Digital Commons Network^™

Applications Of Simulation Analysis To Generate Reference Points And Evaluate Management Control Rules In Three Eastern Us Fisheries, Laura Solinger

Dissertations

Myriad sources of uncertainty are characteristic of or impact all commercial and recreational fisheries, contributing uncertainty to the determination of stock status. In the face of these uncertainties, fisheries managers tend to reserve fishery resources from the management targets to allow for variability. Simulation analysis is a useful tool to complement and extend formal stock assessment models to better inform managers of the risk that a management strategy results in an overfished stock or overfishing occurs over some period of time. Three examples of simulation analysis are presented to address risk-tolerance and development of management thresholds for three commercially important …

Engaging Experts: Overcoming Trust In Risky Environments, Cynthia Goodwin-Sak

Dissertations

In business-to-business sales environments, sellers may choose to bring their go-to expert to a customer meeting, even when there is an expert available who may be more skilled in the product being discussed. The purpose of this study is to identify if an intervention of data, trust transference, ingroup identity, or a combination, influence the choice of expert a salesperson engages for a customer meeting. We tested this question through a series of vignettes and hierarchical linear modeling. The sample came from a US-based technology company, and salespeople in the United States.

We found that trust transference influenced both choice …

Minority Nursing Students' Perceptions About Help-Seeking When Under Stress: A Basic Qualitative Study, Marjorie Attis-Josias

Dissertations

Nursing students experience many situations that lead to stress. Stress can have many adverse effects on students, including attrition, and minority nursing students often grapple with a unique set of stressors related to their status as minorities. This study was conducted to close the gap in the literature about minority nursing students' beliefs and attitudes about help-seeking for stress. A basic qualitative design was utilized to answer one research question, How do minority nursing students describe their experiences with help-seeking when under stress? Individual interviews were conducted with 12 ethnic and racial minority students enrolled in their third or fourth …

Radar Remote Sensing For Land Surface Studies Over The United Arab Emirates, Muhagir Hisham Elkamali

Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the land surface deformations related to anthropogenic activities and how a monitoring strategy can be established for nationwide studies. The main objective of this dissertation is to study land surface fluctuations in regional and local scales over the dry semi-arid climate of the United Arab Emirates with the relation to subsurface layers mechanisms and groundwater dynamics. Radar Interferometry techniques have been developed to detect and monitor land surface movement from space with very high accuracy. This dissertation investigates the implementation of these techniques over highly decorrelated surfaces. The detected land surface movements have been correlated …

The Balance We Seek: A Sequential Narrative Analysis Of Childhood Cancer Blogs, Catherine Mcgeehin Heilferty

Dissertations

The research aimed to identify the narratives and themes about the experience of parenting a child with cancer, analyze the social interaction present in illness blogs created by parents of children with cancer and identify the reasons expressed by parents in the blogs for writing and publishing online.

Employee Engagement, Brain-Based Psychological Safety, And The Sales Professional, Cheri Sherman

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this correlational study was to determine what relationship, if any, existed between employee engagement and psychological safety as measured by the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) and the Academy of Brain-based Leadership’s S.A.F.E.T.Y.™ Assessment and Pulse Survey domains of security, autonomy, fairness, esteem, and trust.

Methodology: A quantitative, correlational methodology was used for this study. The post-hoc sample comprised of 61 high-performing sales professionals working in California. Participants completed the three assessments online via SurveyMonkey. The data were analyzed using a Spearman correlation.

Findings: This study resulted in multiple findings, including a statistically significant relationship between …

Correlation Of Personal Finance Class And Credit Scores, Betty W. Fagan

Dissertations

It is has become a concern: the number of people struggling with personal finance and credit scores. It is for this reason that this study scrutinizes the possible influence of one factor on the other. It is undeniable that personal finance influences some futuristic financial decisions and goals, but has the relationship been proven? This study aims to evaluate the correlation between personal finance and financial literacy, using a sample of 15 to 30 high-school students and teachers. The study collected data through interviews and surveys. The data collected were used to formulate the correlation between the course’s success and …

Examination Of Gaming In Nursing Education And The Effects On Learning And Retention, Tracey L. Hodges

Dissertations

The college environment brings together adult learners from diverse backgrounds who have different goals, personal and work experiences, and learning styles. These learners have the ability to learn in as many ways as educators have ways to teach them and learn better when actively engaged in the learning process. This reality makes it important for adult educators to incorporate a variety of teaching methods in their courses to meet the needs of these learners. Gaming is one such teaching method, with the potential to reach a wide and diverse population of adult learners.

The primary purpose of this study was …

Exploration Of Patients' Spiritual/Religious Beliefs And Resuscitation Decisions, Elizabeth A. Freitas

Dissertations

The resuscitation decision, which has the potential to reverse a premature death or prolong the dying process, is complex and can be associated with spiritual/religious beliefs, values, and quality of life. The consequences of the resuscitation decision make it imperative that healthcare providers have an understanding of patients' spiritual/religious beliefs and how those beliefs are associated with their resuscitation decisions. The objective of this study was to determine the associations between hospitalized patients' spiritual/religious beliefs and their resuscitation decisions.

Concerns, Coping, And Quality Of Life Of Mexican American Breast Cancer Survivors, Mary M. Lopez

Dissertations

Coping is a challenge for breast cancer survivors and may result in a poor quality of life (QOL). The primary purpose of this mixed method study was to examine the effects of acculturation, optimism, and breast cancer concerns on coping styles and to determine the effect coping styles have on the QOL of Mexican American breast cancer survivors. A 1-group ex post facto, descriptive, correlational design with path analysis was used to determine the direct, indirect, and total effects of the causal antecedents on coping and QOL.

A Mixed-Methods Exploration Study On Trauma-Informed Practices Used To Dismantle The School-To-Prison Pipeline In Public And Private Schools In The City Of St. Louis, Jennifer Lauren Gabrian

Dissertations

Since the release of the Missouri Model for Trauma-Informed Schools approved by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in 2019, school leaders were given the opportunity to start the process of meeting the emotional and fundamental needs of students. With the effects of trauma reaching all diverse groups of race, gender, economic status, and community surroundings, there is an increased need to use the education system to reach students emotionally. Though the model is a blueprint for schools, school districts are not required to adopt this model and implement it within their districts. Due to the recent pandemic, …

Clinical Nurses Transitioning In A Faculty Role: A Cultural Analysis Of The Nursing Profession, The Academic Discipline Of Nursing, And The Academic Professorate, Cheryl L. Schriner

Dissertations

Nursing faculty are initially socialized into the culture of the nursing profession and then must transition into the culture of the academic discipline of nursing as they assume their new professorial role. This study explored how cultural similarities and differences influenced the transition of clinical nurses into a faculty role. The study was guided by Peterson and Spencer's (1990) model of organizational culture and Schlossberg's (1995) adult transition theory.

The Relationship Between The Stage Of Moral Development And The Frequency Of Dishonest Behaviors In The Classroom And Clinical Setting In Baccalaureate Nursing Students, Diann C. Cooper

Dissertations

Nursing is consistently ranked for its honesty and integrity. It is guided by a set of standards for ethical practice. However, nursing students participate in academic dishonesty at rates similar to non-nursing students. In addition, those who participate in academic dishonesty are more likely to be dishonest in the clinical setting. Dishonesty in clinical can directly impact patients and staff putting both at risk of harm. While in their nursing program, decision making is guided by the American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of Ethics, which is taught during the program. Specifics on the time spent and method used to teach …

The Art Of Leadership In Times Of Crisis, Valissa Tisdale

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to identify and describe strategies exemplary Navy command master chiefs (CMDCM) used to lead in crisis using the Five Critical Tasks of Strategic Crisis Leadership (sense making, decision making and coordination, meaning making, accounting, and learning; Boin, ’t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2017) during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. In addition, it was the purpose to understand and describe the experiences of exemplary Navy CMDCM during a time of crisis.

Methodology: This study utilized a qualitative multiple case study research design. Qualitative data were collected through standardized, semistructured open-ended interviews. …

How Can Design Thinking Transform Diversity Initiatives For Architectural Trade Organizations In The United States?, Leroy Stewart

Dissertations

This study intended to assess design thinking as a variable regarding its utilization as a tool to increase the number of African American architects in the United States. The research was grounded in the speech given by Whitney Young to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1968, and the initial partnership between the AIA and the National Organization of Minority of Architects (NOMA) in 2001 to increase the number of African American architects to 15,000 by 2030. Through the qualitative methodology, via descriptive phenomenological analysis (DPA), fourteen participants, all of whom were African American licensed architects, were interviewed to …

Utilization Of Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (Tpms) Based Architectures Impregnated With Phase Change Material For Heat Transfer Applications, Zahid Ahmed Qureshi

Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the utilization of mathematically architected Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (TPMS) based lattices for Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage (LHTES) systems. With the advent of Additive Manufacturing (AM), TPMS structures can be readily manufactured. The objective of this dissertation was to investigate the heat transfer performance of TPMS structures vis-à-vis conventional metal foams represented by Kelvin cells while both were impregnated with a Phase Change Material (PCM). Numerical simulations were performed under various boundary conditions to assess the performance. It was found that TPMS structures outperformed conventional metal foam. Moreover, the effects of boundary conditions (isothermal …

The Pontem Path: A Case Study Of A Catholic Bridge Program Focusing On College Readiness, Sean Green

Dissertations

The Department of Education’s 2018 report on the “Condition of Education” indicated nearly 60% of all children under the age of 18 had parents without a bachelor’s degree. When the statistics were broken down by race, the numbers were far higher. For Black children, that number was 74%; for Hispanic children, that number was 79%; for Pacific islander, it was 78%; and for American Indian/Alaska native, it was 80%. This gap in education has had a tremendous economic impact on families, reverberating through generations. According to Georgetown’s 2015 study on the economics of college majors, a college graduate makes $1 …

The Experience Of Non-Spousal Close Intimate Relationships For Women With Breast Cancer: A Journey Of Support, Erin B. Dooley

Dissertations

An estimated 331,530 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019 ("American Cancer Society," 2019, p. 10). The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological, descriptive study was to explore the lived experience of non-spousal close/intimate relationships of women with breast cancer. There are very few studies in the literature examining relationships between women with cancer other than those of partner or spouse. This study's participants consisted of six women, ages 32 to 68. Analysis of these data identified themes reflected along their breast cancer trajectory (1) The journey starts (2) Mid-journey passage, and (3) Journeys end/coming home, as well as …

The Effects Of High-Stakes Ati Remediation And Testing Practices Including The Ati Content Mastery Series And Ati Pn Comprehensive Predictor, Elaine Hernandez Hunter

Dissertations

The purpose of this retrospective, descriptive study was to determine if any differences existed in students' test scores on the Assessment Technologies Institute (ATI) PB tests: Fundamentals, Pharmacology, Medical Surgical and the Comprehensive Predictor before and after implementing a high-stakes remediation and testing policy. The ATI computer-based standardized tests are widely used in nursing programs as a program assessment tool. Also, ATI tests provide correlational evidence of first-time NCLEX-RN passage. The ATI Remediation and tests are commonly added to nursing programs progression plans. In recent years nursing programs have applied high-stakes ATI Remediation to the ATI tests in response to …

Evaluation Of A Community-Based Nurse Residency Program, Clara R. Owings

Dissertations

A secondary data analysis study was conducted to determine if newly graduated nurses benefitted from participation in a 1-year University Health System Consortium/American Association of Colleges of Nursing (UHC/AACN) nurse residency program in a community hospital. The sample included data collected from 121 newly graduated nurses who completed the Casey-Fink Graduate survey at the start of program, 6 months into the program, and again at the end of the year-long program. Data included in the study span 3 years from 2012 to 2015. Participation in a community-based nurse residency provided several benefits to newly graduated nurses. There were statistically significant …

Exploration Of Factors That Promote Continued Volunteer Engagement Of American Red Cross Disaster Health Services Nurses, Kathleen V. Eid-Heberle

Dissertations

The purpose of the research study was to explore factors that promote continued volunteer engagement of American Red Cross Disaster Health Services (DHS) nurses.

A Quantitative Comparative Analysis Of Edd Persistence Factors, Jeffrey D. Deckelbaum

Dissertations

Whether studying physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, mathematics, humanities, or education, approximately one in every two doctoral students fail to persist to degree completion (Bowen & Rudenstine, 1992; Lovitts, 2001; Tinto, 2012). A quantitative comparative study focused on two populations; students currently enrolled in the professional doctorate EdD program and former EdD students, including students who started but did not finish the program. Research-based variables, characterized as personal and program factors driving doctoral student attrition, were tested for significance. The participation criteria defined at least 80% of the program’s course content in totality was or is currently delivered online from …

Improving Dysarthric Speech Recognition By Enriching Training Datasets, Sophie Cullen

Dissertations

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that results from disruptions in the neuro-motor interface and is characterised by poor articulation of phonemes and hyper-nasality and is characteristically different from normal speech. Many modern automatic speech recognition systems focus on a narrow range of speech diversity therefore as a consequence of this they exclude a groups of speakers who deviate in aspects of gender, race, age and speech impairment when building training datasets. This study attempts to develop an automatic speech recognition system that deals with dysarthric speech with limited dysarthric speech data. Speech utterances collected from the TORGO database are …

Measuring And Comparing Social Bias In Static And Contextual Word Embeddings, Alan Cueva Mora

Dissertations

Word embeddings have been considered one of the biggest breakthroughs of deep learning for natural language processing. They are learned numerical vector representations of words where similar words have similar representations. Contextual word embeddings are the promising second-generation of word embeddings assigning a representation to a word based on its context. This can result in different representations for the same word depending on the context (e.g. river bank and commercial bank). There is evidence of social bias (human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs) in word embeddings. While detecting bias in static (classical or non-contextual) word …

Hybridization Of Biologically Inspired Algorithms For Discrete Optimisation Problems, Elihu Essian-Thompson

Dissertations

In the field of Optimization Algorithms, despite the popularity of hybrid designs, not enough consideration has been given to hybridization strategies. This paper aims to raise awareness of the benefits that such a study can bring. It does this by conducting a systematic review of popular algorithms used for optimization, within the context of Combinatorial Optimization Problems. Then, a comparative analysis is performed between Hybrid and Base versions of the algorithms to demonstrate an increase in optimization performance when hybridization is employed.

A Metal-Cutting-Inspired Analytical Framework For Predicting Operating Parameters In Friction Stir Welding, Benjamin Robert Lund

Dissertations

Currently, predictive models for establishing Friction Stir Welding (FSW) process parameters that produce repeatable and robust welds are not well developed and do not account for differences between alloys. Parameter development relies primarily upon costly trial and error studies. The predicted hot working conditions of FSW vary widely with strains ranging from 2 to 100 and strain rates from 10^0 to 10^6 s^-1. These conditions lie outside the range covered by traditional testing techniques but are quite similar to conditions predicted in Orthogonal Metal Cutting (OMC), where strains range from 1 to 50 and strain rates from 10^0 to 10^6 …

Development Of An Explainability Scale To Evaluate Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Xai) Methods, Stephen Mccarthy

Dissertations

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is an area of research that develops methods and techniques to make the results of artificial intelligence understood by humans. In recent years, there has been an increased demand for XAI methods to be developed due to model architectures getting more complicated and government regulations requiring transparency in machine learning models. With this increased demand has come an increased need for instruments to evaluate XAI methods. However, there are few, if none, valid and reliable instruments that take into account human opinion and cover all aspects of explainability. Therefore, this study developed an objective, human-centred questionnaire …

Evaluation Of Automated Eye Blink Artefact Removal Using Stacked Dense Autoencoder, Matthew Rigney

Dissertations

The presence of artefacts in Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals can have a considerable impact on the information they portray. In this comparative study, the automated removal of eye blink artefacts using the constrained latent representation of a stacked dense autoencoders (SDAE) and comparing its ability to that of the manual independent component analysis (ICA) approach was evaluated. A comparative evaluation of 5 stacked dense autoencoder architectures lead to a chosen architecture for which the ability to automatically detect and remove eye blink artefacts were both statistically and humanistically evaluated. The ability of the stacked dense autoencoder was statistically evaluated with the …

Scrolling Vs Paging: Reading Performance And Preference Of Reading Modes In Long-Form Online News, Richard Herlihy

Dissertations

This study explores the impact of scrolling and dynamic pagination in long-form online documents on reader performance and reader experience. Previous research has produced mixed results, indicating no difference between modes, or a positive effect favouring scrolling. Recent advances in web standards have enabled simpler, dynamic, performant methods of pagination to tailor content responsively to any screen, meriting renewed study in this area. This paper uses one such method to load subsequent online news pages instantly without buffering. In an online browser experiment with 38 participants, an increase in reading speed in the scrolling mode was found at a level …

Schooled To The Streets? Exploring The Relationship Between K-12 Educational Experiences And Early Careers In Activism, David Abraham Castro

Dissertations

Since the late eighteenth century, organizing and activism have been part of the urban landscape, from the labor organizing of Eugene Debs in the early twentieth century to the community organizing work of Saul Alinsky during the 1950s and 1960s. The development of community organizers is strongly tied to local institutions such as factories, houses of worship, and schools. For many youths in Chicago, schools often become the sites of political and social awakening and lead to activism beyond the schoolhouse. Within the current context of urban education scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and community organizers alike agree that the perspectives of …