language in higher education. Although university policies in Cusco formally promote inclusion of indigenous knowledge and practices, bilingual Spanish-Quechua practices on campus have remained largely symbolic. …

A Path To Alignment, Gregory Richard Arnold

Linguistics ETDs

What is really needed to make a machine into a verisimilitude of a language using human? Clearly there are holes in human communication, missing linguistic forms, and yet we manage to convey meaning. The under-determinacy of language seems to play an integral part in the adaptive system that all humans possess for perceiving, processing and producing language with shared semantic value. We invent symbols that index the missing contextual elements, allowing partial production of linguistic units. A machine would require the same abilities of indexicality and inventiveness. In this pilot study, I attempt to understand how semantic values shift and …

Effects Of Exposure To Violence On Health In Iraq Between 2006-2007, Fatemeh Shahandeh

Economics ETDs

Iraq has experienced protracted years of war in last two decades. These prolonged years of war in Iraq manifested conflict and violence, degeneration of economic conditions and a serious breakdown of public health services. Deaths, injury and acts of violence such as kidnapping, threat and witnessing heavy casualties are only a few examples of events that Iraqi people experienced during war times. Conflict can result in lasting and profound consequences for the health of the Iraq population. The burden of the communicable, non-communicable disease and mental illnesses in war zone areas is rising rapidly and becoming a major challenge to …

Revealing Silences: The Representation Of Black Identities In Hispanic Afro-Caribbean Autobiographical And Biographical Writing, Bryn Campbell

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This project explores how the historical contexts of the Hispanic Caribbean, including the regions of the Circum-Caribbean and the Caribbean Diasporas in the United States, have sustained dominant racial and nationalist ideologies that continue to silence or negate the identity of Afro-Caribbean subjects in national letters. My research focuses on the autobiographical and biographical writing of four Hispanic Afro-Caribbean men: Autobiografía de un esclavo (1840) by Juan Francisco Manzano¾originally published and translated to English in 1840 by Richard R. Madden¾ Klabel (2002) by Víctor Virgilio López García, Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, and Las criadas de la …

Conceptual Structures Of Vietnamese Emotions, Hien T. Tran

Linguistics ETDs

ABSTRACT

This dissertation presents a comparative study of the metaphoric and metonymic systems underlying the conceptualizations of two emotions, anger and sadness, in Vietnamese, American English, and Chinese. The analytic and theoretical approach is based on previous studies by Lakoff and Kövecses (1987), Kövecses (1988), Barcelona (1986), King (1989) and Yu (1995). The research presented here on emotion concepts reveals cultural variation and potential universals in the conceptualization of emotions. These results support the “Cultural Embodied Prototype” view proposed by Kövecses (2004:14) which proposes that conceptualizations of human emotions is motivated by both physiological embodied experiences (physiological embodiment) and the …

Ethnic And Racial Group Differences In Attitudes Towards Undocumented Latino Immigrants, Juan M. Pena

Psychology ETDs

Tensions towards Latino immigrants in the United States have been a growing concern. As the largest ethnic/racial and immigrant group, Latinos/Hispanics often experience discrimination from majority groups. Perceived discrimination has been linked to worse mental and health outcomes among ethnic minority groups. Measures of implicit and explicit attitudes have been used to identify positive and negative attitudes towards Latinos. Intercultural sensitivity, the ability to understand and appreciate different cultures, is theorized to be linked to implicit and explicit attitudes towards undocumented Latino immigrants. Two-hundred eighty-eight college students, 18 years of age or older (M = 21, SD = 5) completed …

Implicit And Explicit Attitudes Toward Physical Appearance Among Recurrent And Non-Binge Eating College Women, Mindy L. Mcentee

Psychology ETDs

Research has found that among individuals who binge eat, overvaluation of body weight/shape and internalization of a thin ideal are associated with higher levels of distress and functional impairment. These findings suggest implicit attitudes and beliefs may play an important role in understanding the complex relations between one’s cognitions and subsequent eating behavior; however, much of the research on binge eating has relied on explicit self-report measures which may not accurately reflect the way individuals automatically process body weight/shape information or the meaning one has associated with these characteristics. The present study sought to address this gap in the literature …

Neurobehavioral Signatures In Children-Victim Of Bullying, Isabel Solis

Psychology ETDs

Experiencing bullying victimization can lead to detrimental damage to a child’s life potential, reduced long-term contributions to society, and in severe cases, to suicide or desperate acts of defensive aggression, such as school shootings. The current study aimed to examine risk factors that may increase the vulnerability of a child to become a target of bullying victimization and the related consequences of victimization, using rigorous neuropsychological and EEG measures. The end-goal is to translate these findings into a program of preventive intervention increasing the child’s resilience and improving social culture among youth in the academic environment. We propose a two-component …

Women's Response Performance In Sexually Risky Situations: Associations With Sexual Victimization History, Alcohol Use, Psychopathology, And Sexual Attitudes, Kristen N. Vitek

Psychology ETDs

This study evaluated the effects of sexual victimization history, alcohol use, psychopathology, and sexual attitudes on the effectiveness of women’s response performance in hypothetical social situations depicting risk for sexual victimization. Two hundred and fifty undergraduate women first listened to audiotaped descriptions of the hypothetical social situations. They then were given a response to each situation deemed in prior work by experts in the sexual victimization field to be effective at reducing victimization risk and asked to provide each response verbally while they were being videotaped. Participants then completed measures assessing prior victimization history, alcohol use, psychopathology, and sexual attitudes. …

Niemann-Pick C1, Its Connection To Obesity, And Its Impact On Human Evolution, Joseph Joshua Castillo

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Niemann-Pick type-C disease is a rare autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disease that classically presents in the first decade, leading to ataxia, vertical-gaze palsy, loss of communication skills, epileptic seizures, and eventually death. The stark reality about NPC disease underlines the important role the NPC1 protein plays in whole-body lipid homeostasis. It is no surprise, then, that the NPC1 gene has been associated with other diseases as well, such as obesity, diabetes, and Ebola virus infection. In this manuscript, a connection will be made that intertwines genetics, biochemical and molecular mechanisms, physiology, and evolutionary pressures, and will explain how a gene, discovered …

Drinking Norms And College Student Alcohol Outcomes: Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Kylee Hagler

Psychology ETDs

Despite efforts to reduce problematic alcohol use on college campuses, students continue to drink heavily and experience alcohol-related consequences (e.g., Hingson, Zha, & Smyth, 2017.) Descriptive/injunctive norms positively relate to college students’ own alcohol use. Despite substantial research, there have been few efforts to statistically synthesize these data. The present study was a correlation-based, random-effects meta-analysis. Articles published on drinking norms and alcohol outcomes published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 2003 and 2015 were identified, coded, and subjected to meta-analytic integration. There was an overall medium, positive association found between descriptive norms and college student alcohol behaviors (rw = 0.36). …

Analyzing The Medical Definition Of Death In Criminal Homicide Prosecution, Mariah Wood

Nursing ETDs

I investigated the use of the medical definition of human death in the criminal justice system and the impact of this definition on the prosecution of criminal homicide. The units of design for this research were two violent crimes cases investigated by the Homicide Unit of the Albuquerque Police Department. Data was collected from officer interviews, case files, Office of the Medical Investigator reports, media and social media.

I identified the themes of pursuit of justice, frustration, and family from the collected data. Key findings include that the medical definition of human death causes confusion and delay in the criminal …

Pre-Boomer Students On Campus: An Exploratory Study Of How Students Born Before 1946 Experience The Youth-Oriented Campus Culture At Unm, Elinor Sue Coates Phd

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

Older learners have been studied thoroughly, except for those born before 1946, preceding the post-war "population bulge" (Carlson, 2008; Laditka, Fischer, Laditka, & Segal, 2004; Verstynen, 2011). Most such studies define "older" as over 25 or over 40, and fail to separate the subject group from those who came later. Defining a group by numerical age is problematic because it changes every year and soon omits the group's defining life experiences (Pilcher, 1994), which for this group include the Great Depression, World War II, the polio epidemic, and life before television. To address that gap this critical ethnography explored the …

Building A Call To Action: Social Action In Networks Of Practice, Damien M. Sánchez

Organization, Information and Learning Sciences ETDs

The three research papers completed as part of this dissertation explore how people contributing to #BlackLivesMatter build knowledge, using social construction of knowledge (SCK), and what they are building knowledge about, using critical consciousness, because understanding how these processes play out on Twitter provides a way for others to understand this social movement. Paper 1 describes a new methodological approach to combining social network analysis (SNA) and social learning analytics to assess SCK. The sequential mixed method design begins by conducting a content analysis according to the Interaction Analysis Model (IAM). The results of the content analysis yield descriptive data …

Religiosity/Spirituality And Cancer Risk Assessment For Hereditary Breast And Ovarian Cancer: Latina And Non-Latina Women In New Mexico, Belinda Vicuna Tellez

Psychology ETDs

Introduction: Although cancer risk assessment for high-risk individuals and families can offer life-saving information and options for cancer risk management, Latinas have historically underutilized cancer prevention services. Much needed is a better understanding of what encourages and discourages engagement in cancer risk assessment services among Latino populations. Religiosity/spirituality is potentially relevant to such engagement given religion has often been a central coping resource for Latina cancer survivors.

Aim: This study explored the potential impact of religiosity/spirituality and psychological processes on how Latinas and non-Latinas approach decisions regarding preventative health behaviors.

Methods: As a small subset of a larger research project, …

Laterality In The Power Five And Group Of Five Conferences In Women's College Softball, Jon C. Nachtigal

Health, Exercise, and Sports Sciences ETDs

Females in sport are under-represented in data and analysis when compared to their male counterparts. This disparity also applies to women’s softball in comparison to men’s baseball. To help fill this gap, this study evaluated the extent and impact of laterality in women’s college softball’s Power Five and Group of Five conferences from 2015-2017.

This study focused on the extent of a left-sided lateral preference in women’s college softball, possible interactions between throwing hand and batting preference, to what extent the platoon effect exists in the sport, and the extent of positional bias in the sport. As one of the …

A Multi-Level Study Of Clearance: The Role Of Gender, Jenna Dole

Sociology ETDs

Objective. To examine the role that gender plays in the clearance of a reported criminal incident, and whether it varies across places. Methods. Using multi-level logistic regressions, data from the 2014 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), 2010 Census data, 2013 Law Enforcement Management Statistics, and the 2010 Municipal Yearbook are used to examine the effects of a victim’s sex on crime clearance. Results. Women are initially advantaged in clearance before controlling for any evidentiary factors. However, most of the relationship is explained away when controlling for the relationship between the victim and the offender. Women are more likely to be …

American Indian Student Motivation At A Tribal College, Rebecca L. Izzo

Individual, Family, and Community Education ETDs

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between motivational characteristics of American Indian college students attending a tribal college. The Inventory of School Motivation (ISM) was utilized to identify motivational constructs. The literature in general continues to portray American Indian students as the lowest academically achieving subgroup as well as having a lack of persistence and high dropout rate in higher education. This study identified areas that support motivation to attend college, which then can be shared with the tribal college to develop programs and innovations to recruit and sustain American Indian students in education, as well as …

Deposition Of Fr. John Daniel, Hall & Monagle, Llc

Other Depositions

No abstract provided.

Psychological Factors And The Relation Between Neighborhood Conditions And Latino Health: A Mixed Methods Study, Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa

Psychology ETDs

Latinos, the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the US, face multiple health inequities including higher rates morbidity and mortality. Despite the importance of context and the wide range of stressors faced by this population, the majority of the literature on Latino and immigrant health concentrates on issues related to cultural adaptation processes. Using a socialdeterminants of health framework, the present convergent mixed methods study investigated the relation between neighborhood conditions and Latino health with a psychological lens. A total of 361 Latino residents of Bernalillo County, the largest county in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were recruited to complete a series of …

A Case Study Of The Characteristics For Successful First Time Passing Of The National Physical Therapy Exam In The University Of New Mexico Doctor Of Physical Therapy 2012-2017 Cohorts, Beth-Anne Moody Jones

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Abstract

A Case Study of the Characteristics for Successful First Time Passing of

the National Physical Therapy Exam in

The University of New Mexico Doctor of Physical Therapy 2012-2017 Cohorts

Name:

Beth Moody Jones

Degrees:

B.S., Physical Therapy, University of Vermont, 1982

M.S., Orthopedic Physcial Therapy,Old Dominion University, 1994

D.P.T., A.T.Still University of Health Sciences, 2004

Ed.D., University of New Mexico, 2018

Not passing the National Physical Therapy Exam (NPTE) has significant consequences. If a student does not pass the NPTE on the first attempt they can retake the examination, however a student may only take the examination a maximum …

Essays In The Social Determinants Of Health And Public Health Policy, Glen Vincent Mcdermott

Economics ETDs

There is broad-based qualitative evidence arguing that stress is a public health concern. In the search for causality however, economists investigating public health concerns are often limited to a narrow subset of socio-economic status (SES) factors which are not well suited to the evaluation of stress/health effects. As a result, economists have a difficult time answering the “how” and “why” questions which emerge from the well-respected SES/health gradient. This dissertation focuses on a subset of stressors credibly affiliated with SES to address two pathways underling the established SES/Health gradient. Chapter 2 uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to test …

Understanding And Modifying Health Behaviors, Kristina N. Piorkowski

Economics ETDs

This dissertation explores two drivers behind the spread of non-communicable diseases – sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and youth tobacco use – in order to improve policies tailored to mitigate these behaviors. Chapter 2 uses primary survey data to estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for a tax on sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) in New Mexico. Traditional contingent valuation regression methods were reformulated as a three-equation system. Results indicate that respondents who have healthier eating habits have statistically significantly higher preferences for SSB taxes. The estimated individual median WTP 95% confidence interval was 0.002-0.961 pennies-per-ounce. Chapter 3 continues the exploration into SSB …

Development Of The Pain Response Style Inventory: A New Measure For Examining Ambivalence Toward Engaging In Behavioral Treatments For Chronic Pain, Robert Bailey

Psychology ETDs

Over the previous half-century, the framework for chronic pain management has expanded beyond the biomedical perspective to include psychosocial treatments that fall under the cognitive-behavioral tradition. Chronic pain patients, however, tend to endorse the biomedical model, perceiving pain as a problem that requires medical interventions. Enhancing motivation to engage in cognitive-behavioral treatment has therefore been a major theoretical focus in the research literature, much of which has been informed by Motivational Interviewing (MI) and the Transtheoretical Model. At present, however, there is a paucity of empirical evidence supporting motivational enhancement in this context. Furthermore, the research literature has largely overlooked …

Evaluation Of A Rolling Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention Group In A Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Setting: Short-Term Effectiveness And Processes Of Change, Corey Roos

Psychology ETDs

Background: Relapse following treatment is common among individuals with substance use disorder (SUD) and effective treatments that support long-term recovery are needed. Mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP; Bowen, Chawla, & Marlatt, 2011) is a promising intervention, yet there is a lack of evidence on how MBRP can be effectively disseminated and adapted for different real-world treatment settings. MBRP has most commonly been delivered as a closed-cohort group among individuals receiving aftercare treatment. It is unclear whether MBRP can be effectively delivered as a rolling admission group and among individuals at earlier stages in the recovery process. Additionally, there is a need …