Digital Commons Network^™

Bad Apple: Complexities Of New York City Food Aid Programs, Rose Meagan Jimenez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The only universal thing about food is that everyone needs to eat. In the United States, there are more instances of food insecurity than impoverishment. Governmental and local food aid programs are complex but are essentially motivated by socioeconomic issues. Food aid programs, from community gardening to Food Stamps, initially stem from a depression-era need to stimulate the economy. However, as socioeconomic issues change, food aid programs also evolve to meet those needs. By excavating different pieces of literature that discuss issues in food aid, the forms of structural violence that cause hunger come to life. This piece discusses community …

Generalized Event Representation In Pre-School Children With Mild- To High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd) And Children With Cognitive And Linguistic Delays (Cld), Tashana S. Samuel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently establish rigid routines and have difficulties flexibly applying what they have learned. Three experiments were conducted to examine generalized event representation in 34 pre-school children. In Experiment 1, children diagnosed with varying kinds of cognitive and language delays (CLD: n = 14) were tested with the generalized imitation paradigm, a reliable measure of representational capacity. Two sets of perceptually dissimilar objects with similar functions were used to perform the same task: one set consisted of modeling props and the other set was the generalization props. At the generalization assessment, children observed actions modeled …

Dancer Performance On The Lower Quarter Y Balance Test: A Longitudinal Study, Megan Dehey, Kelly Kaems, Molly Saunders, Gabrielle Schneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: There is a need in the current literature for further information regarding dancer performance on the Y Balance Test (YBT). This study tracked the test scores of a group of dancers to assess change over time and relationship of balance scores to injury risk. It is hoped that clinicians may be able to use the information found in this study to more accurately screen dancers for asymmetries, deficits, and changes over time using the YBT. Such screenings would allow for more effective care and better assessment of readiness to return to dance. Method: A group of 12 dancers between …

Factors That Affect Treatment Compliance Among Individuals With Mental Illness, Marsha Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Approximately 6% of the American population suffers from a severe mental illness such as Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Treatment compliance in individuals with severe mental illness is imperative as without treatment these individuals may experience homelessness, unemployment, and a decreased life expectancy of up to 34 years. Consequently, researchers have increasingly examined factors that may affect overall compliance among these individuals, such as insight, social support, symptom severity, and substance abuse. However, many of these studies focus on compliance with prescribed medications and few examine compliance with recommended psychological treatment. The current …

Teaching Community College Students Strategies For Learning Unknown Words As They Read Expository Text, Leslie Craigo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study reported here investigated methods that enable college students to learn the meaning of unknown words as they read discipline specific academic text. The ability to read and comprehend text is known to be positively correlated with academic success. However that ability is challenging to college students in part because of the sophisticated vocabulary encountered in academic text. The study reported here utilized an experimental design. Forty one participants read specific passages aloud during three sessions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four intervention groups to investigate alternative methods of learning the meaning of unknown words. In the …

Employee Environmentally Friendly Behaviors In And Out Of Organizations And Across Cultures, Lilia Hayrapetyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A rising number of organizations are making changes to minimize their impact on the environment. In order to successfully implement such changes for the long term it is important for organizations to not only address operational, structural and process factors, but also their employees' environmentally significant behaviors (e.g., Siero et al., 1996). Unfortunately, there remains a general lack of understanding of factors affecting employees' environmentally friendly behaviors. In an effort to reduce this gap, the present study employed the Values Beliefs Norms theory (Stern et al., 1999, Stern, 2000) to gain a comprehensive understanding of individuals' environmentally friendly behaviors in …

Sensitizing Jurors To Factors Influencing The Accuracy Of Eyewitness Identification: Assessing The Effectiveness Of The Henderson Instructions, Angela M. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recently, the New Jersey Supreme Court determined that jurors may not be able to effectively evaluate eyewitness evidence (New Jersey v. Henderson, 2011). Research generally supports this contention, finding that jurors do not take into account factors surrounding the commission of the crime and identification when determining the reliability of an identification (Devenport et al., 1997). Courts have implemented various safeguards to assist jurors in evaluating eyewitness evidence, including judicial instructions and expert testimony. The New Jersey Supreme Court proposed the use of judicial instructions and suggested their use would reduce the need for expert testimony. The current …

Rebellion Under The Palm Trees: Memory, Agrarian Reform And Labor In The Aguán, Honduras, Andres Leon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On December 9, 2009, the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán; MUCA) occupied over 20,000 hectares of oil palm covered lands in the Aguán region in the Honduran northern coast. This was the latest, and probably most dramatic, chapter in the region's tumultuous recent history. This dissertation explores this history and the process of creation of the Aguán region from the perspective of a set of impoverished peasant families that migrated from different parts of Honduras towards the Aguán from the 1970s onwards, in search of a better present and future.

It asks about the …

The Ecology Of School Readiness, Miriam Beth Tager

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative study applies a critical and constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmez, 2014) to a narrative inquiry of how White middle-class early childhood educators perceive or make assumptions when identifying school readiness in low-income Black children. The data collection included an online districtwide survey of kindergarten and first-grade teachers (n=24), interviews of five teacher participants, observations of five identified non-school ready low-income Black children and two focus groups (participating and interpretative). The findings revealed an ecology of school readiness, in which teachers felt that the increase in standards impacted their quick identifications of non-school ready children. These participants claim …

The Influence Of Forward Head Posture On Suprahyoid Activity During Oropharyngeal Swallowing: A Surface Electromyographic Analysis, Brianne Carroll, Sierra Hunt, Katherine Sheeleigh, Mark Wnukowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

STUDY DESIGN: Within subjects repeated measures design.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this research is to explore the effect that Forward Head Posture has on the mylohyoid muscle during swallowing in a healthy population.

BACKGROUND: Forward Head Posture (FHP) is the most common deviation from ideal head posture, and has become more prominent due to the rise of smart phones and the prevalence of computers in the household and workplace. FHP is associated with a variety of detrimental effects on the musculoskeletal system that arise from the abnormal positioning of the cranial and cervical bones and joints. In particular, the muscles …

The Effects Of Cooling During Gait On Gait Endurance In Persons With Multiple Sclerosis Using The Six Minute Walk Test, Meghan Higgins, Esther Sosowsky, Elisheva Zinberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Persons with MS (pwMS) are limited in their mobility due to thermosensitivity. Exercising at a sufficient volume and intensity to increase mobility can result in increased core temperatures and resultant worsening of symptoms. The use of cooling garments to lower core temperature has been found to be a successful means of allowing pwMS to exercise for longer periods. Previous studies have relied on precooling for an extended period of time prior to activity, to achieve improved exercise performance. Cooling during the performance itself, or pericooling, may allow for similar performance gains to be realized without spending the time needed …

The Effects Of Maximal Strength Training On Gait And Balance In Persons With Multiple Sclerosis: A Pretest Posttest Pilot Study, Janet Klein, David Park, Charles Wright, Michael Zervas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Physical Therapy strength training programs utilizing mild to moderate intensity are commonly prescribed to address many of the deficits found in multiple sclerosis, but studies examining the effectiveness of higher intensity strength training in gait and balance have not been performed. Maximal strength training (MST), which involves lifting nearly maximal weights (85-95% of an individual’s one repetition maximum [1RM]) with low repetitions, has been shown to improve functional abilities in both healthy and non-MS impaired populations. The higher intensity training used in MST may result in greater activation of the CNS, providing a greater stimulus to improvement than …

Electrophysiological Markers Of Short-Term Visual Adaptation: An Examination Across The Schizophrenia Spectrum, Gizely N. Andrade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The experiments comprising this dissertation sought to contribute to the understanding of basic sensory processing in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and risk-liability. We leveraged the sensitivity of visual processing deficits along with widely reported sensory-gating deficits (in other modalities) to develop a new paradigm assaying short-term visual adaptation to repetitive stimuli. In the first experiment, adaptation properties of the visual system were characterized in neurotypical adults using a classic "paired adaptation paradigm" and a more taxing "block adaptation paradigm," using high-density EEG. In the second experiment, we deployed our new visual adaptation assay in a clinical population. We replicated classic early VEP …

Narratives Of Interiority: Black Lives In The U.S. Capital, 1919 - 1942, Paula C. Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs an urban, social and intellectual history of poor and working class African Americans in the interwar period in Washington, D.C. Although the advent of social history shifted scholarly emphasis onto the "ninety-nine percent," many scholars have framed black history as the story of either the educated, uplifted and accomplished elite, or of a culturally depressed monolithic urban mass in need of the alleviation of structural obstacles to advancement. A history of the poor and working class as individuals with both ideas and subjectivity has often been difficult simply because there are limited archival sources.

"Narratives of Interiority" …

Saving Moral Realism: Against Blackburn's Projectivism, Paul James Cummins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the argumentative dialectic between moral realists and non-cognitivist moral antirealists each side in the debate is typically thought to enjoy a different prima facie advantage over its rival. Moral realism gains plausibility from its truth-conditional semantics because it can explain the meaning of moral judgments on the same basis as ordinary propositions. However, many moral philosophers doubt moral realism because the theory is committed to the existence of moral properties, which are, in J. L. Mackie's term, "queer." Moral antirealism denies that these moral properties exist, and this is a principal reason why many moral philosophers endorse the theory. …

The Relationship Between Social-Emotional Development, Academic Achievement And Parenting Practices In Young Children Who Attend Head Start, Emily A. A. Dow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the preschool years, children develop social-emotional skills -- such as cooperation and self-regulation -- which predict later academic achievement. Research shows that parents play an important role in the development of these skills. However, it remains unclear how specific parenting practices may facilitate the relationship between social-emotional development and academic success. Often, children who grow up in low-income families are at risk for a variety of cognitive and emotional problems. Head Start is a federal program offered to low-income families that provides services, including early childhood education programs, to help offset these risks. Using Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory, the purpose …

Archiving The City: A Guide To The Art Of Urban Interventions, Olatokunbo Adeola Enigbokan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The topic of this dissertation is the development and exploration of alternative methodologies for understanding and relating to everyday urban experience. The project is a psychogeographical exploration of methodologies used in contemporary art and architectural practice to create street-level "urban interventions." For the purposes of this study, urban interventions are defined as actions, performances, installations and objects created by artists, and or activists and sometimes architects, and inserted into, or responsive to, everyday urban environments, usually taking place outside of official art spaces, such as museums and galleries. In most cases these interventions are unexpected, express a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic and …

Growing Up Online: Identity, Development And Agency In Networked Girlhoods, Claire M. Fontaine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Young women's digital media practices unfold within a postfeminist media landscape dominated by rapidly circulating visual representations that often promote superficial readings of human value. Meanwhile the dominant framing within educational policy and practice of digital media literacy insufficiently captures young people's motivations for engaging in multimedia production, online gaming and blogging. In addition to using digital media for social purposes, and to navigate dimensions of social difference like race, class and gender, working class young women of color also use digital media to develop internal awareness of their selves. The processes of documenting the self, reflecting on the documented …

New York City Street Theater: Gender, Performance, And The Urban From Plessy To Brown, Erin Nicholson Gale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the ordinary, public performances of fictional female characters in novels set on the streets of Manhattan during the years of legal segregation in the United States. I examine a range of actions from bragging to racial passing, and I argue these ordinary performances are central to our ability to interpret race, gender, and class relations. I detect race, class, and gender-based impulses to segregate and exclude others that overlap with the motives guiding the national, legal edict to segregate people by race. These guiding inclinations, legible through the history of Manhattan's grid, zoning laws, and the city …

Negotiating Limits: Boundary Management In The Bondage/Discipline/Sadomasochism (Bdsm) Community, Karen Marie Holt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to gain insight into the attitudes, beliefs, and values that shape Bondage/Discipline/Sadomasochism (BDSM) activities and how participants negotiate and maintain boundaries in order to engage in mutually satisfying BDSM activities. Additionally, this study explored the degree and consequences of unintended or non-negotiated harms, including physical, emotional, and sexual coercion. A qualitative approach consisting of semi-structured interviews and ethnography was used in order to develop an in depth exploration of the lived experiences of participants. Grounded theory was employed to reveal common themes which all supported a symbolic interactionist / dramaturgical understanding of the protective and predatory processes …

Do Cultural And Perceptual Factor Matter?: An Investigation Of Factors Impacting Intelligence Test Scores Of Latinos/Hispanics In The United States, Mary E. Ignagni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examined societal and cultural explanations regarding the score differences seen between Latinos/Hispanics and Whites on intelligence tests through focusing specifically on possible explanations for the scores obtained by Latino/Hispanic test-takers. In this paper, it was argued that additional unique factors may impact the test scores of Latino/Hispanic test-takers. Specifically, racial and ethnic self-identification, ethnic centrality, acculturation, cultural distance, test perceptions, and ethnicity were explored as possible unique factors. In addition, an attempt was made to explain within group differences. A non-experimental study was utilized in which a final sample of 194 participants completed an intelligence test and measures …

Black Like Me? A Narrative Study Of Non-Anglophone Black U.S. Immigrant Selves In The Making, Yvanne Joseph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished discriminatory national origin quotas that favored European immigrants. The U.S. has since experienced steady flows of immigrants of color. These diverse groups have brought their racial, social, cultural and historical experiences, which adds greater complexity to the existing Black/White and ingroup/outgroup models that shape group relations, and psychological theorizing about identity. This dissertation focuses specifically on the smaller, less visible, yet growing segments of these immigrant populations. It presents a study of the lives of ten individual immigrants of African descent originating from a non-Anglophone country within Africa, Latin America …

Relationship Of Students' Spelling Gains To Teacher Knowledge And Teacher Practice, Alison Puliatte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the impact of classroom teachers' linguistic knowledge and spelling instructional practices on Grade 2 and 3 students' spelling gains over the course of one school year. The purpose of this study was to identify teacher level variables that impact student spelling gains. This study employed a correlational research design aimed at finding relationships between two independent variables and one dependent variable. The two independent variables were teacher instructional practices and teacher linguistic knowledge. Teacher level variables were identified through two measures, an Instructional Practices Questionnaire and a Linguistic Knowledge Survey. The dependent variable was the student spelling …

The Journal Of Mother Studies: A Peer Reviewed, International, Interdisciplinary, Open-Acess, Digital Humanities Hybrid Project, Martha Joy Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic Journals are an established forum for educators and researchers to disseminate information within their field. Journals act as mediators of knowledge, advancing the canons within specific areas of study. There are currently two journals that focus on motherhood from an interdisciplinary perspective and one that focuses on fathers. However, none of these determine a specific foundational definition of what the field is, what it hopes to study, and how it will advance itself. Rather, these journals are general collections of a great number of things that touch on varying subjects regarding motherhood and fatherhood. This thesis argues for the …

Modern Era Centaur: The Fusion Of Art And Religion, Isabel Sobral Campos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, "Modern Era Centaur: the Fusion of Art and Religion," focuses on art's ability to assume other social functions outside its domain. It deals with a variety of artistic practices that take on overt religious roles or are otherwise implicitly grounded in a religiously inflected stance. I argue that the religious impulse of the modern era greatly motivates the poetic and visual aesthetic innovations in the European and American avant-garde. Framed through the thinking of Blaise Pascal, Emmanuel Levinas, and Niklas Luhmann, I show how proto-modernist poetics such as that of Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson articulate similar religious …

Assumptions Underlying Behavioral Linkage Revisited: A Multidimensional Approach To Ascertaining Individual Differentiation And Consistency In Serial Rape, Marina Sorochinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While investigative use of behavioral evidence to help link and solve serial offenses has been in use for centuries, the empirical and theoretical grounds for whether and how to use this evidence effectively has begun to emerge only in recent years. In order for behavioral crime linking to be validated, two base assumptions must be met: individual differentiation (i.e., that offenses committed by one offender will be distinctly different from those committed by another offender) and consistency (i.e., that a degree of similarity will be apparent across crimes committed by the same offender). The present study empirically tested (a) the …

Object Categorization In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asd), Jaime Vitrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to investigate hierarchical object categorization in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), examining three levels of category inclusiveness (superordinate, basic, subordinate) across three tasks (sequential touching task, generalized imitation task, sorting task) in three domains (animals, tools, kitchen utensils) in the same group of children with ASD. Previous research on the categorization abilities of children with ASD has shown mixed results. This study was designed to clarify past discrepancies in the literature.

Ten children with ASD participated in this study (mean CA = 4 years, 10 months; range 3 to 6 years; mean VMA …

Technology And The Glass Imagination: Isolation And Closeness From The Window To The Screen, Sarah Elizabeth Welsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In computer and cell phone screens, as in 19th-century architecture, glass employs a frame to show a specific picture, and keeps us at a distance from what lies behind it. Glass' dichotomies in technology (transparency and reflection, isolation and closeness) have become stronger metaphors for our experience with technology. This paper will look at the similarities between the language and metaphors created by glass in 19th-century architecture and 21st century technology, and glass' role in connecting us to and alienating us from the world 'outside.' In so doing, the role of glass in the imagination and its impact on modernity …

Triple Stigma In Forensic Psychiatric Patients: Mental Illness, Race, And Criminality, Michelle Leigh West

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stigma involves negative beliefs and devaluations of people in socially identified groups (e.g. race, mental illness). Although people have many reactions to social stigma, some labeled people internalize these attitudes. Research has increasingly explored mental illness self-stigma, when people with mental illness begin to believe that society's negative beliefs are true of them (e.g., that they are hopeless due to mental illness). Self-stigma predicts poorer functional and treatment outcomes. Stigma research has typically investigated stigmatized labels individually. Forensic psychiatric patients, people with mental illness with history of criminal conviction, by definition experience multiple stigmas, yet no research has explored how …

The Effects Of Childhood Sexual Abuse On Parenting, Erin Ann Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a pervasive problem that has been the focus of substantial empirical research. While negative outcomes such as psychiatric diagnoses or health problems have been well documented, the literature regarding the effects of CSA on parenting is sparse and has produced conflicting results. Moreover, the existing research on CSA's effect on later parenting has several methodological limitations (e.g., retrospective data) and has failed to find any consistent explanatory mechanisms/pathways for which CSA is most likely to impede parental success. The present study examined whether a history of CSA leads to negative parental outcomes (i.e., how they …