Digital Commons Network^™

Case Studies Of Various Accounting Concepts, Astha Kandel

Honors Theses

Accountancy students enrolled in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College have an opportunity to choose an honors practicum route instead of writing a regular thesis. The students take two ACCY 420 classes taught by Dr. Victoria Lynn Dickinson as part of the practicum. In those two courses, students gain a better understanding of how accounting works in the real world. The thesis is made up of several cases that cover a variety of accounting theories and methodologies. Students are required to do thorough research while writing the cases and each of those cases is carefully reviewed and evaluated by Dr. …

The Role Of The Kurds In U.S. Foreign Policy, Davis Mccool Iii

Honors Theses

The Kurdish people in the Middle East have played a valuable role in furthering U.S. policy interests in the region. The U.S. has aligned itself with various Kurdish groups in a series of strategic partnerships dating back to the early 1970s, yet has never considered the Kurdish nation an ally. As such, the U.S. has reneged on multiple different pacts with the Kurds and opened the door for state-sponsored conflict against a supposed ally, despite mutual interests between both groups. This thesis aimed to assign a formal role to the Kurds within U.S. foreign policy, and to analyze the function …

Proficiency Of Mississippi Pharmacy Staff In Communicating With Spanish-Speaking Patients, Caroline Kreh

Honors Theses

Pharmacists play a crucial role in patient care; they must be able to communicate effectively with patients to convey health information. Given the linguistic diversity of Mississippi, pharmacists will likely encounter Spanish-speaking patients in the course of their practice. Previous studies have investigated various indicators of pharmacists’ ability to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients; however, no existing studies regarding Mississippi pharmacy staff members’ ability to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients were found. The objectives of this study were to measure Mississippi pharmacists’ confidence, satisfaction, proficiency, use of resources, and level of education related to communicating with Spanish-speaking patients. The sample was composed …

A Stolen Culture: The Harmful Effects Of Cultural Appropriation, Amirah Lockhart

Honors Theses

Entertainment has always been an outlet from reality, no matter the culture. Whether in the form of music or television, entertainment has something for everyone. Different factors influence the content of the entertainment being consumed, but culture is one of the most important and decisive elements. The appropriation of entertainers in their work is not always immediately obvious to all consumers of entertainment, but members of the affected culture are quick to notice and usually shut out. I argue that the cultural appropriation of Black culture in most cases facilitates results that are harmful and damaging to the Black community. …

The Effect Of Dialect On Lexical Recall, Chandler Douglas

Honors Theses

Investigating the performance of listeners as they attempt to recall words in both a familiar and unfamiliar dialect could likely lend some insight to the cognitive processes concerning speech perception. Specifically, the current study investigates whether speech spoken in an unfamiliar accent in a listener’s language influences comprehension and, therefore, memory recall of content. To test this, a group of speakers of General American English speakers and a group of speakers of Southern American English listened to two sets of words: one in General American and one in Southern American English. Participants were then asked to write down or type …

Examining Construction And Reproduction Of The Educational Opportunity Gap: The Nation’S School Board Members Respond, Hallet Demouy

Honors Theses

This thesis explores opportunity gaps, often related to achievement gaps, in education via the analysis of school board members’ responses regarding challenges that face future education, students, and the public school system. The perceptions of these school board members serve to address the sources, prevalence, and effects of inequities that exist in widening (perpetuating) this gap between students. After discussing and elaborating upon the perceived challenges and barriers located in the institution of education, school board member responses will again be used to present potential ways and opportunities through which the achievement gaps, relating to the success rates and testing …

Communication Resources For Deaf Or Hard Of Hearing Children In Mississippi: Parents’ Perspectives, Julia Rossano

Honors Theses

A parent’s ability to communicate with their child through formative years may often be taken for granted, as the options for such communication seem intuitive and apparent. However, hearing parents of children with hearing loss must not only make a choice between several communication methods, but they must also navigate an environment where the methodologies are not clearly delineated. Blaiser and colleague provide succinct descriptions of the most common methods which can be chosen. These methods include listening and spoken language systems, manual-visual systems, and systems combining these two modalities (Blaiser & Bargen, 2018). This choice is often challenging because …

The Effects Of Cochlear Implantation And Educational Audiology Services On Language Skills: A Case Study, Madison Josey

Honors Theses

Purpose

Hearing loss can affect many aspects of a child’s life, particularly their language abilities and academic performance. Literature shows that children with hearing loss are more likely to have language deficits compared to their hearing peers (Tomblin et al., 2015). The degree to which language skills are affected has been shown to correlate with various factors, such as age of identification, hearing levels, and amount of speech and language intervention (Delage & Tuller, 2020; Shojaei et al., 2016). The aim of this research study was to assess how cochlear implantation and speech-language intervention affects the language skills and academic …

In-Person Vs Telephonic Interpretation: A Case Study From The Perspective Of Providers And Interpreters At A Virginia Free Clinic, Lucy Cummins

Honors Theses

High-quality medical interpretation is critical to ensuring that patients with limited English proficiency, a rapidly growing group in the US, receive equitable care. Today, as federally-funded hospitals and clinics are legally required to offer language services, a myriad of interpretation options are available and used by providers across the country, including both telephone and in-person interpreters. Though these two options both allow for translation of dialogue between patients and providers, they differ in the communicative and interpersonal experiences they offer.

B'Ars And Catamounts: A Study Of Davy Crockett Through Genre And Medium, Jack Fieweger

Honors Theses

This project seeks to investigate and discuss the changes and variations that have occurred to the mythology of David Crockett over the course of time. Initially appearing as a literary character in 1833, the likeness of Crockett has appeared in a myriad of different texts including: biographies, almanacs, plays, dime novels, comics, television shows, and films. The project attempts to discern how these different iterations of medium and genre altered the mythology of David Crockett. In order to methodologically understand these changes, this project makes use of W.T. Lhamon’s concept known as the Lore Cycle. Lhamon identified that lore diffuses …

Hybridized Spirituality In Singaporean Christians, John Lim

Honors Theses

Background: The doctrine of the incarnation and the “scandal of particularity” are central to Christian theology – that the transcendent God became immanent within time and space. Likewise, the church, being the contemporary expression of God, incarnates within and reflects the culture around it. How this incarnation happens is not always clear or acknowledged.

Purpose: I conceptualize the process of incarnation as the hybridization of various streams of influence. I examined the lived experiences of hybridized spirituality among Singaporean Christians.

Method: I conducted semi-structured interviews with six Singaporean Christians from the same congregation in Singapore. I used thematic analysis, informed …

Crisis And Catalonia: An Analysis On The Impact Of Crisis On The Public Opinion Of The Secessionist Movement In Catalonia, Rachel Ducker

Honors Theses

Catalonia, the autonomous region of Spain has seen an increase in secessionist sentiments in recent years. While the past inclination toward independence has been centered on economic autonomy and cultural identity, there has been a recent emphasis on political independence, particularly in the times of crisis. In this thesis. I analyze the relationship between the economic changes during the period of a crisis and the public opinion about the potential Catalan secession. Specifically, it investigates the relationships between the economic change and public sentiment during the financial crisis of 2008, the political crisis of 2017, and the pandemic crisis of …

Measuring Immigrant Integration In The United States South, Ashton Porter

Honors Theses

This study examines the integration success of immigrants in the U.S. South. The design of this study establishes six indicators of integration: employment, education, political engagement, health, housing, and language. In the discussion, each section establishes the indicator’s measurement technique, its relevance to integration, and its relationship with other indicators. The proposed measure is a point-based survey which correlates to a hexagonal spider graph as an overall index of integration success. The survey is recommended for individual administration to compare cases and determine change across time of immigrants as they integrate into the U.S. South. Integration is viewed as the …

Sir Arthur Evans And The Minoan Myth: The Creation Of Ancient Cretan Culture, Madeleine Mccracken

Honors Theses

This paper explores the excavations conducted in the early 20^th century by Sir Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos on the island of Crete. An analysis of Evans’ humanitarian and journalistic work in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 19^th century sets the tone for the paper. I consider Evans’ life’s work at Knossos to gain a better understanding of the man behind it and both why and how he created a modern image of an ancient culture. I will describe in detail a few key monuments and objects which he excavated and reconstructed. I draw conclusions …

An Evaluation Of The Historical Interactions And Epistemologies Of Science And Christianity, Tyler Partridge

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Fact-Checking Of Claims From The English Wikipedia Using Evidence In The Wild, Aalok Sathe

Honors Theses

Automated fact checking is a task in the domain of Natural Language Processing that deals with the verification of claims using evidence. Fact checking is becoming increasingly important as large amounts of human-generated information accumulate online. In the recent past, our society has witnessed large-scale spread of disinformation via the internet that has time and again led to noticeable disruptions in the fabric of society. Fact-checking would help mitigate the spread of disinformation by allowing large magnitudes of content to be automatically evaluated for disinformation. In this work, we construe and tackle multiple subtasks of fact checking using labeled data …

Ez-Translate, Mason D. Beattie

Honors Theses

This report describes the EZ-Translate Software that was designed and developed by Mason Beattie for the CSCI495-D1 Honors Capstone Project and Course at Coastal Carolina University. This project is built from Java and is designed for the Windows 10 operating system. While running it displays or hides a translation menu when the designated key binds are pressed. Translations supported include select phrases from English, German, and Russian. The application also provides localization support for these three languages. The overall goal of this project to provide translation services while within another application was successfully achieved. The application utilizes an open-source Java …

How Power Creates Alteration Among Communication For Members Within A Greek Letter Sorority, Kelsey M. Kopec

Honors Theses

This study aims to address whether or not communication is altered due to hierarchical or seniority status within an all-female base organization such as a sorority. Prior to doing this research, I predicted that the outcome would result in negative alterations within communication. Using a survey method, I was able to obtain 90 participants within female based, National Panhellenic sororities nationwide. Overall, I found that there was more of a positive shift in communication between members who are in power positions, to those that are not.

Bert Argues: How Attention Informs Argument Mining, Ting Chen

Honors Theses

Argument mining is the automatic identification and extraction of structure from argumentative language. Previous works have constrained the argument structure to forming strictly trees in order to utilize efficient tree-specific techniques. However, arguments in the wild are unlikely to exhibit this constrained structure. Given the recent trend of fine-tuning large pre-trained models to reach state of the art performance on a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, we look to leverage the power of these deep contextualized word embeddings towards the task of non-tree argument mining. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline which utilizes pre-trained BERT based …

Beyond Realism: Reading The Ongoing Wounds Of Enslavement In Beloved And Kindred, Stephanie Fawell

Honors Theses

In an introductory chapter, I synthesize a genealogy of African Diasporic thinkers that challenge traditionally conceptualized bounds of realism and modernism both aesthetically and intellectually. In the chapters that follow, I look closely at Morrison’s Beloved and Butler’s Kindred, as well as the scholarly discussions surrounding the elements in these novels that stretch the bounds of conventionally defined realism. In both novels the linearity of time and concreteness of space is challenged: in Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s child continues to haunt her family after her death and then physically manifests as Beloved, crossing a mysterious bridge between …

Neo-Colonial Actors?: Analyzing French Ngos In Francophone West Africa, Katharine R. Kilcoyne

Honors Theses

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) have the reputation for being benevolent organizations that help populations in need. Globally, these organizations promote this particular image to the public, but international NGOs also often work in tandem with other neo-colonial structure systems to maintain Western domination over poor and underdeveloped countries in Africa and elsewhere. This thesis looks at this phenomenon through the lens of French neo-colonialism and the Françafrique regime to study the extent to which French NGOs participate in this neo-colonial system in Francophone West Africa. Using interview data and data collected from the European Commission’s ECHO, this thesis looks at the …

"Nice, Quiet Hand": The Creation And Navigation Of Feeling Rules In A Second Grade Classroom, Avery Munns

Honors Theses

Emotions are largely viewed as individual and internal, but in reality, emotions are socially situated. This project aims to use a sociology of emotions framework in order to explore how emotional expectations are created, maintained, and navigated within a classroom environment. Through a series of observations over the course of a month, I set out to answer questions surrounding which emotions were encouraged, which emotions were discouraged, and how both teachers and students created and navigated these feeling rules. Overall, I found that emotions were largely discouraged, especially through the overarching feeling rules of “be quiet” and “control your body.” …

Identity-Making And Spatialization Among Colby College's International Students, John G.G. Shamgochian

Honors Theses

This thesis presents the research that I have done for the award of Honors in Anthropology. The following text begins with a vignette that highlights identity-making and spatialization among international students in a moment of precarity and visibility. The “Introduction” records the development of my research from its initial topics to its current form, my methodology, my positionality, and the ethics of my research. Following this, in the chapter titled “Internationality,” I lay out the interwoven social, institutional, and political processes which shape the experiences of academic migrants. Because the purpose of this chapter is to fully contextualize my argument, …

The Tetralemma Of Nothingness, Samuel O. Sessions

Honors Theses

Grammatically, the question is rather simple. It is when we set out to answer the question that it suddenly becomes complex. What is nothing? Its very asking seems almost impossible because the ‘is’ within it brushes up against its meaning, producing paradox. How do we even begin to get at a something that is not a something? Immediately, you remark how similar this task is to a child chasing fairies in the forest or hunting for ghosts in the attic. Will we be doomed from the outset? If so, then what is the point? Our many predecessors have had varying …

Dissociating Socioeconomic Influences On Maternal Language Input And Child Language Outcomes, Klaudia Kulawska

Honors Theses

Early language development is associated with children’s socioeconomic status (SES). Specifically, children from lower SES backgrounds, on average, exhibit slower language development compared to their peers from higher-SES backgrounds. Even though SES is a multidimensional construct, research often relies on a single dimension or a composite measure when studying child language development. In this article, I investigate four dimensions of SES, including maternal education, income-to-needs ratio, financial security, and neighborhood SES. Specifically, I examine whether the quantity and quality of maternal linguistic input mediates the relationships between dimensions of SES and child receptive language skills. Mothers and their 36-40 months …

Food Insecurity At Bucknell University: A Look At Student Experiences And Contributing Factors, Emma Curtin

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the prevalence of food insecurity at Bucknell and examines the contributing factors. Two research questions frame the present study: 1) What factors contribute to food insecurity on Bucknell’s campus? And 2) How do students at Bucknell experience food insecurity? Additionally, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on college student food insecurity is explored. The theoretical framework used in this thesis is Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction. This framework coupled with a phenomenological approach to analyzing the data are the most appropriate for the present study because food insecurity is a systemic phenomenon, maintained by institutions but lived …

Arab Media's Representation Of Arab-Israeli Normalization Agreements, Rylan L. Forester

Honors Theses

When, on August 13, 2020, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced it was normalizing relations with the state of Israel, few could have predicted the effects it would have. However, since the Emirati decision, three other Arab countries - Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco - have reached agreements with Tel Aviv to normalize relations. Such events are a sharp divergence from the status quo and thus, this thesis examines, through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and analyzed through a constructivist framework, how three Arab media sources - Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and Al-Mayadeen - discuss and represent these normalization agreements. By …

Soft Power And Human Development In Central Asia, Cheryl White

Honors Theses

Due to the wealth of natural resources and the strategic geographic location of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, these two countries have attracted a significant amount of soft power investments, including foreign direct investment, non-government organizations, and infrastructure development. This paper compares the fluctuations in the soft power measurements to the levels of human development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The findings show highly similar changes in the amount soft power investments to the level of human development indicators, suggesting a strong correlation between the two measures. A methodological analysis and further data sets would be necessary to determine the connection though.

"Foreign" Language: Examining Systemic Attitudes, Xenophobia, And Foreign Language Anxiety, Olivia Jennings

Honors Theses

With the focus on the systemic attitudes, this study examines previous background in foreign language, attitudes about language in general, and the relation of language to identity. This study stresses the defining process in the making of American as a national and cultural identity, and how it has changed over the years. It examines the role of xenophobia and xenoglossophobia in the context of American identity, and through its evolution in past and current sociopolitical believes impacting an overall disinterest in foreign language. The disinterest in foreign language is investigated to discover the reasons why foreign language programs are being …

What's In A Name? An Assessment Of Degradation Of Women In The Name Of Climbing Routes, Raiza Barahona

Honors Theses

Gendered behavior is reinforced at an early age. In media, women are usually portrayed following gender stereotypical behaviors and are often sexualized, meaning that their worth is often determined by their body shape and clothing type and as such women are often wearing revealing clothing, following gender stereotypical behaviors, and portraying unrealistic body proportions (e.g., Gentlemen’s Quarterly Magazine; Collins, 2011). The representation of women in climbing media is similar to that of the general media. The present study focused on route names within the climbing community and presents a qualitative analysis on the sexism and other derogatory (i.e., overtly sexual) …