Digital Commons Network^™

Knowledge-Aware Assessment Of Severity Of Suicide Risk For Early Intervention, Manas Gaur, Amanuel Alambo, Joy Prakash Sain, Ugur Kursuncu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Amit Sheth, Randon S. Welton, Jyotishman Pathak

Publications

Mental health illness such as depression is a significant risk factor for suicide ideation, behaviors, and attempts. A report by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that 80% of the patients suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have suicidal behavior, 5-10% of whom commit suicide. While multiple initiatives have been developed and implemented for suicide prevention, a key challenge has been the social stigma associated with mental disorders, which deters patients from seeking help or sharing their experiences directly with others including clinicians. This is particularly true for teenagers and younger adults where suicide is the second …

School Development In Culturally Diverse U.S. Schools: Balancing Evidence-Based Policies And Education Values, Rose Ylimaki, Lynnette Brunderman

Faculty Publications

This article problematizes evidence-based policies in the USA, using Dewey’s (1916) education theory and findings from a school development project in 71 culturally diverse Arizona schools. The study asked three questions: (1) How do formal and informal school leaders work in teams to mediate between evidence-based policy requirements at federal, state, and district levels and the needs of culturally diverse students? (2) What leadership team practices contribute to school development as measured by improved student outcomes in school letter grades? (3) What values from evidence-based policies and democratic education are evident in effective school development? Evaluation methods featured qualitative interviews …

Absolutist Thinking And Depression, Katherine Cohen

Senior Theses

A key characteristic of depression is the presence of cognitive biases (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). This study added to the growing literature examining absolutist thinking as a potential cognitive bias associated with depression. We used data from a survey conducted at the University of South Carolina Columbia campus which included 116 students to compare the use of absolutist words in participants’ writing with their depressive symptomatology. We further compared the difference in the use of absolutist words in participants’ responses about success versus their responses about failure. Results revealed that there was not a significant relationship between BDI scores ( …

Orthographic And Phonological Processing In Beginning Readers, Emily Fisher

Senior Theses

In order to learn to “sound out” new words, children must have phonological awareness, the ability to reflect on and manipulate the sounds in words. However, in skilled readers, performance on phonological awareness tasks is influenced by orthographic awareness, the awareness of spelling patterns and constraints. Both orthographic and phonological awareness are essential to reading, however, until recently the role of orthographic knowledge in phonological awareness has not been thoroughly investigated in beginning readers. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between orthographic and phonological knowledge in beginning readers and established a proof of concept for the use of …

The Southern American Belle: History, Evolution, And Perceptions In Contemporary Culture, Hannah B. Vickery

Senior Theses

This research study seeks to examine the concept of the southern belle and to provide greater insight into how the southern belle is perceived by those today as a means of describing contemporary southern womanhood and culture. Chapter 1 traces the history of the southern belle from its pre-Civil War roots, through the turmoil of the Civil War, and up through post-war Reconstruction and beyond, thereby situating the concept of the southern belle within the context of southern history. Utilizing a socio-linguistic approach, Chapter 2 explains the research methodology of this study where two group interviews were conducted and where …

A Spatial Text Analysis Of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Michael H. Beasley

Senior Theses

Using a technique called “distant reading”, which aggregates and analyzes large amounts of data with computational models that can be used to understand literature and find insights or patterns that may otherwise be undetectable, this paper seeks to understand the system of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional world of Middle-earth through a statistical approach. In an attempt to provide an entirely different view on his work, this paper examines semantic aspects of Tolkien’s corpus and how they complement the narrative structure, with particular emphasis on the topographic landscape and the journeys of specific characters through the space of Middle-earth itself.

Bring In The Culture To The Science Classroom ; Bring In The Science Classroom To The Culture, Ying-Chen Lin

Senior Theses

Middle school science has a stigma of being a boring subject area from the student’s perspectives due to the spoon-fed characteristics and the lack of real-world connections in the curriculum design. The low-level student engagement and motivation in the science classroom often contribute to students’ low academic achievement, especially those who have been underserved in the educational system. In addition, with a view to addressing the increasing diversity in the classroom, teachers are encouraged to practice culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in the lessons so they can reach every student and make the class learning experience more meaningful and relevant to …

Vietnamese Family Caregivers’ Adjustment Process To Their Caregiving Roles For Family Members With Dementia, Trang Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the psychological process that Vietnamese family members go through to adjust to the caregiving role for their relatives with dementia. Adopting constructivist grounded theory, 30 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews, including 10 follow-up interviews, were conducted with 20 Vietnamese primary family caregivers of relatives with dementia from the National Geriatric Hospital in Vietnam. The study results reveal that Vietnamese family caregivers held limited understanding of dementia. They used a mixed explanatory model, combining both folk (e.g., dementia as normal aging) and biomedical approaches (e.g., dementia as a brain-related disease) to explain causes of dementia. Family cohesion and responsibility are …

The Interaction Of Individual Working Memory Capacity With Cognitive Linguistics-Based And Translation-Based Instructional Treatments During The Acquisition Of Polysemous L2 Spanish Spatial Prepositions, Joseph F. Letexier

Theses and Dissertations

The present study investigated three areas in SLA related to the acquisition of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions. These three areas were (1) the effect of instructional method on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions, (2) the effect of working memory capacity on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions, and (3) the effects resulting from the interaction of working memory capacity with instructional method on the acquisition of productive knowledge of polysemous L2 Spanish spatial prepositions. The target learners were adult L1 English speakers 18 years of age or over …

Studying The Voice Of Mo Yan And Howard Goldblatt: Zhang Kou In The Garlic Ballads, Yiran Yang

Theses and Dissertations

In 2012, a Chinese, Mo Yan 莫言, became the laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the first time in China’s history; this is not because Mo Yan is better than other Chinese writers, or that he follows some Western writers like Gabriel García Márquez, but because he works with better translators, who make his stories captivating for Western readers, than whom his precursors work with. Even though Mo Yan sticks closely to dialect and culture in rural areas in northern China, his translators adjust his writings to an accessible form in another language. In order to understand …

The Word Frequency Effect In English Second Language Students: An Eye Movement Monitoring Study, Chase Alexandria Rathfoot

Senior Theses

Reading has been the subject of hundreds of thousands of studies. Reading is fundamental skill not only to an individual’s education, but to their socialization and an understanding of the behavior is a rapidly expanding area of research. One of the least understood areas of reading behavior can be found is the growing English Second Language (ESL) population – or those who are learning English after demonstrating competence in their native language. As their native language has its own unique set of properties and is presented in its own unique written form, the influence this language has on their reading …

Acquisition Of The English Copula By Arabic Speaking Esl Learners: Evidence For Feature Reassembly, Jenna Steiner

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to identify whether the acquisition of the English copula by Arabic- speaking learners of English provides evidence for a performance or representational- based account of errors. The representational theory tested in this study is the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Mastropavlou, 2007) which proposes that language learners have only partial access to Universal Grammar (UG), making some language structures unacquirable for second language learners. The performance theory tested in this study is Feature Reassembly (Lardiere, 2008), which proposes that the source of errors lies with the mapping of features onto morphology rather inside the core computational component of …

Women’S Writing And The Poetics Of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740, Rachel Mann

Theses and Dissertations

Women’s Writing and the Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740 probes the porous boundary between science and literature, revealing that the methodologies undergirding scientific experimentation were developed communally and through a confluence of interdisciplinary and cultural concerns. Ultimately, it shows that our contemporary understanding of the natural world and the scientific method have a history that is largely one of fragments. Secondly, and more importantly, it demonstrates the value of reading imaginative writing alongside scientific developments of the day.

Focusing on women’s imaginative writing in particular reveals the power and limits that ostensibly liminal voices have. As such, Women’s Writing and …

Creating A Place: Mulberry Site (38ke12) Interpretation And Exhibition, Abigail Geedy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interprets the place and archaeological collections of the Mulberry site (38KE12) through a community-focused lens and applies that interpretation into text for a museum exhibition. Mulberry is a multi-mound Mississippian town in central South Carolina that was likely inhabited by ancestral Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Muscogee (Creek), and/or Catawba Indian Nation peoples. Utilizing entanglement, place-making studies, and Indigenous worldview studies as grounding theory, oral histories and ethnographies are applied to the physical landscape and artifactual remains of the site in an effort to understand the ways that people interacted with objects and the landscape to create meaning-laden …

Tool Migration: A Framework To Study The Cross-Disciplinary Use Of Mathematical Constructs In Science, Chia-Hua Lin

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the scientific practice in which a mathematical construct that was originally developed to study a particular subject matter subsequently used in other disciplines or sub-disciplines for a different subject matter, a phenomenon that I call ‘tool migration.’ I argue that tool migration can be ‘epistemically risky.’ Specifically, uprooting a research tool from one disciplinary context and re-situating it for use in another can change how the tool is applied; whatever has made the tool useful and reliable in the first place may not have stayed the same in the new context. Using the migrations of …

Bringing Culture Into The Classroom: The Impact Of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy On Student Engagement And Self-Efficacy In Social Studies, Siddeeqah K. Cruse

Theses and Dissertations

The presence of the achievement gap has plagued our education system for decades. One of the most astonishing trends has resulted in the racial achievement gap as White students drastically outperform minority groups with African American males being the most affected population. Educators have studied and implemented Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) to increase the achievement of African American males. CRP contends that all students are capable of learning and should be held to high expectations while using students’ culture and interests to drive instruction. This action research study examines the impact of culturally relevant teaching on the self-efficacy and engagement …

Role Of Resources For Care In Improving Care Behaviors, Children’S Nutritional Status And Early Childhood Development In Low- And Middle-Income Countries, Sulochana Basnet

Theses and Dissertations

Poor child growth and suboptimal early childhood development are global health problems. Provision of appropriate care may help to achieve optimum child growth and development. Maternal resources for care such as education, knowledge, health, autonomy, reasonable workload, and social support may be needed to provide appropriate care behaviors, and improve children’s nutritional status, and early childhood development. The overall goal of this research was to understand the role of resources for care in improving care behaviors, child nutritional status, and early childhood development. The baseline Alive & Thrive household surveys from Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Ethiopia were used. We examined the …

Parenting And Child Self-Regulation As Mechanisms For The Relationship Of Household Food Insecurity With Child Dietary Behavior, Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Food insecurity is both a nutritional problem and a stressful life experience of adults and children in households dealing with food shortage. Potential mechanisms of the associations between food insecurity and adverse outcomes in children’s health and development are through parenting and child self-regulation.

Objectives: We investigated parenting and child self-regulation as potential mechanisms for the relationship of food insecurity with child dietary behaviors with two specific aims. Specific aim 1 was to understand how food insecurity and its change over time relate to parenting in early childhood. Specific aim 2 was to understand the relationship of parenting in …

Russian Roots In Southern Soil, James Preston Edge

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the profound influence that 19th-century Russian authors had on 20th-century Southern writers. Recent analyses of the American South have looked to the fluid nature of this region’s borders, often spreading into the Caribbean, South America, and American West, but there has not yet been any book- length study of the ways in which several Russian literary masters, including Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, influenced Southern authors, particularly Ernest Gaines, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. In particular, these Southern authors, in interviews and essays, have repeatedly extolled these Russian figures for their elevation of communal folklore, …

Divine Absence, Divine Presence: The Theological Arguments Of Elizabeth Singer Rowe’S The History Of Joseph, Laura Macgowan

Theses and Dissertations

Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Biblical epic The History of Joseph (1736), which dramatizes the events of Genesis 37-45, stands out in her oeuvre not only generically—it is her only long narrative poem—but because of how rarely God appears as an intervening agent or subject of narrative attention. Rather than highlight God’s splendor by imbuing Scripture with poetic embellishment, as is her wont, Rowe’s language downplays God’s hand in a famously Providential story (Genesis 50.20). While God shows up most often as an entity to beseech or a cultural token to reference, pagan deities govern the plot’s action; Rowe relishes in …

Beyond Standardized Test Scores: The Use Of Culturally And Linguistically Responsive Pedagogy To Improve Access To Gifted Programming For Hispanic Students, Virginia G. Pratt

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed-methods action research study was to explore how expanding curriculum in a gifted and talented English/ Language Arts (ELA) class to include a culturally and linguistically responsive strategy might broaden access to gifted programming for high-achieving children of Hispanic descent. The identified problem of practice is that the population of students from Hispanic families at Little Tree Elementary School (a pseudonym) continues to rise, yet Hispanic students are largely underrepresented in the school’s gifted program. This action research was carried out with a fourth-grade gifted ELA class in a Title I South Carolina elementary school. The …

Ammani Youth- Paradoxical Citizens On The Margins, Holly L. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Cities are complex social environments representing a convergence of many physical and human processes which influence how young people form their identities and plan for their futures. The role of urban environments on social processes has received substantial attention. However, significantly less attention has been focused on how urban youth are impacted specifically as political actors. Youth are particularly exposed to feeling the impacts of historical and on-going geopolitical issues in and surrounding their urban environments. Amman, Jordan is a compelling location to examine urban impacts on young political actors because of the clear geopolitical changes taking place in and …

The Impact Of Drama Pedagogy On Student Achievement, Attitude, And Empathy: An Action Research Study, Deborah J. Gascon

Theses and Dissertations

This action research study evaluated a problem of practice which emerged from the apathy and passive responses of students to reading classic literature in the high school English classroom. Teachers instructed while students received information with little investment on their part. The purpose of this study was to determine how to help students read closer and develop a deeper comprehension and appreciation of literature while expanding capabilities within the affective domain.

Through a convergent mixed methods action research design, the study addressed three research questions that explored how drama pedagogy affected student comprehension, their attitudes toward reading classic literature, and …

The Influence Of Consumer Inference About A Company’S Motive On Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) Evaluation, Taehoon Park

Theses and Dissertations

The author investigates the roles of consumer inferences and consumer suspicion in responses to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities by companies.

Chapter 1 examines how consumers infer a company’s motive for its prosocial activity when the same company is also involved in a socially harmful accident. When a company is involved in both CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and CSI (Corporate Social Irresponsibility), consumers can infer the motive for the CSR campaign from the temporal order of these two events. The author further proposes that this effect will be moderated by perceived invested effort in CSR campaign. Specifically, high effort invested …

The Warped One: Nationalist Adaptations Of The Cuchulain Myth, Martha J. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I trace the use of the mythic Irish hero Cuchulain by early Irish nationalists. From 1878 to 1939, Standish James O’Grady, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats employed this figure for specific political and cultural agendas. Cuchulain makes a fitting symbol for the “poet warrior” stereotype that was purposely and incidentally cultivated during the cultural nationalist phase of the Irish Literary Revival, when writers were beginning to explore the Cuchulain myth to demonstrate cultural and linguistic ideals. Nationalists found in Cuchulain a symbol that could tie the cultural to the political and the political to the …

The Distribution Of [ʍ]: An Acoustic Analysis Of Sociophonetic Factors Governing The Wine-Whine Merger In Southern American English, Keiko Bridwell

Theses and Dissertations

In US English, the merging of the voiceless labiovelar glide [ʍ] and its voiced counterpart [w] has been an ongoing process over the past century, originating in central port cities on the Atlantic seaboard and gradually spreading to include the bulk of the continental US. While described by many sources as still present in Southern American English, the so-called wine-whine merger shows evidence of nearing its completion as its usage becomes increasingly rare even within the Southeast, even as the segment [ʍ] is interpreted as a feature of Southern speech. Despite this fact, very little research has been conducted on …

Convertirse En Inmortal, 成仙 Chéngxiān, Becoming Xian: Memory And Subjectivity In Cristina Rivera Garza’S Verde Shanghai, Katherine Paulette Elizabeth Crouch

Theses and Dissertations

Verde Shanghai, published in 2011 by Cristina Rivera Garza, is often used in discussions of Orientalism in Latina America and Mexico. The text employs tropes and stereotypes common in Orientalist thinking, but to label the work Orientalist and analyze it through that lens seems too simplistic. I argue that Verde Shanghai ultimately proves a refutation of Orientalism’s existence within Mexico, and, more broadly, an overall deconstruction of the East-West dichotomy. Rivera Garza appears more interested in using racial and cultural identities to dismantle the polar dichotomies in which her characters live, ultimately critiquing these frameworks in the outside world.

Host Country Responses To Non-Communicable Diseases Amongst Syrian Refugees: A Review, Chaza Akik, Hala Ghattas Ph.D., Sandra Mesmar, Miriam Rabkin, Wafaa M. El-Sadr, Fouad M. Fouad

Faculty Publications

Background:

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey have hosted large refugee populations, with a high pre-conflict burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Objectives:

We aimed to describe the ways in which these three host country health systems have provided NCD services to Syrian refugees over time, and to highlight the successes and challenges they encountered.

Methods:

We conducted a descriptive review of the academic and grey literature, published between March 2011 and March 2017, using PubMed and Google searches complemented with documents provided by relevant stakeholders.

Results:

Forty-one articles and reports met our search …

March 6, 2019 Faculty Senate Minutes, University Of South Carolina

Faculty Senate

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Insider Control, Benjamin Means

Faculty Publications

According to conventional wisdom, insider control of businesses is detrimental to the interests of non-controlling investors. Family-run businesses, in particular, are seen as nepotistic and inefficient. Yet, commentators have overestimated the dangers of insider control and overlooked its potential benefits for all stakeholders. Controlling owners have a personal stake that gives them reason to identify with their business and to adopt responsible business practices capable of creating lasting value. A stewardship model of insider control helps explain the continuing vitality of family businesses as well as the success of recent public offerings by Facebook, Google, and Snapchat involving low-vote or …