Digital Commons Network^™

Private Narratives In Public Places: The Experiences Of Predominantly White Gay Male Undergraduates On Lgb Classroom Panels, James Patrick Dolan Jr.

Dissertations

The scholarly literature addresses the common practice and effectiveness of using classroom panel presentations by lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) speakers to increase awareness of LGB experiences and to change attitudes. However, little is known about the experiences of the speakers themselves or how the experience may affect the speaker's sense of self or identity. From an identity as narrative perspective, the goal of this study was to learn what effect the repeated telling of a coming out story in a public setting may have on the teller's identity, the story they tell, and the meanings and feelings associated with …

Coordination, Collaboration, And Culture: Local Economic Development In A Time Of Networks, Gregg G. Guetschow

Dissertations

Social coordination takes form in accordance with three pure types: markets, hierarchies, and networks. The research that is the subject of this dissertation explored coordination through interorganizational networks involved in policy implementation. Of specific interest was the decision on the part of network participants to cooperate with other network participants to undertake implementation tasks. Conventional models of decision-making do not account for the interdependent and strategic nature of these interactions. To address this gap in understanding, a model of decision-making was developed. Central to this model are the influences of political, organizational, and professional culture and focal effects directing network …

A Phenomenological Study Assessing African American Women’S Perspectives On Successful Heterosexual Relationships, Shamika Yolanda Latrell Hall

Dissertations

This study seeks to understand successful African American relationships from the perspective of African American females. Recognizing the impact of structural factors on African Americans, as well as the limits of imposing Eurocentric definitions of successful relationships, this study seeks to understand how African American women themselves describe successful relationships and to identify factors that have influenced their ideas about what is required for them to have healthy, happy, long-lasting, nurturing relationships. Design of the present study is informed by findings from Stephens-Williams' (1992) study of successful African American relationships, as well as a broader review of structural, sociological, and …

Citation Analysis And Journal Impact In School Psychology: 1995-2004, Rebecca Lanai Jennings-Knotts

Dissertations

The present study is a citation analysis of the school psychology literature from 1995-2004. Data from six major journals over a 10-year period were analyzed to determine the disciplines, books, and authors who most heavily impacted school psychology. Findings suggest that school psychology is characterized by high levels of interdisciplinary collaboration, and that the school psychology literature maintains relatively low self-citation and cross-citation rates when compared to other domains of psychology. As in previous investigations, the field of education was found to be less influential than the field of special education. The impact of behavior analysis varied significantly by school …

Evaluation Of A School-Based Program Targeting Pediatric Asthma Self-Management Skills In An Urban Population, Dawn J. Dore-Stites

Dissertations

Asthma is the most commonly diagnosed chronic disorder in childhood and is linked with several problematic outcomes including frequent school absences, increased hospitalizations and decreased quality of life. Further, urban populations struggling with low socioeconomic status are disproportionately represented in prevalence statistics and suffer from increased functional morbidity relative to other children with asthma. These findings exist in the midst of largely effective pharmacological interventions.

Asthma self-management programs (SMPs) target several behaviors linked to improved outcomes and are often used as an adjunct to medication management. SMPs have been employed using a variety of techniques and treatment targets in a …

The Biographic And Poetic Dimensions In Gary Synder’S Green Buddhism Poetry: Cold Mountain, Mountains And Rivers Without End, And Danger On Peaks, Byoungkook Park

Dissertations

From the perspective of ecology, many scholars have examined works of Gary Synder, who is an environmental activist, a peasant-Buddhist, and one of the most beloved and significant poets in the East and West. While his poems have been widely read, they have been rarely articulated from the perspective of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism or, which I would call, Green Buddhism. Considering this, my dissertation focuses on Snyder's Green Buddhism poetry and delineates the concept of Green Buddhism and how it has emerged in his Green Buddhism poetry over the past fifty years. According to my research, his poetic dimensions …

Effect Of Extinction Across Multiple Contexts On Renewal Of Responses Within A Functional Response Class, Jennifer L. Sobie

Dissertations

Resistance to extinction in applied settings is a common problem seen in behavior excess scenarios including those that deal with dangerous responding such as high-intensity aggressive responding, or drug dependence--where relapse is discouragingly high and is acknowledged as the most significant challenge in treatment--or eating disorders, or those that include simple reduction of common but undesired behavior in adults, children, and even pets. Behavior reappearance (i.e., the untargeted return of a learned response following extinction) implicates the physical context in which learning occurs as having a critical influence on what is learned and how, when and where this learning will …

Mail And Web Surveys: A Comparison Of Demographic Characteristics And Response Quality When Respondents Self-Select The Survey Administration Mode, Dawn M. Mackety

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to use a nonexperimental, quantitative design to compare mail and web surveys with survey mode self-selection at two data collection waves. Research questions examined differences and predictabilities among demographics (gender, ethnicity, age, and professional employment) and response quality (pronoun use, item nonresponse, response extremity, yea-saying, item completion errors, response length, response equivalency, anecdotal comments, and multiple response use) by survey mode and response wave. Analyses were conducted using chi-squares, ANOVAs, t -tests, and binary logistic regressions.

A questionnaire in mail and web formats containing 48 forced-choice and open-ended items was administered to a nonrandom …

Evaluation Of Researchers And Their Research: Toward Making The Implicit Explicit, Chris L. S. Coryn

Dissertations

Due to its very nature, the evaluation of research permeates nearly every aspect of the work of researchers. They evaluate the work of others or have their own work evaluated. They evaluate hypotheses that come to mind, the previous literature, the quality of data, the explanatory power of theories, or the design of experiments or instruments. And this is not always casual evaluation. It is highly skilled evaluation, and becoming a first-rate or world-class researcher is a process of improving the quality of these evaluations. However, deciding when someone is or has become a first-rate or world-class researcher is an …

The Effect Of Influence Tactics And Contingency Factors On The Adoption And Diffusion Of Is/It Innovations In Social Networks, Anand Jeyaraj

Dissertations

Despite considerable research on the adoption and diffusion of information systems (IS)/ information technology (IT) innovations by individuals in organizations, very little is known about the processes underlying the adoption of innovations, and how those processes contribute to the diffusion and assimilation of innovations within organizations. Viewing processes as sequences of actions, this research conducted two studies to: a) uncover the adoption and influence processes employed by individuals, and b) identify the factors that influence diffusion and assimilation within social networks. The first study, situated at the individual level, involved field interviews with 27 individuals from ten organizations in a …

Using Structured Employment Interviews To Predict Task And Contextual Performance, Brian M. Bonness

Dissertations

This study investigated the extent to which structured interviews predict task and contextual performance dimensions. Participants recruited from undergraduate business courses at a mid-sized, Midwestern university participated in a structured interview and received performance assessments from three separate rating sources (self-assessment, performance assessment exercise, peer/supervisor assessors). Study results showed that the contextual performance dimensions of the interview significantly predicted contextual performance ratings provided in peer/supervisor assessor questionnaires and predicted these ratings above and beyond the prediction of the task dimension of the interview. Conversely, the task dimension of the interview did not predict task performance in any of the performance …

Adapted Physical Education Enrollment Issues And Exercise Mediators For Students With Disabilities In San Diego County Community Colleges, Toni M. Pfister Edd

Dissertations

Most community colleges in California offer adapted physical education (APE) courses specifically designed to assist people with disabilities and chronic diseases in adapting and maintaining exercise programs. However, little is known about those eligible to enroll in these courses as well as their participation profiles; as such, the primary purpose of this study was to determine why some eligible community college students with disabilities do not enroll in APE courses as well as to determine what relationship demographics and exercise participation profiles have on physical activity participation. Data for this study was gathered through a web-based survey of 163 college …

Navigating Barriers Of African American Male Administrators: Manifesting Mechanisms For Career Advancement In Mainstream Institutions Of Higher Education, Orlando Lewis

Dissertations

The overall goal of this qualitative case study was to provide information to African American males regarding barriers they are challenged to navigate for career advancement at mainstream institutions of higher education. I utilized semi structured interviews to: (1) determine what barriers face African American male administrators in higher education that prevent advancement to executive positions; (2) identify and detail ways in which African American male administrators successfully navigate the barriers and; (3) identify coping mechanisms and support systems to aid African American men to navigate the identified barriers.

I identified three themes of barriers that reflect the route of …

Behavioral Tolerance Under Variable Ratio Schedules Of Reinforcement, Barry Eshkol Adelman

Dissertations

Previous studies (e.g., Hoffman, Branch, & Sizemore, 1987) have demonstrated that greater drug tolerance develops in responding under fixed-ratio (FR) schedules of reinforcement when the schedule parameter is small than when it is large; little research has been done on related schedules such as variable-ratio (VR). In Experiment 1, three pigeons responded under a multiple FR 5 FR 125 VR 5 VR 125. A range of prechronic doses of cocaine produced dose-dependent reductions in response rates under the component schedules. Following chronic dosing with daily administrations of 5.6 mg/kg, similar dose-response curves were derived by substitutions of the usual dose. …

A Qualitative Study Of Women Therapists’ Experiences Of Spirituality In The Counseling Process, Sharon A. Carney

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Thereby Become A Monster: Complex Organizations And The Torture At Abu Ghraib, Janine A. Bower

Dissertations

Reasearch and theory on organizational crime and deviance suggest organizational offending includes aspects of the environment, organizational characteristics (such as tasks, structure, and processes), and cognition, and is systematically produced by the combination of these three. This research is an examination of the organization of the Abu Ghraib detention and interrogation facility in Iraq, the location of prison abuses now made infamous following their public disclosure in 2004. An ethnographic content analysis of documents was performed to probe organizational culture, structure and processes, and their intersection with individual biographies and contextual forces. While public questions focused on why seemingly ordinary …

The Role Of Automatic Reinforcement In Early Speech Acquisition, Barbara E. Esch

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Struggling With Race: A Grounded Theory Study Of The Developing Of Awareness Of Racism, Shawn Victoria Macdonald

Dissertations

White counselors and psychologists need to have a strong understanding of racism and white privilege for effective therapeutic work with people of color. However, many white counselors struggle in various ways with multicultural training. The phenomenon of white counselors in training struggling with awareness of racism and white privilege is well-recognized but not fully understood.

A constructivist grounded theory study was conducted to explore the phenomena of "struggle" among white counselors in training who were engaged in multicultural training. 33 interviews were conducted with 17 participants who were students in master's and doctoral level counseling, counseling psychology, and related programs. …

A Role Of Problem-Solving In Complex Intraverbal Repertoires, Rachael A. Sautter

Dissertations

kinner described intraverbal behavior as verbal behavior with no point-to-point correspondence between the stimulus and the response. This verbal operant encompasses a wide range of response topographies ranging from answering simple questions to complex conversational exchanges. Previous interventions for teaching complex responding to questions about category membership have focused primarily on transfer of stimulus control procedures to teach specific intraverbal responses. These procedures have proven effective at establishing basic intraverbal responses but have consistently produced small and somewhat restricted repertoires. Theoreticians have hypothesized that effective use of problem-solving strategies rather than simple stimulus control may account for the performance of …

The Impact Of Combined Maternal Alcohol And Tobacco Use On Low Birth Weight In Singleton Pregnancies : A Population Based Study In The Us, 2003, Della A. Campbell

Dissertations

Background: The Black-White disparity in birth outcomes in the United States remains embedded. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines low birth weight (LBW) as birthweight less than 2500 grams/5.5 pounds or below the 10th percentile for gestational age. LBW is a frequent marker of poor maternal/infant health outcome. A reduction in the incidence of LBW is a major public health initiative in the US. Objective: The objective of the study was to determine the magnitude of risk for low birth weight, defined in this study as neonatal birth weight less than 2500 grams, in relation to combined maternal alcohol and …

People-Search : Searching For People Sharing Similar Interests From The Web, Quanzhi Li

Dissertations

On the Web, there are limited ways of finding people sharing similar interests or background with a given person. The current methods, such as using regular search engines, are either ineffective or time consuming. In this work, a new approach for searching people sharing similar interests from the Web, called People-Search, is presented. Given a person, to find similar people from the Web, there are two major research issues: person representation and matching persons. In this study, a person representation method which uses a person's website to represent this person's interest and background is proposed. The design of matching process …

Sifting Customers From The Clickstream : Behavior Pattern Discovery In A Virtual Shopping Environment, Peishih Chang

Dissertations

While shopping online, customers' needs and goals may change dynamically, based on a variety of factors such as product information and characteristics, time pressure and perceived risk. While these changes create emergent information needs, decisions about what information to present to customers are typically made before customers have visited a web site, using data such as purchase histories and logs of web pages visited. Better understanding of customer cognition and behavior as a function of various factors is needed in order to enable the right information to be presented at the right time. One approach to achieving this understanding is …

Comparative Immune Function In Wild Birds, Kevin David Matson

Dissertations

Over the last several decades, interest in quantifying immune function in comparative studies of wild animals has grown appreciably. Now, the field of ecological immunology is undergoing a transition, and ¿second generation¿ studies are being designed and carried out. With a greater appreciation of the complexity of immune systems, these second generation studies are commonly distinguished from their antecedents by making comparisons using multiple assays and including multiple species. I worked to advance this transition by developing novel approaches to comparative immunology, exploring the interrelationships among indices of immune function, and applying multiple indices to a question of comparative avian …

E-Portfolios: Their Impact On Preservice Teachers' Self-Directed Learning And Computer Technology Skills, Yufang Carole Huang

Dissertations

Students in the Teacher Education Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis have to complete their professional E-portfolios to be certified for the program. An E-portfolio demonstrates a future teacher¿s knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired through teaching and learning. Five qualitative case studies were investigated to understand how E-portfolios impact preservice teachers¿ self-directed learning readiness (SDLR) and computer technology skills (CTS). Data were gathered from the preservice teachers¿ pre- and post-questionnaires, interviews, observations, and their completed E-portfolios. Two internship students and three student teachers were observed creating their E-portfolios during a 16-week semester. During the period, some sought assistance from …

An Empirical Study Of Employee Relations And Managerial Malpractice Risks In A Four-Year Public Higher Education System, Robert Lee Brown Edd

Dissertations

Over the last decade, the rapid rise in college tuitions and fees has become a national priority, with congressional committees and scholars interested in solving this persistently stubborn and often intractable problem. Although a number of reasons for this phenomenon have been discussed, one theoretically plausible but untested explanation involves the extent to which campus climate may be empirically linked to the costs of managing various legal claims against the university, including workers' compensation, employment practice, and stress claims. To test the empirical validity of this hypothesis, this study gathered campus climate and claims data from 23 campuses and 25 …

Integrating Total Disability Management In A Climate Of Change: A Case Study, Mary E. Jesko Edd

Dissertations

Integrated disability management (IDM) is a cost-containment strategy increasingly being employed by human resources and risk management departments to address occupational and non-occupational illness and injury in a consistent manner. The goal is to both reduce on-the-job injury and minimize the loss of work time due to injury or illness. Although a large number of organizations have embraced the IDM concept, implementing IDM often is difficult because of the complex array of contracts, policies, procedures, corporate cultures and structures. Although extensive research has examined leaders' influence on change in various types of businesses, to date, research has not specifically explored …

Experiences Of Sacramental Marriage, James Patrick O'Brien Edd

Dissertations

This study interprets the stories told by eight couples about their experiences approaching marriage as a religious sacrament. The eight couples represented a purposeful sample selected using the following criteria: (a) They self-identified as having a sacramental marriage within the Roman Catholic tradition; (b) they appeared to be information rich sources who could provide an emic, i.e., an insider, view of the sacramental marriage experience; (c) they participated in the Catholic Cursillo movement; (d) they engaged in observable religious practices; and (e) they parented children. Research methods included guided conversation, participant observation, and a timeline activity that asked participants to …

Building Management Bench Strength: A Qualitative Look At A Job Rotation Program, Paige Litton Creager Phd

Dissertations

Job rotation programs are known in the organizational development field as one of the primary components used in a successful employee development program. To date little research has gone beyond the quantifiable reporting of practices. The view of program participants has been unaccounted for, and consequently the organizational development field has lacked a holistic understanding of how employees succeed and fail in these programs. This research offers a current perspective on job rotation: A means of accelerating the development of high potential employees in order to build a strong management bench. A qualitative grounded theory approach was used to investigate …

Stakeholders’ Perspectives Of A Catholic K-8 School As A Caring Community, Marci-Anne Hanks Edd

Dissertations

Many educators and researchers have found that caring school communities positively affect students’ behavior, academic achievement, and socioemotional development. Students’ basic needs of feeling cared for must be met for them to realize their full potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate stakeholders’ perceptions of a Catholic K-8 school as a caring community. Stakeholders included parents, teachers, administrators, staff members, and sixth through eighth grade students. The following research questions were posed for this study: (1) What are the different stakeholders’ perceptions of the school as a caring community? (2) Are there significant differences in perceptions between the …

A Mixed Methods Study On Cbam And The Adoption Of Thin Client Computers By Adolescents, Cynthia Sistek-Chandler Edd

Dissertations

Although stages of change and adoption of innovation dynamics have been examined for adult populations, comparable research for adolescents is limited. Applying a change instrument grounded in Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) to an adolescent population, this study investigates perceptions of 45 middle school students who used thin client portable computers in a one-to-one program at home and at school for 3 years. A mixed methodology design identified which of the 7 stages of concern students passed through and why some students adopted the innovation more readily than others. The Change Facilitator Stages of Concern Questionnaire, a modified version of CBAM, …