Digital Commons Network^™

Realms Unseen: Albinism And Epistemic Decoloniality In Tanzania, Jane L. Saffitz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“What Is A Wave But 1000 Drops Working Together?”: The Role Of Public Libraries In Addressing Lgbtqia+ Health Information Disparities, Vanessa Kitzie, Alexander N. Vera, Valerie Lookingbill, Travis L. Wagner

Faculty Publications

This paper presents results from a participatory action research study with 46 LGBTQIA+ community leaders and 60 library workers who participated in four community forums at public libraries across the US. The forums identified barriers to LGBTQIA+ communities addressing their health questions and concerns and explored strategies for public libraries to tackle them. Forums followed the World Café format to facilitate collaborative knowledge development and promote participant-led change. Data sources included collaborative notes taken by participants and observational researcher notes. Results revealed that barriers experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities are structurally and socially entrenched and require systematic changes. Public libraries must …

A Tripartite Approach To Designing An Inclusive Hiring Experience And An Inclusive Workplace, Kim M. Thompson, Paul T. Jaeger, Clayton A. Copeland

Faculty Publications

Inclusive workplaces start with inclusive hiring practices and then the design and support of inclusive workplace cultures once a hire is settled. The process includes consideration of why you are looking for diverse candidates, writing inclusive job descriptions and job ads, inclusive interviewing considerations, and building an inclusive work environment and culture. Each of these considerations can be examined through a tripartite approach, exploring ways to ensure physical, intellectual, and social needs are addressed and met throughout each stage of the hiring and retention process.

How Does Religious Faith Impact Positive Youth Outcomes, Michael A. Goodman, W. Justin Dyer

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the protective aspects of religiosity in young adolescents and explores the potential processes involved. Specifically, we examine the influence of three measures of religiosity—religious salience, intrinsic religiosity, and daily religious experiences—on delinquency and anxiety. The study sample consists of 636 families located in the state of Utah. Additionally, we explore how positive youth development (PYD) constructs may mediate the relationship between religiosity and adolescent outcomes. The findings indicate that religious salience and daily religious experiences are directly and indirectly associated with lower levels of delinquency and anxiety. Furthermore, two PYD constructs—character and connectivity—serve as mediators between religious …

Family Home Evening As A Model For Promoting Family Health, Tommy M. Phillips, Jennifer R. Smith, Alice C. Long, Brandan E. Wheeler, Loren D. Marks, Michael Goodman, Trevan Hatch, Sterling K. Wall

Faculty Publications

One hundred thirty-seven married members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with children participated in a study of Family Home Evening and its relation to family well-being. Results support previous research suggesting that regular family-level rituals and sacred practices benefit families, marriages, and parent-child relationships. While this study‟s results cannot demonstrate any sort of causal link, they do provide very strong correlational evidence in support of the power and value of regular family-level routines, rituals, and sacred practices, as seen in LDS observance of FHE. Implications for the full universe of families are discussed.

Rightsizing Local Legislatures, Brenner M. Fissell

Faculty Publications

Local councils, boards, and commissions have all the lawmaking powers of a legislature—including the power to criminalize conduct—but they are far too small to deserve them. With an average size of only four members, local legislatures depart from the norm observable at all other levels of government. Only in the past few years have legal scholars turned their attention to the institutional design of these bodies, but this developing literature has yet to address their most striking feature—their small size.

This Article takes up this project. It claims that local microlegislatures are comparatively unrepresentative and undemocratic, and that their size …

Building Educational Leaders’ Capacity In A Community Of Practice, Théophile Muhayimana, Denise Schares, Megan Ruxton

Faculty Publications

This qualitative study examined rural educational leaders’ perceptions of the outcomes of the 2019 Leadership Camps (LCs). This capacity-building opportunity helped educational leaders meet as a community of practice (CoP) where participants’ interactions contributed to learning with and from one another, reducing perceived isolation and increasing self-efficacy. We analyzed data collected from 242 participants’ responses using an open, axial, and selective coding process. With this sample, 52.5% of participants were rural educational leaders. Overall, educational leaders most often appreciated interacting, networking, and collaborating with peers. Additionally, educational leaders highlighted the importance of the in-depth understanding and application of the Leadership …

Living Out The Principles Of The Ten Commandments, Trevor O'Reggio

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Economic Thought: A Biblical Perspective, Williams Kwasi Peprah, Lucile Sabas, Quentin Sahly, Delynne Shepard

Faculty Publications

This study joins the debate about whether capitalism or socialism best shows how the Bible sees economic interactions between people and, by extension, provides insights into how a Christian should live. Capitalism is based on the private ownership and control of resources and profit, which spread with the migration process of the Protestants. Socialism is based on the idea that the group or community should own the means of production and distribution to benefit everyone equally. This paper argues that biblical principles point neither to socialism nor capitalism as the appropriate economic framework for economic interactions and the organization of …

Repugnant Precedents And The Court Of History, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

Aged Supreme Court precedents continue to tolerate many practices that would shock modern sensibilities. Yet the Court lacks standard tools for phasing out decisions that offend our national character. The very cultural shifts that have reoriented our normative universe have also insulated most repugnant precedents from direct attack. And the familiar stare decisis factors cannot genuinely explain what ails societally outmoded decisions. Even for justices inclined to condemn these embarrassments in less clinical terms, it is unclear what qualifies courts to make universalist claims about contemporary American values.

The Court recently sidestepped these difficulties by insisting that one of its …

Gender Violence As Legacy: To Imagine New Approaches, Deborah M. Weissman

Faculty Publications

This essay considers gender violence as a consequence of systemic problems rooted in patriarchal structures, transacted through poverty and inequality, and embedded in a historically conditioned political economy. It is informed by the scholarship that propounds the need to develop community responses independent of the carceral system as a means to address the systemic source factors that contribute to Intimate Partner Violence (“IPV”), with attention to restorative and transformative justice approaches (RJ/TJ). This essay advances anti-violence scholarship to suggest the need to reconceptualize gender discrimination, poverty, and inequality as cause and consequence of social ills, and, moreover, to contribute to …

Global South Research Collaboration: A Comparative Perspective, Abdoulaye Gueye, Edward Choi, Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela, Gustavo Gregorutti

Faculty Publications

Research collaboration has become a major research topic in the social sciences. While this literature has mainly focused on collaborative dynamics in the Global North, more recent studies have examined these dynamics within the Global South. This article expands the scope of analysis by comparing the level of co-publications by Global South-based scholars with Global South-based colleagues and that between academics at Global South institutions and researchers in Global North universities. It shows that academic partnerships within the Global South are less common than instances of collaboration between the Global South and Global North. The relatively weak Global South collaborative …

Tragedies Of The Cultural Commons, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

In the United States, Black cultural expressions of democratic life that operate within specific historical-local contexts, yet reflect a shared set of sociocultural mores, have been historically crowded out of the law and policymaking process. Instead of democratic cultural discourse occurring within an open and neutral marketplace of ideas, the discursive production and consumption of democratic culture in American politics has been rivalrous. Such rivalry too often enables dominant White supremacist cultural beliefs, values, and practices to exercise their hegemony upon law’s production and meaning. The result has been tragedy for politically disempowered and socioeconomically excluded communities.

This Article uses …

Social Inequalities In Climate Change-Attributed Impacts Of Hurricane Harvey, Kevin T. Smiley, Ilan Noy, Michael F. Wehner, Dave Frame, Christopher C. Sampson, Oliver E.J. Wing

Faculty Publications

Climate change is already increasing the severity of extreme weather events such as with rainfall during hurricanes. But little research to date investigates if, and to what extent, there are social inequalities in climate change-attributed extreme weather event impacts. Here, we use climate change attribution science paired with hydrological flood models to estimate climate change-attributed flood depths and damages during Hurricane Harvey in Harris County, Texas. Using detailed land-parcel and census tract socio-economic data, we then describe the socio-spatial characteristics associated with these climate change-induced impacts. We show that 30 to 50% of the flooded properties would not have flooded …

Experiences Seeking, Sourcing, And Using Abortion Pills At Home In The United States Through An Online Telemedicine Service, Melissa Madera, Dana M. Johnson, Kathleen Broussard, Luisa Alejandra Tello-Pérez, Carol Armelle Ze-Noah, Aleta Baldwin, Rebecca Gomperts, Abigail R.A. Aiken

Faculty Publications

A growing number of people in the United States seek to self-manage their abortions by self-sourcing abortion medications online. Prior research focuses on people's motivations for seeking self-management of abortion and experiences trying to obtain medications. However, little is known about the experiences of people in the U.S. who actually complete a self-managed abortion using medications they self-sourced online. We conducted anonymous in-depth interviews with 80 individuals who sought abortion medications through Aid Access, the only online telemedicine service that provides abortion medications in all 50 U.S. states. Through grounded theory analysis we identified five key themes: 1) participants viewed …

Academic Work As Factory Work: A Former Blue-Collar Worker’S Observations On Class And Caste In The Academy, Kenneth Atkinson

Faculty Publications

What was it like to have come of age after the Glorious Thirty (1945-1975), an era Jack Metzger (2016; 2021a) describes as a time when the working-class bettered their lives? I had the misfortune to have worked in several Metropolitan Detroit factories during the period of decline after the Glorious Thirty. During that time, I witnessed what the journalist George Packer (2013) has called ‘the Unwinding,’ the unraveling of the social contract that has left the working class to their own devices to find success and salvation. In keeping with the tradition in working-class studies of sharing lived experienced of …

What Does It Mean To Take Online Classes As An International Student During Covid-19?, Katie K. Koo, Mei Jiang

Faculty Publications

Using the Theory of Social Support and the Community of Inquiry as theoretical frameworks, this qualitative study explored international students’ experiences, challenges, and perceptions of online learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. By conducting three virtual focus group interviews with 18 international students, we identified four key themes that encapsulate participants’ challenges and experiences of online learning: social isolation in online learning spaces, difficulties with engaging in online class discussions and activities, limited opportunities for improving English proficiency in the online setting and limited academic support from faculty and advisors. Implications for research and practice to …

Using Online Education To Address The Challenges Of Small, Multigrade Schools, Lori Imasiku, Michael Gayle, Michelle Bacchiocchi, Melanie Kartik

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Manipulating Facebook's Notification System To Provide Evidence Of Techno-Social Engineering, Brett Frischmann, Katherine Haenschen, Paul Ellenbogen

Faculty Publications

Techno-social engineering (TSE) theory argues that digital platforms shape and program human behaviors. We provide empirical evidence of this theory by introducing a novel method to conduct in-network studies on Facebook. We manipulate Facebook’s birthday notification system by recruiting confederates to change their birthday to a randomly assigned date and then measure network members’ responses in terms of whether they leave a greeting or question the veracity of the date. TSE theory leads us to expect that more participants will wish happy birthday on the fake date than question its veracity. We explore variables expected to predict heterogeneity in terms …

Implementing Just Climate Adaptation Policy: An Analysis Of Recognition, Framing, And Advocacy Coalitions In Boston, U.S.A., Jeffrey T. Malloy, Catherine Ashcraft, Paul Kirshen, Thomas G. Safford, Semra Aytur, Shannon H. Rogers

Faculty Publications

Cities face intersectional challenges implementing climate adaptation policy. This research contributes to scholarship dedicated to understanding how policy implementation affects socially vulnerable groups, with the overarching goal of promoting justice and equity in climate policy implementation. We apply a novel framework that integrates social justice theory and the advocacy coalition framework to incrementally assess just climate adaptation in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. Boston made an ambitious commitment to address equity as part of its climate planning and implementation efforts. In this paper, we evaluate the first implementation stage over the period 2016–2019 during which Boston developed coastal resilience …

Association Of National Football League Fan Attendance With County-Level Covid-19 Incidence In The 2020-2021 Season, Justin Kurland, Wanda E. Leal, Erin M. Sorrell

Faculty Publications

Importance The 2020-2021 National Football League (NFL) season had some games with fans and others without. Thus, the exposed group (ie, games with fans) and the unexposed group (games without fans) could be examined to better understand the association between fan attendance and local incidence of COVID-19.

Objective To assess whether NFL football games with varying degrees of in-person attendance were associated with increased COVID-19 cases in the counties where the games were held, as well as in contiguous counties, compared with games without in-person attendance for 7-, 14-, and 21-day follow-ups.

Design, Setting, and Participants This cross-sectional study used …

Dating App Facilitated Sexual Assault: A Retrospective Review Of Sexual Assault Medical Forensic Examination Charts, Julie L. Valentine, Leslie W. Miles, Kristen Mella Hamblin, Aubrey Worthen Gibbons

Faculty Publications

Dating app facilitated sexual assault (DAppSA) is a concerning phenomenon with minimal published research. This retrospective study explored if DAppSAs were different than other sexual assaults (SAs) committed by acquaintances through a review of 3,413 sexual assault medical forensic examination (SAMFE) charts from 2017 to 2020 in a Mountain West state in the United States. Routine Activities Theory and Confluence Model of sexual aggression provided the theoretical framework for the study. Inclusion criteria for DAppSA cases included (1) victim was 14 years of age or older; (2) victim indicated meeting the perpetrator on a dating app; (3) SA occurred at …

In A Double-Bind: Time-Space Distanciation, Socioeconomic Status, And Coping With Financial Stress In The United States, Harrison J. Schmitt, Adeena L. Black, Lucas A. Keefer, Daniel Sullivan

Faculty Publications

Psychological research has shown that lower socioeconomic status (SES) individuals experience higher levels of stress and tend to cope in more present-oriented ways. While some research in the field has sought to, for instance, increase future-oriented ways of being among lower SES individuals, we argue that such approaches may come at significant cost. We consider the construct of time–space distanciation (TSD) – the normative way in which time and space are abstracted from one another at cultural and individual levels – as a way to complicate psychological research on social class, stress, and coping. Across four studies, we present research …

Avoiding The Appearance Of Virtue: Reactivity To Corporate Social Responsibility Ratings In An Era Of Shareholder Primacy, Ben W. Lewis, W. Chad Carlos

Faculty Publications

We examine why organizations may at times decrease their performance after receiving a positive rating. We argue that in contrast to the prevailing assumption that organizations will strive for favorable ratings to achieve reputational benefits, incompatibility between a positive rating and a dominant institutional logic may cause recognized firms to question the perceived value of maintaining superior performance, thus leading them to strategically reduce their efforts on the rated dimension. Using a difference-in-differences design, we examine how companies responded to being rated as charitable organizations, an evaluation that we argue was generally perceived as incompatible with the dominant logic of …

Covid-19 Impact On Church Cash Inflows In Ghana As Moderated By Location Profile, Francis Osei-Kuffour, Williams Kwasi Peprah, Dickson Marfo Sarfo, Bright Osei Yeboah

Faculty Publications

The corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic brought both negative and positive impacts on all sectors of world economies since its inception in the early 2020s. Profit and not-for-profit institutions have had their levels of effects as a result of the world-wide crises. Lockdown measures imposed by governments around the world to curb the spread of the virus had various repercussions on various activities, including churches. Effects of the pandemic on businesses, education, agriculture and tourism, among others, have received massive highlights in literature. Given this phenomenon, this study sought to ascertain the impact of COVID-19 on church cash inflows. The study …

Instrumental Music Education In Rural North Carolina: A Descriptive Study, Melody Causby, Catheryn Shaw Foster

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to investigate secondary instrumental music education in rural North Carolina. This descriptive study investigated the experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that rural instrumental music educators (n = 55) held about their schools, students, and communities. Furthermore, the researchers examined how participants defined success for their programs, what challenges and rewards they experienced in their positions, and what skills they considered most important for themselves as teachers.

Results indicate that although rural music educators find the musical aspects of their positions rewarding, they believe that their nonmusical skills related to teaching, such as developing …

Approaches To Faith Integration: A Case Study Of Andrews University Employees, Duane Covrig, Glynis M. Bradfield, Steven Injety, Duduetsang Kakhu

Faculty Publications

For centuries, Christians have cultivated faith in themselves and others by engaging in prayer, evangelism, discipleship, and education, with Christian tertiary institutions playing a vital role in this nurturing of faith. However, previous studies have shown that Christian educators have also been complicit in depleting faith in others. This erosion of faith has been well documented in American "Christian" universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, primarily due to modernity and secularization. For faith to thrive, it has to be backed with intention, and this is especially of paramount importance in American higher education today. As the oldest Seventh-day Adventist University, …

Contestation And Participation: Concepts, Measurement, And Inference, Vanessa Alexandra Boese, Matthew Wilson Phd

Faculty Publications

Contestation and participation are commonly viewed as two main constituent dimensions of electoral democracy. How exactly have these two dimensions been conceptualized and measured in the literature? Are they empirically observable and do they matter for democratic development and stability? This article answers the first of these questions and considers their implications for the second by reviewing the literature on these two dimensions. We discuss three issues that affect conclusions about dimensions of democracy and their relevance for understanding democratic development: First, conceptual ambiguities—substantive overlap between the two concepts—obscure the meanings of each of the two dimensions. Such ambiguities led …

Autism Training At A Small Liberal Arts College: Librarian Perceptions And Takeaways, Blake Robinson, Amelia M. Anderson

Faculty Publications

While there has been some research about the intersection of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and larger research libraries, less work has been done in other academic library settings. To assess librarians’ knowledge of ASD, the authors administered an ASD training manual and subsequent survey to academic librarians at a liberal arts college library in the Southeast. The librarians found the training about ASD itself to be most valuable. Additionally, they gave positive assessments of their ability to serve students with ASD both at the individual and institutional levels. This suggests that librarians recognize the importance of serving this unique population.

Worldviews Transformed: How God And His People Can Change Worldview, S. Joseph Kidder, Katelyn Campbell Weakley

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.